The very involuntariness of love, even where it has not found itself a practical accommodation beforehand, contributes to the whole as soon as it is established as a principle.

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

In June 2009, during a break in the winter rains that sent chunks of masonry crashing onto homes built along the interior walls of collapsed buildings, I joined a friend at the corner of João de Deus and Gregório de Mattos Streets. This crossroads served for most of the twentieth century as the symbolic heart of the Maciel, as the western side of today's Pelourinho Historical Center was called prior to 1992, when IPAC initiated its most recent round of urban reforms. My companion, whom I will call Malaquias, had been one of the neighborhood's many infamous malandros, or old-school hard men who refused to tolerate affronts to their honor even as, like the Mago introduced in the preface above, he often "took no position at all" while making do at the edges of the so-called formal economy. By the mid-1990s Malaquias had parlayed this renown as a bender of rules, and thus as a fixture in the Maciel/Pelourinho, into a career as a reggae musician. And as we traversed streets where the smells of wet lime, garbage, and rotting hardwoods had been replaced by stale beer and fresh paint, my friend compared his life to the increasingly depopulated Historical Center.

Malaquias' autobiography, which I have heard in many iterations, usually involves escape from his overbearing cowhand father in Bahia's dry backlands (the sertão); childhood struggles to survive alone in the once lively streets of the Maciel/Pelourinho; confrontations with, and crafty confoundings of, infamous detectives; stints in the penitentiary under aliases that spared him a record and thus permitted him to travel to Europe; re-acquaintance with his mother, a domestic servant who had been forced to send him to live with his father so she could care for others' children in Salvador; conversion to Pentecostal Protestantism; and, finally, consecration as a Rastafarian leader, or a holy man celebrated due in part to widely perceived links to the Afro-Brazilian tradition packaged and disseminated in the Pelourinho's reconstruction. Malaquias, then, has become well known, and a person (gente) rather than a street child or convict, on the basis of travails and a struggle for truth that he argues has led him to an appreciation of Afro-Brazilian identity and rather Christian notions of restoration and self-examination.

As Malaquias and I left the Maciel, we stopped by the Praça das Artes, Cultura, e Memória (Plaza of Arts, Culture, and Memory), an interior courtyard restored by IPAC in 1999. There a sculpture called "Redemption" gurgled hopefully. Encrusted with semiprecious stones whose safeguarding requires that the artwork be enclosed by an iron fence, the fountain announces that:

water washes away evil as compassionate tears sacralize this contemporary ritual. In the end, then, the place's negative energies are inverted.

The Pelourinho's destructive aspects evaporate, and from this we extract its regenerative power.

Out of condemned material we extract magical power, the mana of the condemned, whose magic is that of knowing how to reinvent life in a ritualized form again and again, again and again.

But Malaquias and I did not even glance at words that suggested that we were crossing a landscape whose regeneration, we had learned through bitter experience, rested on the ritual sacrifice and careful presentation of data — the "mana of the condemned" — about its inhabitants. All too familiar with this state-directed monumentalization of the Pelourinho's populace over the last two decades, we pointed out the corner in which Bira "the Ox" and Fat Carlos used to tether their fighting cocks. And we spat, nearly in unison, below a tiled sign that announced our arrival at the Praça das Artes, Cultura, e Memória. Not by chance, then, its first vertical column was louvered at a thirty degree angle so as to guide the viewer's eye toward "A-C-M," the initials and well-known nickname of Bahia's "Governor" Antonio Carlos Magalhães.

Unnerved by the spectral power of the iron-fisted patron of "Arts, Culture and Memory" whose architects, neighborhood residents agreed, rarely missed a chance at nervous obeisance, we followed Rua João de Deus. We walked silently past the military police post established in 1992 as part of the state's initial attempts to control the Maciel and paused at the handicrafts market that had replaced a brothel formerly known as the Buraco Doce (Sweet Hole). After Malaquias collected a small sum owed to him, we crossed onto the bustling Terreiro de Jesus Square. There, bookended by Salvador's Cathedral and the gold leaf of the Baroque Igreja de São Francisco (São Francisco Church), baianas do acarajé slathered black-eyed-pea fritters (acarajé) with fish paste and okra while capoeira fighters drummed up an audience in the drizzle. At the Square's opposite edge we turned toward the still-stigmatized 28th of September Street. Descending pitted hillsides (ladeiras), we sought to recall the names of sealed buildings' former occupants. At times we stuttered and stumbled, disoriented on slippery cobblestones that had once reassured in their uneven familiarity.

Now, nearly two decades after they had shuttered the first of the Maciel's buildings, workers were transforming colonial sobrados, built for planter and merchant elites but occupied across the twentieth century by impoverished quasi-citizens, into quarters for the philanthropies and state institutions that would help cement the Pelourinho as a cultural destination. Due to hiccups in IDB funding supported by arguments that planners had neglected the population, they were also converting a number into apartments for the police and the bureaucrats reviled, and envied, by Malaquias and his former neighbors: In response to pressure to enliven a now-depopulated architectural jewel, IPAC and its institutional sibling, state-level urban planning body CONDER, had joined federal credit institutions to structure mortgages for public servants. But this meant that working-class Afro-Bahians without formal labor documents (carteira assinada) or the marks of bourgeois propriety demanded by lending officers had little hope of returning to...