Carnaval in Recife (AfroPop Worldwide)

Carnaval in Recife, 2018

It's that time of the year: Carnival in the Caribbean, Hispanophone Latin America, and Europe, Carnaval in Brazil and Portugal, Mardi Gras in parts of the US, all marking the rise of the Lenten season. Over the years I've periodically blogged about Carnival celebrations, with the last such post, a search tells me, coming in 2012, my final year in Chicago. Those snowy Midwestern winters often provoked thoughts of getting far away and celebrating at a Carnival celebration, but the scheduling has never panned out. Glancing through news sites during the last several weeks, I've begun noting photos of preparations for Carnival and the big events themselves, fermenting once again my desire to attend one.

In lieu of doing so this year, I am posting a few photos from a Carnaval celebration in Recife, one of the oldest and major cities in Brazil's northeastern region. The Recife Carnaval is an important and culturally distinctive Carnaval in Brazil (the other key ones are in Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro), with the ethos that all attendees are participants, an Afro-Brazilian religious performance, Maracatú, at its core, and a drag parade to open it. Recife's local frevo music also serves as one of many soundtracks for the Carnaval blocos.

Since I'm in cold--and snowy (sigh!)--New Jersey and not Recife, the photos are courtesy of Banning Eyre, and are featured on AfroPop Worldwide.  I'm only going to share a few of the photos, all of which are copyrighted and belong to AfroPop Worldwide and Banning Eyre, so please do head over to AfroPop Worldwide's blog to see the rest. Banning Eyre says a bit not only about the Carnival events, with a bit of background about Recife Carnaval, but also notes how Brazilian's faltering economy is effecting the celebration.

If you have photos of Carnival or Carnaval celebrations, in Recife or anywhere else, please do share the links in the comments section here!

Side street maracatu!

Frevo on parade

No means no, My body is not
your plaything. Women's empowerment
is surging in Brazil, as elsewhere.

Brazilian Notes: Quilombo Decree Upheld + Borba's "Black is Beautiful (#BLVCKSBTFLL)"

The signs read, "Brazil is quilombo residents;
not one less quilombo"

All over the Americas, when fugitive slaves had the opportunities to escape and set up maroon (marrons in French, cimarrones in Spanish, maròn/mawòn in Kreyol/creole, etc.) communities, beyond the administrative and military grasp of the settler-colonial and slave system, they did so. These communities took different forms in different parts of the hemisphere, but their legacies continue, sometimes in name (palenques in Spanish, maroon towns or free towns in English), sometimes in traces and foundations that are mostly forgotten but still inspire the descendants. In Brazil, these communities were often known as quilombos, the most famous of which remains Palmares, in the interior of the northeastern state of Alagoas, north of Bahia, established by a group of fugitive slaves and warriors led by the great Imbangala (Angola)-descended Zumbi (1655-1695).

Quilombos, from the Kimbundu word kilombo, dot rural areas far from the major metropoles across northern and northeastern Brazil. As anti-colonial and anti-imperial, black-centered zones of resistance, they were targets of the Portuguese and later Brazilian governments in the colonial period, and the state's administrative, bureaucratic, legal, social, and economic war against them has not relaxed in the 20th and 21st centuries. From attempts to seize title to quilombo land to the murders of quilombolas (residents of the quilombos), these communities have had to engage in continual struggle to stay whole, and free. A ruralist coalition of lawmakers, some allied with agribusiness and other powerful interests, has repeatedly attempted to gain control of the increasingly valuable quilombo territory. In 2003, however, then-President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva signed a decree that expanded the quilombolas' rights to title and demarcated their land, empowering the residents to gain legal title in order to keep them.

Brazil's current president, the profoundly unpopular Michel Temer, took office after a soft 2016 coup in which he and the Brazilian Congress impeached and ousted popularly elected president Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor, over technical budgeting violations. Temer subsequently began instituting a range of neoliberal policies, under the aegis of pro-market rhetoric, yet Brazil's economy has continued to sputter, and the once expanding lower middle class of the Lula years has increasingly tumbled back into poverty. Among Temer's actions that threatened the quilombos was an order to suspend the titling process for the quilombos, which are supposedly protected by the Brazilian Constitution, until the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF) could rule on the validity of the decree Lula signed, which the conservative Democratic Party challenged.

