STRUGGLE AGAINST RACIAL BANISHMENT: THE ZERO EVICTION CAMPAIGN IN SALVADOR'S OLD CENTER DURING THE COVID-19 HEALTH CRISIS

Abstract

The pandemic of COVID-19, declared by the World Health Organization as a health emergency, led to the death of almost 700,000 people in Brazil. The guidelines for the adoption of social isolation to prevent contagion revealed the centrality of the right to housing as a condition for the realization of the right to health and life. In this context, the fractures of socio-spatial inequality, especially in relation to the black population, were more intensely evidenced, driving the struggle for Zero Eviction in Brazil. This article seeks to understand, based on feminist and antiracist approaches, how the eviction threats and actions are configured, their socio-spatial and legal implications for the families, occupations, communities, and social movements involved and the strategies of struggle and resistance used by them to defend their rights to permanence in the Old Center of Salvador. This paper shows a case of struggle against racial banishment and the defense of territories, housing, and black lives through the articulation between diverse insurgent knowledges and actions that created networks, countercartographies, and transcalar political and legal effects towards the Right to the City in the context of the pandemic.