1st Royal Engineers, who reached the first FA cup final in 1872, from Wikipedia Commons
With the World Cup starting in Brazil this week, it’s worth reviewing a book on Brazil, soccer and international sporting organizations. Dave Zirin is a well-known sports writer who has covered other major events, such as the summer Olympics in Athens. HIs book seeks to explain why preparations for the World Cup, as well as the 2016 Summer Olympics, have created a wave of protest within the country. The book is written in a popular style, by a non-expert in Brazil. The strength of the book is his deep understanding of both FIFA (the International Soccer Association) and the Olympics. Overall, his book is a good introduction to the issues in a readable format. By the end the reader will have no difficulty understanding the current wave of outrage in Brazil caused by the preparations for these events. …
Christoph Niemann has an incredibly beautiful animated story book about Brazilian soccer in the New York Times. The piece integrates photography, video, music and animation to tell the story of the Maracanaço, when Brazil lost to Uruguay in 1950. Brazilians remember this event as a collective trauma to the national psyche. Even if you are not a soccer fan, you will want to see this. This storybook is a work of art that should be mandatory viewing before the World Cup begins in Brazil next week. Want to see more posts about Brazil? Click here. Or you can find my own work on military terror in Brazil here.
Machado de Assis at the age of 57, Wikipedia Commons.
One of my favorite ways to engage students in thinking about another part of the world is through literature. For this reason, I’ve been reading the short stories of Machado de Assis in John Charles Chasteen’s new translation, which is named after perhaps the author’s most famous short story, the Alienist. It’s often said that Brazil is the sepulchre of great literature. There is still no English translation of Taunay’s, A Retirada da Laguna, an epic first hand account of a disastrous retreat during the Paraguayan War, which is widely hailed as a literary masterpiece. And even people who know the work of Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are likely to be unfamiliar with Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), likely the greatest Brazilian writer of all time.
Machado de Assis was born into the Brazilian empire, which largely escaped the widespread conflict that Spanish America experienced after independence, despite a host of regional rebellions. His father was the son of freed slaves, and his mother was Portuguese. He had an irregular education, but managed to learn four languages, and become a great novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. He was the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. …
“Part Of A Globe With Map Of South America” by digidreamgrafix at freedigitalphotos.net
In an earlier post, I talked about what appeared to be a case of bioterrorism in Brazil, in which someone deliberately introduced a fungus, called “Witches’ Broom” into the cacao growing region of northeastern Brazil. Dilson Araujo posted a comment, in which he talked about the documentary he had made on the topic, which had kindly posted to Youtube. I’ve watched the video, which seeks to describe the immense impact that this event had, and to explore why there the Brazilian state failed to appropriately investigate the crime. More than just a documentary, this video represents an important historical document, which contains eyewitness evidence about events during that terrible period from 1989 through the early 1990s. The film is sub-titled in English, and makes for gripping viewing, in particular in the final twenty minutes.
One of the common beliefs about Witches’ Broom was that if it had been introduced deliberately, the reason likely was a political one, to undermine the power of the great landowners. This idea seems to concern the film-maker, because the documentary began with a fairy-tale history of witches’ broom, in which a female narrator described how this event freed rural workers from the oppression of the northeastern countryside; at the end of this story, the narrator was revealed to be a witch. Paired with the following scene, in which President Dilma Rousseff announced a Truth Commission in Brazil, I at first feared that the documentary might be a polemic. Instead, the director wanted to make the point that in Brazil there are many truths. Sadly, because of the inequality and rural oppression that did exist in Brazil at the time of the crime, those who were victimized seemed at times almost defensive. One of the points that an interviewee made was that the majority of cacao producers were not people of great wealth, as over 90% had fewer than a 100 hectares. …
“Seeding Poppy Heads” by Simon Howden at freedigitalphotos.net
In an earlier post, I talked about the move to decriminalizing marijuana in the Americas. What struck me last August how quickly this idea has gained political momentum, both within the United States and internationally. In the United States, medical marijuana is legal in 40% of states, while the next state to fully legalize the drug for recreational use may be Alaska. A recent article in the Washington Post examines the impact that this trend is having both in the United States and in Mexico. On the positive side, in Sinaloa the demand for marijuana has collapsed, with current prices just a quarter of what they were five years ago. Nick Miroff quotes one Mexican farmer about this economic transformation: ““It’s not worth it anymore,” said Rodrigo Silla, 50, a lifelong cannabis farmer who said he couldn’t remember the last time his family and others in their tiny hamlet gave up growing mota. “I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.’” While this economic change should weaken the power of the major drug cartels, it has also had an unintended consequence: Mexican farmers are transitioning to opium, which is used to produce heroin. According to the article, Mexican cartels have adopted heroin as their key product, and they are pushing near treatment centers in the United States. …