After over five years in court, an overwhelming majority of the justices voted, 10-1, to uphold the decree, finally leading the Democratic Party's leader, Senator Agripino Maia, from the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, to end his opposition. The STF ruling represents a major victory for the quilombo communities and Afro-Brazilians in general, as well as for indigenous Brazilians, who have seen their lands seized and rights threatened, and a significant defeat for the powerful conservative rural interests, and their allies, including overtly racist, homophobic leading far-right presidential contender Jair Bolsonaro (of Rio de Janeiro state), who have strongly supported Temer.

As Black Women of Brazil blog reported (translating a report from the Brazilian media site iG):

Members of the National Coordination of Articulation of the Quilombola Rural Black Communities (Conaq) celebrated the [decision].”This is a first step in the recognition of the debt that the Brazilian State has with the quilombolas, as it also has with the natives,” said Denildo Rodrigues, a member of the association at the end of the trial.

Conaq was one of many associations engaged in lobbying the STF in voting. Among other actions, it organized the undersigned “Not one less quilombo”, which had more than 100 thousand signatures requesting the maintenance of Lula’s decree.

“There is no motive, reason or circumstance today for the policy of titling quilombos to be or remain paralyzed. What is expected now is for the public administration to continue and complete the regularization processes,” said Juliana de Paula Batista, a lawyer at the Socio-Environmental Institute, also involved in the case.

It would be foolhardy to believe that this successful ruling will completely halt outside interests' attempts to gain control of the quilombolas' land, but it does give them an even stronger legal foundation to defend themselves in the courts, even as they battle ongoing violence and other forms of predation.

* * *

Photo © Thiago Borba

Black Women of Brazil Blog (BWBB) is always a trove of current, informative news about Black Brazil. One recent article I enjoyed featured the work of Bahian-born and based photographer Thiago Borba, whose current project, "Black Is Beautiful," so appropriate for Black History Month, is featured at Revista Trip. On that site, in an article entitled "A coisa tá preta" (The thing is black), writer Giulia Garcia discusses Borba's route to the project, which uses the respective English title and hashtag Black is Beautiful (#BLVCKSBTFLL). After turning to photography in 2006 and studying in Spain, Borba could find no jobs in Bahia, so he pursued a commercial career in São Paulo to make ends meet.

Photo © Thiago Borba

In 2016, however, he reconnected with an earlier interest in exploring the topic of blackness in relation to beauty, still so fraught in Brazil, and started a photographic project entitled Paraíso Oculto (Hidden Paradise), melding images of black beauty in human form and natural landscapes. As BWBB regularly points out, contestations over beauty, and valorization of Eurocentric standards, constantly play out not only in interpersonal and intrafamilial spaces, but in the Brazilian public sphere. A number of spectacular, overtly racist incidents, involving denigration of Afrobrazilians' hair, features, color, style, and intelligence, have occurred over just the last year. One irony in all of this is that Afrobrazilians now constitute a numerical majority in the country, with sizable populations in Brazil's north, northeast and southeast.

Photo © Thiago Borba

He returned to Bahia from São Paulo last year, and began focusing on images of Afrobrazilians, particularly darker-skinned ones, who remain the most discriminated against in Brazil--not unlike in the US, where colorism within black communities, and within the larger US society, persists. Bahia is the traditional African heart of Brazil, with the highest percentage of self-identified black ("negro") and brown or mixed race ("pardo") residents, but hierarchies of color, class and ancestry exist there as well. As the Brazilian saying goes, "Quanto mais preto, mais preconceito sofre" (How much blacker you are, the more prejudice you suffer"), as true in Bahia as in pats of Brazil far smaller black populations, like Santa Catarina, in the far south.

Photo © Thiago Borba

Photo © Thiago Borba

The new project centers "pretos retintos" (dark-skinned blacks), those people who are "mais preto," amid a range of hues; Borba draws his subjects mostly not from the ranks of models, but from his personal and broader social network. (Looking at the photos, though, any of these subjects could or should model, and some, like Vanderlei Nagô, clearly are modeling!) Borba began posting the images on his Instagram page, and from there they gained wider notice and were selected for the state of Bahia's Novembre Negro (Black November) campaign. (November 20 is Dia da Conciência Negra, a holiday celebrated since the 1960s and officially established as a legal holiday in 2003 to honor the death, in 1695, of none other than Zumbi do Palmares, mentioned above. In Bahia, the entire month is beginning to assume the cast of honoring black Brazilian history.)

