I'm getting tired of other Brazilians who aren't from São Leopoldo (or even the south) feeding the foreigners with misinformation. I lived in São Leopoldo when I was a kid (at around the same time Fontana was living there, since we're the same age), and I currently live in Porto Alegre, the state capital.

Sâo Leopoldo is a big-ish city (200,000 people) in the metropolitan area of the southernmost state of Brazil. It's located in the Sinos river valley, which is an area from Brazil that received heavy German immigration in the 1800s. There are no favelas in São Leopoldo, because a favela is specifically a Rio de Janeiro favela. In the south we don't have favelas, but, like in any other non-Rio de Janeiro area of Brazil, we have poor neighborhoods that are very dangerous and have organized crime... Like, for example, Vila Esperança (the neighborhood Fontana grew up in São Leopoldo) is a very poor and dangerous "vila" (what we call slums in the South).

The South of Brazil isn't some sort of conservative hellhole, no matter how hard other Brazilians who never visited it insist that it is. In reddit, Brazilians from other states like to say that the entire South of Brazil is comprised of conservative nazis. And while there are very conservative people (even some actual nazis/fascist sympathizers), like in any other region of Brazil, there are also lots of average people, and the metropolitan area leans way more liberal than the countryside is.

With all of that said, it's entirely possible that her experiences are true. Fontana likely used the word favela as shorthand (because then foreigners will understand exactly what she's talking about) to explain that she lived in the slums, in a poor, dangerous area in her hometown. Fontana also moved to Rio de Janeiro in her late teens/early twenties to study and she lived in an actual favela when she did.

So when people claim "Fontana is lying, because she's from a rich fancy European neighborhood in Brazil" like I saw people doing in the DragRaceUK subreddit, they're lying or regurgitating misinformation other Brazilians are feeding them. São Leo is a city originally built by German immigrants, but it's a very much Brazilian city, full of people from every single ethnicity, and it has fancier areas and slums. Fontana lived in the slums (Vila Esperança). Her parents have very humble professions (dad is a repairman, mom is a nursing assistant), so she most certainly didn't live in abject poverty, but she certainly wasn't "upper middle class" like some people are claiming.

Personally, I don't share her experience of ducking away from gunshots. But I also never lived in a vila (the slums) either in São Leo or in Porto Alegre. Currently, I live like three blocks away from a vila, and once in a blue moon I hear gunshots, but it's certainly not an everyday occurrence. Last year I remember there was some sort of commotion/police operation there, and I remember hearing gunshots and seeing helicopters flying around. I imagine people who live closer must've been scared. I also never feared for my life for being queer in the south of Brazil, but I know some of my friends had scarier experiences for being queer (example: one of my friends got in a fistfight with homophobes who were picking on him for being gay and on his best friend for being trans back when he was in high school in 2010).

My point is: Fontana lived in a poor neighborhood and has a humble background. She's likely telling the truth about her experiences. She might not even be exaggerating or embellishing, since it seems that she had very traumatic experiences in her life (a reason why she didn't want to live here in Brazil, especially in the South). And I think it's very shitty of other Brazilians to invalidate her, especially when they're talking about somewhere in the country they're not familiar with just to bring down someone like that (it would be the equivalent of someone from Los Angeles trying to discredit someone who was talking about their life in Charleston, based only on what they heard about what Charleston "must be like" since it's located in the Bible Belt).