My neighbor the gringo: commercialized intimacies and newcomer hospitality in a Rio de Janeiro favela

During the past two decades, foreigners have acquired housing stock in many of Rio de Janeiro's oldest and most iconic favelas, or self‐built neighborhoods, and invested in capital improvements, with an eye toward turning private residences into lodging accommodations. These new arrivals, mainly from the Global North, have altered social milieus and property values. The proliferation of favela hostels has signaled a market‐led displacement of residents and a reproduction of the urban periphery. The present essay asks what an anthropology of hospitality looks like amid these emergent spaces of commodified culture and transnational mobilities. This curious social arrangement wherein newcomers play the role of hosts inflects debates over favelas' economic trajectories and shifting status in the cultural imaginary. Newcomer hosts both aestheticize and monetize a presumed generosity, vitality, and promiscuity of working‐class residents. Hospitality as cultural rule meets the favela as unruly culture. The essay explores ethnographically how the concept of convivência, or living together, comes to describe an aspiration to rework urban change amid class and racial anxieties about place‐belonging and identity. The emergence of foreigner‐owned accommodations in Rio's favelas reveals a confluence of global slum imaginaries and global real estate interests, and how resident hosts and traveler guests experience the attendant contradictions in the everyday.