Photo © Thiago Borba

According to BWBB and Revista Trip, one of the images was even promoted on billboards, on buses and in the metro, among other public spaces. For Borba, this expanded reach was important in helping to amplify, in the eyes of minds of Afrobrazilians and all Brazilians, the representation and representativeness of black people in Brazilian society. It is a battle we continue to fight in the US, in similar and different ways.

Photo © Thiago Borba

Photo © Thiago Borba

The Coup in Brazil II: Rousseff Is Ousted

Dilma Rousseff defends herself before
the Brazilian Senate
(Independente)

It is now official; after the two-week façade of the Rio Olympics allowed Brazil to project a positive international image of itself, its sidelined Dilma Rousseff, democratically elected in 2010 and 2014, has been ousted from her post. This past Wednesday, August 31, according to the dictates of Brazil's post-dictatorship federal constitution and by a vote of 61-20 in Brazil's Senate, she has been officially removed from office. A second vote failed to reach the majority required to bar her from running for office again. Rousseff's former vice president, now acting president Michel Temer, of the opposition PMDB Party, assumes the mantle of power. Temer was sworn in two hours after Dilma was out, and now will hold office, unless he too is impeached, on far more solid grounds than Rousseff, given his alleged involvement in multiple corruptions schemes, resigns or falls ill, until 2018.

(I should note that Chamber of Deputies also called for Temer's impeachment in 2015, but that lower house's former president, Eduardo Cunha, who was third in line to the presidency, blocked the push. In April of this year, a Supreme Court Judge, Mello, ruled that the lower house vote to impeach Temer could proceed. The likelihood of that is slim unless significantly more information about Temer's links to corruption receive a public airing. In any case, other parties would have to ally with opponents of his ruling PMDB party to push through a vote. Cunha, for his part, was suspended as Chamber President in May of this year because the Supreme Court ruled he intimidated fellow lawmakers and obstructed investigation into his receipt of bribes; he also has been linked to money laundering schemes involving Petrobras.)

Before the final vote, which required a total of 53 senators to strip her of her position, Rousseff delivered a passionate self-defense outlining how the entire impeachment process was not simply an attack on her, Brazil's first woman president and representative of the Workers' Party, but also a major blow against democracy itself in Brazil. She cited predecessors such as Juscelino Kubitschek, the visionary president behind the construction of Brazil's third and current capital, Brasília, who was nearly toppled several several times, and João Goulart, whose overthrow led to two decades of dictatorship. Her lawyer, José Eduardo Cardozo, underlined in his written defense of Rousseff that the main aim of the impeachment was not to punish Rousseff for her budget manipulations, which a Senate report found did not amount to an impeachable crime, but rather, as wiretaps released by the Folha de São Paulo made clear, to push her out in order to eventually quash the ongoing and metastasizing Lava Jato corruption investigation involving the state oil company Petrobras, construction firms, lobbyists, and a sizable number of Brazil's elected Congressional politicians, including, it must be said again, the new president Temer himself.

I will not reprise my prior post from this past May on the coup, which describes the process by which the impeachment unfolded, but what's clear is that the structures and systems of a functioning constitutional democracy were abused in Rousseff's case to expel her from office. The coup plotters harnessed the public's rage at the country's economic crises and disgust at the rampant corruption swirling around the Lava Jato scandal, the Workers' Party, and politicians in general to get rid of the main obstacle to implementing what they could not achieve electorally: a conservative, neoliberal regime. It is probably the case that had Rousseff decided to take the unethical route and protect Temer and other members of the PMDB Congressional delegation, such as Cunha, she might have continued to receive public condemnation and cratered in popularity, which fell to as low as 8% last year, but she also would still be president. When Temer officially broke with her, however, the die was cast.

What also appears clear is that this coup was poorly covered by the US media--and here I am pointing to The New York Times in particular. Though it did repeatedly point out that Rousseff had not benefited in any way from the Lava Jato corruption or and had not been accused of corruption herself, the Times did fail to note more than once that she had been exonerated in a report by the very legislative body that was voting to impeach her. In a complete flip off to critics of the flimsy basis for impeachment, Brazil's Congress has subsequently ratified into law the very budgetary "pedaling" that Rousseff, like many of her predecessors, had engaged in. Whether Temer and his allies will be able to halt the corruption probes without public unrest is unclear, but so long as he remains in power and retains the support of Brazil's powerful media conglomerates, he and the right can continue to shape the narrative and downplay, to the extent possible, the narrative.

