Chavoso da USP: The Periphery’s Professor

On a grainy Facebook post back in 2019, Thiago Torres—better known today as Chavoso da USP—told a story that struck a national nerve. A young man from Brasilândia, a working-class neighborhood on São Paulo’s northwestern edge, he had entered Brazil’s most prestigious public university only to find himself surrounded by an elite bubble that treated him as an outsider. His viral words cut through: race, class, and the violence of belonging in a place designed to keep you out.

In that moment, a chavoso was born—not just as a student, but as a voice of the periphery, translating sociology into the language of memes, rants, and razor-sharp video essays.

Funk Style Meets Marxist Theory

Chavoso is instantly recognizable: shaved lines in his eyebrows, cap tilted, chains gleaming, a São Paulo funk aesthetic colliding with the book-lined backdrops of his home recordings. This isn’t cosplay. It’s the refusal to shed his identity in order to be accepted by an academic institution built on elitism.

In a country where gay men from the periphery are often caricatured or erased, Thiago performs something radical: he exists, unapologetically. He teaches Marx, Paulo Freire, and Angela Davis the same way funk DJs drop a beat—direct, rhythmic, accessible. His YouTube channel became a classroom for those who’d never set foot in USP. Videos about police violence, LGBTQ+ rights, and neoliberal decay rack up views in the hundreds of thousands.

If the Brazilian right perfected WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, Chavoso hacked the system back—weaponizing the same platforms to bring political literacy into the palm of your hand.

Social Media as Political Pedagogy

While many “influencers” chase brand deals and algorithmic trends, Thiago calls himself a “media activist.” He doesn’t just inform—he trains audiences in how to think politically. Every clip starts with a familiar provocation (“Você já ouviu alguém dizer que o Brasil não tem jeito?”), then unfolds into a history lesson you can actually follow on your phone during the commute.

The comments sections are full of young workers, queer teens, and students writing lines that read like testimonials: “You explained more in five minutes than my teacher did in a year.”

The reach is undeniable. In public schools, in youth detention centers like Fundação Casa, in workshops across São Paulo’s periphery, Thiago has become a kind of parallel educator—bridging the gap between the language of sociology and the lived experience of the street.

The CPI of Funk

That work doesn’t just live online. On August 28, 2025, Chavoso walked into São Paulo’s city council chamber as a witness in the CPI dos Pancadões, a parliamentary inquiry set up to investigate the city’s massive funk street parties. For the right-wing councilors driving it, the CPI was a chance to paint funk as criminal, chaotic, and inseparable from organized crime.

Chavoso flipped the script. Sitting in his hoodie and braids before the microphones, he reminded lawmakers that noise and nightlife aren’t unique to the periphery—affluent districts hold late-night parties too, but only bailes funk are criminalized. He demanded the creation of safe, public venues instead of police crackdowns, insisting that culture is not a crime but a right. And in a moment that ricocheted across social media, he declared that “there are people inside this Chamber with closer ties to organized crime than the kids dancing in the streets.”

To some, it was provocation. To others, it was the periphery finally speaking back in a space built to silence it.

Confronting the State

This wasn’t his first clash with institutions of power. In 2022, his face was mistakenly placed in a police recognition album of suspects—a chilling reminder of how Black and peripheral youth are criminalized. In 2023, during São Paulo’s Virada Cultural festival, he was assaulted by military police after filming officers harassing his friend. And earlier this year, he was convicted of calumny and defamation in a case involving posts against a former mayor.

At every turn, his life illustrates the thin line between dissent and criminalization in Brazil.

A New Kind of Public Intellectual

What sets Thiago apart isn’t just his defiance. It’s the way he embodies an evolution of the Brazilian public intellectual. Where once the archetype was the suited academic, quoting French theory from a lectern, today it’s a 25-year-old in a Nike cap speaking directly into a phone camera—or into a city council microphone.

He makes no attempt to hide his contradictions: openly gay, Umbanda practitioner, vegan since his teens, unapologetically chavoso. In doing so, he offers a new horizon of visibility for youth in the periphery who rarely see their realities reflected in higher education—or in politics.

Why He Matters

Brazil is in the middle of a war over who gets to define truth. On one side, the machinery of fake news and authoritarian nostalgia. On the other, grassroots communicators like Thiago Torres, who insist that knowledge belongs to everyone.

His impact can’t be measured by subscriber counts alone. It’s in the 14-year-old in Guarulhos who watches his videos and decides to sit the entrance exam for a public university. It’s in the LGBTQ+ teenager in a conservative household who finds language to name themselves. It’s in the packed hearing room of the CPI dos Pancadões, where he stood in front of hostile lawmakers and refused to fold.

In a society that constantly tells poor and Black youth to “know their place,” Chavoso da USP has flipped the script: the periphery isn’t just a site of absence—it’s the starting point of a new political imagination.