Favelas, or shantytowns, are where cocaine is mainly sold in Rio de Janeiro. There are some six hundred favelas in the city, and most of them are controlled by well-organized and heavily armed drug gangs. The struggle for the massive profits from this drug trade has resulted in what are increasingly violent and deadly confrontations between rival drug gangs and a corrupt and brutal police force, that have transformed parts of the city into a war-zone. Lucia tells the story of one woman who was once intimately involved with drug gang life in Rio throughout the 1990s. Through a series of conversations with the author, Lucia describes conditions of poverty, violence, and injustice that are simply unimaginable to outsiders. In doing so, she explains why women like her become involved with drugs and gangs, and why this situation is unlikely to change.

Robert Gay is Chair of the Department of Sociology at Connecticut College. He is the author of Popular Organization and Democracy in Rio De Janeiro: A Tale of Two Favelas (Temple).

"Rio de Janeiro is under siege. The poor communities and the favelas on the hills are submitted to a mix of terror and populism by the drug traffickers. The affluent classes live under fear of organized crime. Most of the police are involved in corruption and lethal violence. Despite this overwhelming presence, life in the favelas is not well known. Robert Gay has written a rigorous, but at the same time compassionate, study of the complex strategies for survival in those surroundings. In this outstanding book we are able to hear, through Lucia, the voice of those brave (and neglected) survivors."—Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Senior Researcher, Center for the Study of Violence, University of Sao Paulo, and former Secretary of State for Human Rights, Brazil

"Lucia is an outstanding book. Robert Gay does a splendid job of laying out and expanding the lives of Lucia and of those who intersect with her. He makes them live by explaining social organizations and institutions—gangs, prison, school, work, economy and religion—within the context of people's lives. Gay offers a rich, superbly readable narrative that develops these important themes. Lucia provides depth and breadth to a subject about which there is little empirical research; it teaches sociology in an interesting and informed way."—Martha Huggins, Charles A. and Leo M. Favrot Professor of Human Relations, Tulane University

"If you can no longer recall the stomach-churning depictions of Rio de Janeiro favelas from the 2002 film City of God, this true account of one mujer's life in the Brazilian underworld—trying to survive local gangs and merciless rule of her drug-lord boyfriend—will bring it all back."—Latina