The vote to oust Dilma Rousseff:
Blue was Yes, Gray Abstain,
Yellow Absent, and Red was No
(Image courtesy of Veja Abril)

As it stands, allegations of corruption involving the 81 members (3 per state) of the Brazilian Senate and Chamber of Deputies keep filling the news. In addition to Cunha and Temer, who is barred from running for office for eight years, four major Senate figures linked to Rousseff's ouster are under investigation. They include Senate President Renan Calheiros, formerly fourth and now third in line for the presidency, and Minas Gerais's Senator Antônio Anastasia, who prepared the impeachment vote in the Senate. In total, out of the 81 Senators, 49 are under investigation of some kind. 60% have charges of bribery, money laundering, and other crimes looming over them. Brazil's Supreme Court is investigating 24 of them. 5 face criminal charges outright. One of Temer's strongest supporters, Brazilian Senator from Minas Gerais state, Aécio Neves, the grandson of Brazil's first democratically elected post-dictatorship president, Tancredo Neves, who died shortly before he could assume office, has been named by four different people under investigation in the Lava Jato corruption case. Neves lost to Rousseff in the last presidential election, 52%-49%. Another figure who voted for her, disgraced former president of Brazil and current Senator from Alagoas state, Fernando Collor de Melo, is also under investigation because of his links to the Lava Jato corruption case.

Another deeply disturbing aspect of this episode has been the US government's tacit approval of what was clearly the overthrow of a standing government. As I had previously pointed out, the current US ambassador to Brazil had served in Paraguay when a strange, quasi-democratic coup drove out a leftist leader there. Also, as Wikileaks revealed last year, the US had been monitoring the Brazilian government's phone lines, including those of President Rousseff, as well as many of Brazil's economic officials, and, in a recent revelation that should surprise no one, new president Temer allegedly served as a US informant. Secretary of State John Kerry in particular was mostly silent as Rousseff was put on trial, and has spoken favorably of conservative the former ambassador and now Foreign Minister, José Serra, who lost to Rousseff in the 2010 presidential race and also allegedly has ties to the US government.

Although both Dilma Rousseff and her Workers' Party predecessor Lula oversaw macroeconomic policies falling within the rubric of global neoliberalism, they also expended far more than their predecessors on social programs that helped reduce poverty, increase school enrollment, and increase the size of Brazil's middle and working classes. Afro-Brazilians, who constitute a majority of Brazil's population (roughly 51%) and the majority of its poor, were especially empowered economically by the range of programs Lula and Dilma Rousseff implemented. (One need only look at the success of the medal winning Afro-Brazilian athletes like Rafaela Silva and Isaquias Queiroz, who took up sports and received support via Lula-Rousseff sponsored program.) On multiple levels, these changes were anathema to Brazil's mostly white elites. It was not merely happenstance that Temer's acting--now permanent--cabinet is and remains all male and all white (according to Brazilian standards).

As Brazil became more powerful, it also represented a beacon for other Left-leaning regimes across Latin America. Its support of Venezuela, in particular, as well as the governments in  Bolivia and Ecuador, was stalwart. By pushing Rousseff out, Temer's government will now not only be able to impose a range of neoliberal programs, ranging from privatization of state enterprises and contracting out government services to private companies, and impose government austerity overall, and slash ministries and programs as much as it pleases, popular protests be damned, but it provides a bulwark to the conservative regimes in Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Chile, and Colombia, as well as the USA, which would like to bar Venezuela from chairing Mercosur, but also which may support a coup, particularly a non-parliamentary one, in Venezuela. Having witnessed a near coup there when George W. Bush was president, I don't doubt that plans for one are sitting on someone's desk in Washington.

Before her impeachment, millions of Brazilians took to the streets to protest Rousseff's government, which was deeply unpopular, even among people who had voted for the Workers' Party. As a number of commentators have pointed out, a large portion of those participating in the anti-Rousseff rallies, which were championed by media conglomerate Globo, were middle and upper middle class Brazilians, particularly in the central and southern parts of the country, and the images of white Brazilian couples marching with a black nanny or maid behind them pushing their children in strollers have. become iconic. Yet what was less covered in the US mainstream media were the millions who also marched against Rousseff's removal and who have consistently called for the ouster of Temer ("Fora Temer") as well. So unpopular was the acting president that he was booed at the Rio Olympics Opening Ceremony. Since Wednesday, Brazilians have not taken the coup lightly, with rallies and marches underway all over the country. Given Temer's military support and the leaked wiretap suggesting collusion between some of the people seeking to impeach Dilma, members of the judiciary, and military officials, violent repression of anti-coup protesters is probably coming, especially the further we get from the media spotlight on the coup.