When I did my doctoral research in Brazil during the 1990s there was a pervasive fear of the police. I remember once watching as the police hunted someone who had gone into hiding, while I sat safely in a tram in central Rio de Janeiro. As the police poked into alleys and boxes, the other passengers had a look of disgust on their face, while the people on the street looked terrified. I escaped any serious crime while living in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and 1993. But I knew many people who had stories about carjackings, muggings and worse. When I did fieldwork in Sao Paulo in 2005 for my book in HIV in Latin America, I interviewed drug traffickers and users, most of whom were using crack, although injecting drugs were also common amongst an older generation of drug users. I went into the favelas, many of which were totally under the control of the drug lords at that time. One day I was at an NGO that did harm mitigation work around drugs. We were supposed to work in a favela that afternoon, but then a phone call came. The drug lords had closed the favela to protest some action that the government had taken, and nobody could enter it that day. …
In 1990 I did an immersion program in Pernambuco, Brazil. I spent weeks in Recife and the colonial city of Olinda, where I saw baroque churches, staggering poverty and urban life. I also heard the rich folklore and oral traditions that survived in the region regarding everything from nineteenth century bandits to messianic leaders. And of course I learned about the droughts, which have engulfed the region time after time. Lately there has been a great deal of attention given to the drought in the American West, and in particular California. But there is also a drought in Brazil that is so bad that dams cannot be relied upon to supply power. The Global Post has had a great series of reports on the disaster, which includes text, video and a photo essay. And if you want to have a deeper understanding of events there, read Nicholas Gabriel Arons’ Waiting for Rain: The Politics and Poetry of Drought in Northeast Brazil. Or if you want to dive into literature to understand the region’s past, read Jorge Amado’s Violent Land. You can also see more posts about Brazil at this blog here. Or you can find my own book on Brazil here.
“The Offshore Drilling Oil Rig And Supply Boat Side View” by num_skyman at freedigitalphotos.net
I’ve just returned from three weeks in southern Mexico, where the biggest political issue in the news has been the President’s energy reform plan. In 1938 Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the petroleum industry. This measure attracted popular acclaim in Mexico, and fury in the United States. While President Roosevelt was pressured to act, he knew that World War Two was coming, and had little interest in alienating a key neighbor. The state oil company PEMEX is now Mexico’s largest economic organization, and a source of national pride. When you travel in Mexico, all of the gas stations have the green stripe and red eagle of PEMEX. But now the company faces massive challenges. …
I’ve been working to revise my modern Brazilian history syllabus, which I’m attaching here. If you are interested in Brazil, you might also want to look at my book on military terror in that country:
Modern Brazilian History
HST 463U/INTL 463U
MWF, 12:45-1:50
Neuberger Hall, Rm. 222
Professor Smallman
Rm. 345, East Hall
Phone: 725-9978
E-mail: drss@pdx.edu
Office hours: Friday, 10:00-noon
This course will explore such topics as slavery, abolition, messianism, banditry, the Amazon, race, military rule and democratization. Particular emphasis will be given to the differing visions the elites and the masses held of their nation, and how this tension has shaped Brazilian society.By the end of the course students will have a better understanding of a Latin American culture, and how characteristics such as race and power are defined by history. …
I’ve been teaching a class on the Amazon rainforest for about fifteen years now, which provides a brief historical overview of Amazonia, before examining indigenous and environmental issues. A few words about the books for the course: students love David Campbell’s, Land of Ghosts, despite his sometimes challenging vocabulary, because of his evocative descriptions. But be forewarned about Mindlin’s, Barbecued Husbands. This is a book of erotic myths from the southwestern Amazon. The first time I used this book in a class, I had a delegation of students come to complain that I was requiring them to read material with sexual content; I made the use of the book (and attendance in the class discussion) optional. I also had another student explain why they hadn’t read the book by saying: “I loaned it to my housemate at the start of the quarter, and he’s refused to give it back.” I continue to use it as an optional text, and on that basis have not had any more student complaints. …
