Qual Sociol (2006) 29:233–236

DOI 10.1007/s11133-006-9014-0
BOOK REVIEW

Robert Gay, Lucia: Testimonies of a Brazilian Drug

Dealer’s Woman
Philadephia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005. 231 Pages.
ISBN 1.59213.339.8.

Enrique Desmond Arias

Published online: 24 May 2006

C Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006

In his acknowledgements at the start of Lucia: Testimonies of a Brazilian Drug Dealer’s

Woman, Robert Gay thanks Bob Levine for showing him “that social science could be written
a different way [xxii].” This book, indeed, has relatively little in common with either the
standard social science monographs being published today or, for that matter, most other
works of non-fiction. The volume, which runs a brief one-hundred and seventy-four pages
of text, is composed for the most part of interviews with the eponymous Lucia, a young
woman from a Brazilian favela (shantytown) who in her short life has experienced immense
personal tragedies at least in part because of a series of romantic relationships she had with
adolescents and young men involved in Rio de Janeiro’s violent drug trade. The mass of the
book is a fascinating exchange between the author and his subject as he tries to learn from
her and tell her story. In terms of genre this book has a lot more to do with those books
in which writers interview Great Men near the end of their lives to retell their usually well
known story and reiterate their famous opinions.1 Lucia is, however, of a different cloth. It
uses the interview strategy to construct a biography of a person who would not otherwise
attract literary or scholarly interest. Lucia is one of a mass of poor and abused people who
provide services in Rio but whose stories tend only to be told when they die tragically or
appear peripherally in a more traditional social science monographs where personality takes
a second seat to the authors’ thesis. By marrying an old technique to a radically different
subject, Gay has achieved an extraordinary result by providing profound insights into a
particular type of life usually overlooked in academic writing. As a result he provides a very
personal and real account of how the violence and poverty facing Rio de Janeiro affect the
lives of the often voiceless people who have to live with its most brutal results. Gay has,
indeed, achieved a different sort of social science.

E. D. Arias (
)
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York,
445 West 59th Street, New York, 10019
e-mail: dearias@jjay.cuny.edu
1 For very different examples of this see Teodomiro Braga, O Sonhador que Faz: A vida, a trajetória polı́tica
e as idéias de José Serra, Editora Record (Rio de Janeiro), 2002; Michel Foucault (ed. Colin Gordon),
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Pantheon (New York), 1980; John
Paul II (ed. Vittorio Messori), Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Alfred A. Knopf (New York) 1994.
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234 Qual Sociol (2006) 29:233–236

The book starts with a short but very worthwhile foreward by Arthur Schmidt, the series
editor, who provides a solid and rigorous academic summary of the state of research on
favelas in Rio today and a prescient analysis of the problems of violence facing that city
and others in the region. This short essay plays an important role in framing this unusual
project in a more traditional light. It provides those coming from outside the field, especially
students who may have little familiarity with these issues, a brief and approachable analysis
of the current literature on the topic that Gay delves into with more depth and subtlety later
in the book.
The remainder of the volume is composed of eight two-part chapters that form a narrative
of Lucia’s life from adolescence into her thirties. Gay uses Lucia’s experiences with dating,
looking for work, building a family, surviving extremely abusive relationships, seeing family
members and other loved ones go to prison, and watching many of her own friends die to
understand, from a very personal perspective, many of the political and social issues facing
Rio de Janeiro today. The first part of each chapter is composed of extended interviews which
relate the conversations that Gay had with his subject and collaborator. These sections focus
at first on various romantic and sexual relationships that Lucia had in her adolescence and
early twenties with men involved in drug trafficking. Later chapters look at her experiences
on the job market, efforts to stabilize her life, and the role of religious faith for her and her
family. The second half of each chapter takes topics in Lucia’s life and uses them as a starting
point to analyze political and social conditions in Rio. In these sections Gay articulates the
link between Lucia’s experiences and broader trends in Rio de Janeiro to tell a story of the
life of the urban poor in Brazil today. Thus, for example, we learn in the first chapter of the
history of Lucia’s house, how her parents built it, and the way that fits in to the context of the
urbanization of Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century (pp. 23–27). Later, after we
learn of police shaking down and killing one of Lucia’s boyfriends, Gay provides a detailed
and cogent analysis of police violence and corruption (pp. 83–87).
Despite the inclusion of these analytical chapters, this book cannot really be considered a
monograph. Gay does not appear to be making a single argument about violence and poverty
in Rio. Rather, he tells a story that intersects very heavily with the conflicts affecting that
city but that extends more broadly into the realms of family life, work, and faith. Reading the
book through, and taking special note of Gay’s discussion of his own feelings about doing
this research, the project reads more as a parallel journey through Lucia’s and the author’s
life. On the one hand we see Lucia growing from an adolescent involved with male peers
who earned a living in the drug trade to an unemployed mother trying to provide for her
children and desperately attempting to maintain a relationship with a man who is in and out
of prison. On the other hand, we see Gay going from his experiences as a graduate student
studying favela social movements and clientelism during the optimistic democratization
process twenty years ago to a more seasoned researcher who, with good reason, has become
disillusioned with the way the current Brazilian regime governs the lives of the people he
researches. The sadness which he expresses at the end of the book with the recurring cycles
of violence both in Lucia’s life and in Rio de Janeiro more broadly provide one of the more
poignant accounts I have read about the pervasiveness and intractability of violence under
the city’s current political and social regimes (pp. 168–174).
Despite his reluctance to make a single explicit argument about violence in Rio, Gay’s
examination of such diverse issues as prison, work, police, politics and drug gangs in the
context of Lucia’s life, powerfully shows the intersection between physical and structural
violence and the way the two (re)produce each other. By taking us through one single life
experience the author allows us to see how different forms of violence come together and
interact to produce the particularly violent, discriminatory, and casually abusive social and
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Qual Sociol (2006) 29:233–236 235

