Heads turn as Raphael Vicente walks down the narrow streets of Maré, a sprawling favela complex in Rio de Janeiro’s gritty north zone. One woman rushes out of a cafeteria to ask for an autograph. “Autographs are so old-school, let’s take a selfie!” the 22-year-old laughs before snapping a picture.
Taller than average with a wide smile, Vicente is easily recognizable – and he’s an internet sensation with 3.1 million followers on TikTok and nearly 1 million on Instagram. Fans follow him for his funny, relatable videos, a mixture of skits on life at home in the favela and creative takes on social media trends.
The TikToker wants to use his fame to change the way favela residents are perceived in Brazil and show that there is much more to these communities than crime and poverty.
“Raphael has an important role … because he’s showing the cheerfulness of the favela,” says his sister, Maria Eduarda “Maddu” Reis. “Even people from the favela are used to seeing their community depicted in the media as just tragedy, violence, shootings, police operations.”
Vicente shows the human and humorous side of favela life by filming his videos with the people he considers his closest family: his 21-year-old sister and 70-year-old grandmother, as well as the family of his 67-year-old godmother.
According to Fernanda Carrera, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s school of communication, Vicente’s visibility is significant given the under-representation of Black, favela-dwelling Brazilians in traditional media – even though 56% of Brazilians are Black and almost a quarter of Rio’s residents live in favelas.
“I’m a Black, poor, gay boy who has lived in Maré [my entire life],” says Vicente. “Us people, we don’t have the same opportunities as those who don’t live in the favela, our struggle always requires double the amount of grit, double the amount of work.”
Vicente started posting videos online at age 14, honing his craft across different platforms before finding his niche on TikTok in 2020. Entirely self-taught, he is scriptwriter, actor and editor for his videos – a “genius of audio-visual production”, in Carrera’s words.
As well as humorous sketches and TikTok dances, Vicente produces more elaborate choreographies with a dance troupe he founded, Dance Maré. His content hits the spot in hyper-connected Brazil, where people love an online trend and tend to make a joke out of even the darkest of situations.
“I see how much humour serves as an escape valve when bad things happen,” says Vicente. “People tell me they’re having a bad day, and that watching one of our videos made their day better.”
He puts his success down to the relatability and high quality of his content – and the side-splitting performance of his relatives, whom he readily admits are the true stars of his videos. Whether they are acting out a role, playing a caricature of themselves, or twerking to the latest viral TikTok song, the women who raised Vicente take their job seriously, while also having the time of their lives.
“I think it’s marvellous!” cackles his godmother Luciene Elias, for whom filming the videos was a lifesaver during the pandemic lockdowns.
“People say to us, your family is an inspiration, I wish my family was like yours, close, happy, contagious, and that’s really gratifying,” says Reis.
This fun-loving family might not fit the conventional image of the nuclear family, but they are not so unusual in Brazil, where father abandonment is common and a growing number of children are raised by their grandmothers.
“Raphael Vicente’s family is the authentic Brazilian family, just not the one we see represented in the media,” says Carrera, who researches race and representation in digital culture.
The high point of Vicente’s career so far was getting noticed by the Colombian pop star Shakira with a remix of her 2010 World Cup anthem Waka Waka, released during last year’s tournament. The success of the clip, which shows the Dance Maré crew bopping through the festooned favela, landed the dancers on national television, where they were congratulated by Shakira herself.
Two months later, Vicente and his family are still giddy with disbelief. “When he told me, ‘Gran, Shakira spoke to us,’ I thought, that’s it, she’s going to sue him [over the music rights],” says his grandmother, Maria Antonia da Silva.
The video’s success also has a deeper meaning. Vicente recounts how it was released the same week that a heavy-handed police raid in Maré left several dead. Within a few days of the clip going viral, a Google search for Maré-related news threw up positive articles about the World Cup dance rather than the usual violence-dominated headlines.
“I actually succeeded, for real,” says a visibly moved Vicente. “Little by little, I can change this reality, this vision that people outside the favela have of us.”
