In the shadows of a Shinto torii (gateway) in São Paulo's ‘Japanese’ neighbourhood rests the city's first burial ground for enslaved Africans. Recently unearthed, the gravesite is one of the few visible remains of the Liberdade neighbourhood's significance in São Paulo's ‘Black zone’. This article excavates the history of the nearby Remedies church, the headquarters of Brazil's Underground Railroad and a long-time museum to the enslaved. The 1942 demolition of the Remedies church, I argue, comprised part of a spatial project of forgetting centred on razing the city's ‘Black zone’ and reproducing São Paulo as a non-Black, ethnically immigrant metropolis.

This paper documents changes in infant mortality (IM) rates in São Paulo, Brazil, between 2003 and 2013 and examines the association among neighborhood characteristics and IM. We investigate the extent to which increased use of health care services and improvements in economic and social conditions are associated with reductions in IM. Using data from the Brazilian Census and the São Paulo Secretaria Municipal da Saúde/SMS, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of panel data in all 96 districts of São Paulo for every year between 2003 and 2013. Our regression model includes district level measures that reflect economic, health care and social determinants of IM. We find that investments in health care have contributed to lower IM rates in the city, but the direct effect of increased spending is most evident for people living in São Paulo's middle- and high-income neighborhoods. Improvements in social conditions were more strongly associated with IM declines than increases in the use of health care among São Paulo's low-income neighborhoods. To reduce health inequalities, policies should target benefits to lower-income neighborhoods. Subsequent research should document the consequences of recent changes in Brazil's economic capacity and commitment to public health spending for population health.

This article examines the question of how architects in São Paulo during the 1950s and 1960s addressed the political nature of their work, and more specifically the connections between their practice and the lives and politics of the urban poor in the context of a rapidly expanding metropolis of the Global South. More specifically, it assesses how they elaborated strategies to articulate the semiotic and material practices of Brutalism and the political repertoire of national developmentalism, initially in its democratic and later in its authoritarian form. The article argues that these architects deployed two semio-material strategies to operationalize the articulation between that political repertoire and the field of architecture: metaphorical indexicality and the impetus for the industrialization of construction. The image of the urban poor reinforced by that political repertoire was marked by a severe distance from their empirical life experiences, which deeply affected the practices of design and construction that progressive architects advanced.

In this article, I discuss São Paulo's legal apparatus in respect of environmental noise. I begin by situating my analysis within broader citizenship issues. I then focus on three debates on noise control in the city. The first two debates involve noise ordinances created in the 1990s and enforced by São Paulo's Programa de Silêncio Urbano (Urban Silence Programme, PSIU). The first revolves around the evangelical lawmakers’ attempts to exclude, minimize or hinder the impact of a noise ordinance on religious services. The second debate focuses on an ordinance that required bars without acoustic insulation to close at 1 am – a demand that faced strong opposition from businesses involved in the night-time economy. The third debate describes the recent attempt of a group of acoustic engineers to lobby the city administration for the systematic mapping of traffic noise. I contend that environmental noise is a fruitful point of entry to investigate how the state mediates universal equality and individual freedom, welfare principles and economic gain.

Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted – of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the lived paradigm of governance over life and death, albeit in concealed ways. Statistics are produced by and are productive of a de jure state, different from the state de facto. The acceptance of state-made homicide figures, whether for analysis, visualisation or political claims, is consequential for the future of lived security and social science knowledge production.

This article examines black criminal agency in the context of drug trafficking and territorial control by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, PCC), a self-identified criminal organisation in São Paulo's favelas. It argues that black youth's racialised encounters with the police shape their political praxis in the city. Since in the racial imaginary, they are constantly linked to crime and violence, and since their criminalised status justifies mass incarceration and death by the police, criminality appears as a valid category to better understand not only their fate but also their agency. Ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2009 and 2010 in a hyper-impoverished, predominately black slum community, along with weekly visits to a local detention centre in São Paulo, informs the author's analysis of the PCC's controversial languages of resistance and the gendered and racialised outcomes that emerge from their attempts to fend off the state in such topographies of domination.

A world key is given to the species of Pyxine with lichexanthone in the upper cortex. Pyxine pustulata Aptroot & Jungbluth is described as a new corticolous species of Pyxine from São Paulo State in Brazil, with lichexanthone in the cortex, upper surface K−, a yellow to ochraceous medulla and clusters of laminal polysidiangia. Brazil is clearly the centre of Pyxine diversity, with 34 out of c. 70 species known worldwide.

An examination of the Brazilian newspaper O Combate, this article accomplishes four goals. First, it defines the politics of a periodical long cited but little understood by historians. Second, it documents O Combate's place, alongside other ‘yellow press’ outlets, in the making of a ‘public sphere’ in São Paulo. Third, it situates the same publications' role in the bringing into being of a more commercial, publicity-driven press, which would shed the yellow press's radicalism and abet the collapse of the public sphere of its heyday. Fourth, it suggests that O Combate's radical republicanism was one fount of the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as of the regionally chauvinist constitutionalism of 1932–7. In this rare application of the ‘public sphere’ idea to twentieth-century Brazil, readers may also detect an account closer to Jürgen Habermas’ original formulation than that found in the historiography of nineteenth-century Spanish America.

Two domestic guinea-pigs (Cavia porcellus), bought in Pinheiros, São Paulo State, Brazil, were taken by their owners a farm in the rural district of Capão Bonito, close to the Atlantic Forest, São Paulo, where they both developed tumour-like and ulcerating lesions on the ears. The causative agent was identified as Leishmania (L.) enriettii, based on biological characters and isoenzyme profiles. Sources of the parasite in wild mammals, and the possible sandfly vector species discussed.