Favelas, Feijoada, and a Festa Junina

After a spirited rendition of “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” I was impressed. But for some reason, the fact that the country band’s next song was in Portuguese made perfect sense.

That’s because I was in São Paulo, Brazil, attending a Festa Junina, one of a series of fairs held throughout June to celebrate the birthdays of three saints that fall within the month. This one, however, bore more resemblance to the West Virginia State Fair that I attended last summer to anything I had expected to see in Brazil. From the western-style lettering to the singer with the perfect Garth Brooks accent, I could have been in Texas. But the booths served suco de cana and churrasco, and the t-shirts under the cowboy hats sported names like “Emporio Armani” and “GAP.”

After three weeks in Brazil, I have found that appropriation and contradiction often typify Brazilian society and culture. Like feijoada, the concoction of meats enveloped in beans with which Brazilians so identify, Brazilian culture consumes many foreign and extraneous elements and makes them its own. Sometimes the mix is inconsistent, and there are some unlikely amalgamations. Here, the first and third worlds are often on the same block: in some parts of the skyline, chic apartment buildings seem to ascend out of seas of squat favelas, the urban slums that dot the urban landscape. Though oft-publicized violent crime is prevalent in the periphery, it is far less common in the center. São Paulo’s Liberdade neighborhood boasts the biggest community of ethnic Japanese outside of Japan. São Paulo just hosted the biggest gay pride parade in history, but it is not recommended that gay men walk alone at night. The subway is extremely clean and efficient. But it does not reach the periphery, and will not even when finished.

Many cultural idiosyncrasies are amusing. There is a veritable passion for public display of affection: if there’s a couple—in a theater, on the subway, at a Festa Junina—they are probably making out. There is a curious love for English words and phrases: malls are called “shoppings” and American music dominates pop radio. Asking for directions can result in a 30-minute conversation. Working for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, I have learned that everyone wants to talk to a reporter. The subject of the conversation, however, can vary. I received a guided tour of the University of São Paulo’s equivalent of University Hall—invaded by students and barred to the press—after a fifteen-minute argument with a socialist student named Duarte who tried to convince me of the democracy of Hugo Chavez’s closing of Radio Caracas Televisión. I watched with amused befuddlement as my host father dug into his hunk of watermelon with gusto and a knife and fork.

Others are more serious. The conventional wisdom is that public pre-university education is in disarray. On the day we visited a public elementary school, four out of 11 teachers were missing. The government takes the publicly-financed healthcare system very seriously; posters about child vaccinations and medical attention blanket buses. Over the past 15 years, the government has conducted a very aggressive and effective anti-AIDS campaign that has included universal free treatment and television advertisements featuring parents giving condoms to progeny of various sexual persuasions. However, the system has been criticized: The Minister of Health faced audience participation at a Folha-sponsored panel ranging from questions about unequal access to a religious fanatic heckling the minister about providing healthcare to homosexuals.

In short, Brazil is a huge, diverse, and active country. Its appropriations and contradictions are sometimes amusing, sometimes surprising, and always fascinating. Brazil is dealing with many of the same issues as the U.S. is today—except it was ruled by a military dictatorship until just over 20 years ago. As Brazilians love to say, “é complicado” (it’s complicated).


Matthew S. Blumenthal ’08, a Crimson news editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. He is interning at Folha de São Paulo as part of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) Summer Internship Program, and has four friends on Orkut, the Brazilian version of Myspace.