Four Vignettes by Marcelo D'Salete

Joāo Pedro was a black, beautiful teenager of14 years old and nothing prevents us from imagining that he loved to read comic books. 1991. In a society that has gotten used to seeing black citizens from the peripheries of Säo Paulo or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro as a set of see-through statistics-whether those numbers refer to poverty levels, dead or imprisoned bodies, or the collateral casualties of the war on drugs-claiming the right to opacity, the right to be ambiguous, to exist within the complexities, nuances and contradictions that are attributed to the individual, is a minimum requirement for humanity. ® Nohora Arrieta Fernandez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University, where she specializes in Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies. Currently, she is a Research Associate at ALARI (Afro Latin American Research Institute/Harvard University) and a fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice (Georgetown University).