political orders that dominate Rio de Janeiro today. More straightforward social science
would have required a lot more effort to get to this point and would not have done it with the
same eloquence.
Gay’s research technique and approach to writing this book provide important insights
into a number of other issues. Through newspaper reports and scholarly writings we know,
for example, that traffickers play a role in maintaining discipline in favelas and that police
extort money from traffickers to supplement their meager salaries and enrich themselves.
What we have had less idea about up until now is how this particular process works. Indeed
the so-called, and much abrogated, lei do silencio (law of silence) that governs favela life
makes it very difficult for outsiders to gain access to data about these issues. By conversing
over an extended period of time with one person who was very close to some of the worst
violence affecting the city, Gay has gained some important insights into these issues. We
learn, for example, that people associated with the Brazilian military play an important role
in wholesale drug dealing (31). While I have seen a reference to this once in a Brazilian
newspaper, I had never seen a confirmation of it.2 By going into a detailed life story of one
person closely associated with the problems affecting the city, Gay provides us with a host
of new empirical insights that could not have been obtained by using other methodologies.
The true richness of this book, however, comes home simply in understanding one life
story. So much social science works to divorce itself from particular individuals’ lived
experiences that it is surprising and refreshing to read an academically serious book that
cares about how people feel and that tries to help us to understand why they felt that way.
Even contemporary ethnography, which is much more in tune with these issues than the bulk
of the literature produced today in political science and sociology, is burdened often with
dense theoretical analyses that get in the way of truly understanding particular individual’s
experiences.3 This book is, however, free of that. We learn Lucia’s life story and, through
its intersections with broader events, we learn about life in Rio today. At its best moments
Lucia provides us with deeply personal insights into a particular life lived in a distinct social
context. By taking up biography as a mode of writing social science Gay has provided us
with insights which we would never have had into life in Rio. As a result, this work will
provide a solid basis for deepening and enriching future studies of poverty and violence in
Rio and Brazil more broadly.
In addition to its empirical insights, Gay’s volume also makes important methodological
contributions. Gay’s effort to merge these very personal testimonies with specific political
events is unusual and offers important insights into how individual experience can be used
to drive social scientific thought. The book provides an outline for developing this new
methodology more systematically to study other types of phenomena for which it might be
uniquely appropriate such as domestic violence or work experiences.
A second important methodological contribution of this book is the fact that it is composed
in large part by seemingly unvarnished interview data. Over the years Gay has proved himself
an excellent qualitative field researcher. The testimonial sections of this volume provide an
almost unprecedented insight into the flow of qualitative interviewing on sensitive subjects. It
is fascinating to read the interview transcripts in this book which flow as normal conversation
from one subject to another and in which Gay pursues questions around particularly touchy
but important issues which Lucia then dances away from, occasionally providing clear

2 Monica Torres Maia, “White admite conhecer acusados de tráfico na FAB,” O Globo, 19 May 1999, p. 10.
3 In the context of Rio’s favelas, however, Donna Goldstein’s does a very good job examining the emotions of
its subjects in herrecent book Laughter out of Place: Race Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown,
University of California Press (Berkeley), 2003.
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236 Qual Sociol (2006) 29:233–236

answers but sometimes avoiding saying anything definitive. Gay’s exposure of his interview
text differs considerably from the more typical use of interview data where a quote is trotted
out to support a point or, in the case of more rigorous ethnographic research, we see a snippet
of interview but very rarely the type of extended picture Gay offers. The interviews in this
book should provide students learning interviewing techniques with an important resource
and will make the book relevant to methodology courses at the graduate and undergraduate
levels.
Despite all of the extremely positive elements of this book there are a handful of ways that
it could be improved. Perhaps the most central would be a more explicit analysis of Gay’s
dialogues with Lucia. Certainly I would not encourage cutting the existing interviews to
accomplish this but more explicitly analyzing these conversations in the analytical portions
of the chapters would go a long way to adding depth to the analysis and would position Gay
to more forcefully advance his methodological and empirical claims. More generally the
analytical sections of the book could simply be longer and more comprehensive. Gay writes
very well and has a lot to say. It would be great if he said a little more of it in these chapters.
Finally, more critical analysis of specific things which Lucia and the other interviewees say
as well as more of Gay’s own perspectives about the data which he is analyzing would be
fascinating and would help to further project the methodological and empirical positions
Gay takes.
I make these criticisms reluctantly, however, because it seems that Gay had a very clear
idea of how he wanted to write this book and what he wanted to accomplish with this project.
He distinctly has made an effort to break away from many of the constraints of contemporary
social science and look at the world in a different way. Asking him to expand the analytical
chapters of the book or analyze his data more critically might push him in a direction which
he was trying to avoid. At the same time as a researcher who also works with qualitative
methodologies and who is very concerned with the empirical questions which Gay so ably
analyzes, it would be great if the book were set up in a way that it could engage more
directly with other scholarly approaches to these issues which may not be so sympathetic
to the approach taken in this book. The question with this, however, would be how much
of what is so worthwhile about this book would be lost in such an effort. In the end these
questions, especially from a methodological perspective, may be left to those who build
on Gay’s methodology. In providing a basis for this Gay has already made an important
contribution to our contemporary scholarly debates.
Enrique Desmond Arias is an Assistant Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal
Justice, CUNY and a Fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at
the Graduate Center, CUNY. His book on drug trafficking and politics in Rio’s favelas is
forthcoming at the University of North Carolina Press.

Springer