The Loudspeaker on the Rooftop: Zé do Caroço Turned a Favela Into a Voice

In the steep alleys of Morro do Pau da Bandeira, a working-class hillside neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro’s Vila Isabel district, a voice once rang out every morning. It wasn’t the voice of a preacher, a politician, or a pop star. It was the voice of José Mendes da Silva—a retired laborer, known to everyone simply as Zé do Caroço.

Long before his name would be immortalized in samba lyrics, before artists like Leci Brandão and Seu Jorge would sing of him as a metaphor for popular awakening, Zé was already speaking to the people—literally. He built his own PA system and installed it on the rooftop of his house, transforming his home into a makeshift communications hub for the entire favela.

Each day, the neighborhood would tune in. He’d broadcast public service updates: rain warnings, obituaries, vegetable prices, bus schedules. All of it free of charge. In a community long ignored by the city’s official information networks, Zé’s laje (rooftop) became something extraordinary: a platform for grassroots citizenship.

But that’s only part of the story.

A Voice That Didn't Ask Permission

Zé’s nickname—Caroço, meaning “lump”—came from the illness that led to his early retirement. He had developed painful growths in his joints, and could no longer work. But what he lost in physical ability, he channeled into his voice.

Raised by a domestic worker and a bricklayer, Zé grew up in the narrow corridors of Rio’s informal neighborhoods. He spent time in a juvenile institution, FEBEM, where he was known for his leadership—not through aggression, but through words. In time, he became a figure of respect. Not a politician, not an activist in the traditional sense, but something harder to define: a community anchor.

And it didn’t take long for his rooftop broadcasts to draw attention—not just from grateful neighbors, but from the Brazilian military dictatorship. One day, a neighbor (married to a military officer) allegedly complained that the loudspeaker was disrupting her telenovela. Soon after, repression followed.

This wasn’t just about noise. It was about power. About who gets to speak, and who gets silenced.

The Favela and the Anthem

In 1978, during one of the darkest periods of Brazil’s authoritarian regime, samba singer and political icon Leci Brandão heard Zé’s story. Moved, she wrote a song in his honor. But the music was too subversive to be released at the time—it called for the political awakening of Brazil’s favelas, something the regime was keen to suppress.

The lyrics were sharp and prescient:

“The day the hill comes down,
and it’s not for Carnival...”

It was a warning. A prophecy. A dream. That the favela would someday take to the streets not for samba parades, but to claim its place in Brazilian democracy.

The song, simply titled Zé do Caroço, wouldn’t be recorded until 1985, at the tail end of the dictatorship. But once it hit the airwaves, it spread like wildfire. In the decades since, it’s been reinterpreted by a long list of artists—Grupo Revelação, Art Popular, Ana Carolina, and Seu Jorge, who updated a key verse to read:

“When Brazilian television DESTROYS everyone with its soap operas,”
replacing the original: “When it DISTRACTS everyone with its soap operas.”

It was more than a semantic shift. It was a condemnation of the mass media’s role in anesthetizing the public—especially the poor.

The Politics of the Everyday

Zé do Caroço never wrote manifestos. He didn’t hold elected office. He wasn’t funded by an NGO or backed by a university. What he did was deceptively simple: he informed his neighbors. And in doing so, he dismantled, piece by piece, the idea that the favela had to remain silent or uninformed.

In his own way, Zé was a media theorist of the people. His broadcasts embodied Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of critical consciousness. He didn’t just deliver facts—he created space for reflection, action, solidarity.

As his son Edmilson and longtime neighbors recall, Zé’s rooftop was a form of “street-level radio”—long before the age of community podcasts and Instagram lives. In a time when state censorship was rampant, his broadcasts were a kind of resistance.

Echoes in the Present

Today, Zé’s voice lives on—not through old speakers, but through the many grassroots media initiatives that dot Brazil’s urban peripheries. From the Voz das Comunidades platform to favela-based podcasts and WhatsApp news collectives, there are hundreds of Zés, speaking in hundreds of ways.

But remembering the original matters. Not just for nostalgia, but because Zé do Caroço’s life is a blueprint for radical imagination. It asks a simple question:

What if the favela was not just spoken about—but spoke, loudly, on its own terms?

In a country where the poor are often treated as background noise—except when dancing for tourists or dying on the news—Zé’s story insists on something deeper: the right to narrate one’s own life.

His rooftop might have been small, but it broadcast a future.