Over overloaded (in fragments)

This is a continuation of my posts on the subway...

I have been thinking a lot about how an ethnography of the metro in São Paulo demands an overwhelming emphasis on the experience of riding the train.  Reading a news paper article on the subway the other week, I was impressed by the term superlotação.  Lotado means to be full to the point of not being able to fit more.  Somewhere between "at capacity" and  "bursting at the seems" would perhaps aptly cover the word.  Superlotação, whatever its technical definition being employed by metro technicians, politicians or journalists, connotes a particular miserable state of affairs.  And yet, for all the talk of new lines, different services, qualitative improvements, newspaper articles seem incapable or unwilling to capture the frustrating and inhumane conditions of what superlotação means.  I began to think about what it would take to document and explain superlotação.  this is the beginning of an explanation, in fragments...

- An American friend tells me that people have told him they don't trust the automatic doors on the new yellow lines trains.  I don't believe him until, one day, I see the doors take five times to close.  The car is so full that people can fit into the external doors (shielding the train from the platform) but not the internal doors (closing the actual metro car).  On one attempt, the external doors close without the internal doors.  Nothing happens for 20 seconds.  From the other side of the glass doors, I can see the look of terror on one the face of one woman squeezed to the very margen of the open doorway.  I imagine that she is asking herself the same question that I am asking:  "would the train actually begin without closing the inside doors?"
The outer doors open again so as to begin the process over again.  A petit young woman jumps on and worms her way into the pressed bodies.  Bodies have to move, but they don't exactly master the physics of where their matter can go.

-I try to avoid using the train during rush hour.  Almost everyone I know who uses the metro does the same. Everyone has different strategies.  Many just stay at work.  It is a Brazilian national stereotype that Paulistanos  work too much.  And many people stay two or three hours later than they need to.  Of course, if they were to leave their offices at 5:30 p.m., they would spend those next three hours trying to go ten miles.

-While the middle class plays on the internet in their office, shopping malls contain the overflow of workers who decide to wait out rush hour.  Whole economies spring up around waiting.  Food stands, knick knack vendors, news kiosks.

-I had to go to an event that was hosted by the city governement in the "periphery," the poorer outer neighborhoods less serviced by public infrastructure.  To do this, I had to take a train, which is different from the metro.  About seven old suburban train lines built at the beginning of the 20th century still serve what have now become the outer neighboorhoods of São Paulo.  Although integrated with the metro, which serves mostly central neighborhoods and was not constructed until the mid-1970s, the two sets of lines are kept administratively separate.  They are also separate in the public imagination.  As much as the São Paulo elite demonizes subway riders, those who take the "train" are even more socially marginalized.  If you don't feel demoralized by telling someone you take the train, you will feel demoralized when you actually ride it.
When I arrive at the event, the city employees tell me they are impressed, that they wouldn't know how to use the train.

-Sometimes, I forget and call the train by it's formal acronym, the CPTM (Compania Paulista de Trens Metropolitanos).  People parodically tell me how fancy I sound using the formal name.

-On a train line that should be superlotado for the time of day, I am pleasantly surprised to find a piece of wall to lean against for the ride. The women who come aboard at the next station seem pleased as well.  One looks knowingly at the other and says, "milagres existem" (miracles exist).

[ok, I have about three times as much stuff written in my examples...wait for fragments part II]