I think Rousseff's ouster should send a warning sign to Hillary Clinton should she win the presidency in November, which appears likely. I doubt that Brazil's administration would or could provide any material support, but the template they've established is one the GOP could replay, without need for a special prosecutor, as they required when they impeached Bill Clinton. Between the endless Benghazi investigation, which showed that Hillary Clinton was no culpable, to the private email server imbroglio, which the FBI stated did not warrant criminal charges against Clinton, to the current uproar, aided and abetted by the mainstream press, swirling around the Clinton Foundation, a GOP House could easily gin up a pretext from any of these as a means to launching a trial against Clinton. Her opponent, Donald Trump, has already spurred outright calls for Clinton to be tried and jailed, and chants along these lines occurred repeatedly at the GOP Convention in Cleveland. Over the last few years both Clinton and her boss, President Barack Obama, have backed Latin American coups and ousters, including the one in Paraguay and the 2009 Honduras coup, which she has admitted she supported. Let us hope, at least for our US democracy's sake, that the impeaching chickens do not come home to roost with the Clintons again.

Translations: Paulo Leminski

Paulo Leminski (photo Julio Covello)

It has been eons since I've posted translations; the last, I think, were several poems by Sunjata, from French. Over the last few days, as the new year rolls in, I've been reviewing old translations I'd completed but never published, and I found a trove of translated short poems by Paulo Leminski (1944-1989), whom I've featured several times on this blog. He remains a favorite of mine. My first led to a lively conversation in the comments section with Kai hingeing on the sonorities of vowel sounds in Spanish and Portuguese and the word "dezenas" (close but distinct from "dozenas"), which led me to think even more carefully not just about Leminski's work but about translating poetry in general. I find translating poetry considerably harder but more rewarding than translating most prose (though writers deeply rooted in their native languages, like Guimarães Rosa, are more difficult or even impossible to render into another language, though people still do so).

As I wrote about Leminski before--and here I'm going to be lazy and collage parts of my previous postings--he is mostly unknown in the United States, though he is acclaimed as one of the important 20th century poets in his native Brazil. (You can scan a thorough bibliographic timeline here.) A native of Curitiba, Paraná State, he was incredibly prodigious in his brief 45 years, producing "poetry, fiction, biographies, criticism, journalistic pieces, translations, children's literature, performance scores, song lyrics, and photographs" before suffering the effects of cirrhosis of the liver. As I also wrote, "He also found time to become a martial arts master!" He apparently did not sleep.

I also wrote:

A good deal of Leminski's best known poetry is brief and linguistically playful, almost defying translation; a poem like "Ali," which turns on the Portuguese word for "there" and homonyms formed through verb juxtaposition while also referring to and riffing off the name of his second wife, "Alice," loses most of its zip in English. He also like forms such as the hakai and Leminski's work also shows affinities with the Concrete work of his good friends Haroldo (1929-2003) andAugusto de Campos (1931-). One of the best sites for translations is Edson Froes's Kamiquase: p. leminski, which features translations by Michael Palmer, Chris Daniels, and others.

Here are several of those short, linguistically playful poems, all taken from Leminskianas: antologia variada, by Paulo Leminski, with the collaboration of Maria Esther Maciel; Célia Pedrosa y André Dick and with a prologue by Mario Cámara (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2005).

soprando esse bambu
só tiro
o que lhe deu o vento


breathing in this bamboo
I get only
what the wind lets through

***

mês s/ fim
vem de fora
ou de dentro
esse cheiro de jasmin?

month w/out end
it is coming from outside
or from within
this scent of jasmine?

***

a hora do tigre


um tigre
que se entigre
não é flor
que se cheire
não é tigre
que se queira
ser tigre
dura a vida
inteira


The Hour of the Tiger

a tiger
which entigers
is not a flower
it has no odor
is not a tiger
that can be desired
being tiger
lasts an entire
lifetime

***

And a slightly longer poem, about Leon and Natalia Trotsky:

El viejo León y Natalia en Coyoacán

desta vez não vai ter neve como en Petrogrado aquele dia
o céu vai estar limpo e o sol brilhando
você dormindo e eu sonhando

nem casacos nem cossacos como en Petrogrado aquele dia
apenas você nu e eu como nasci
eu dormido e você sonhando

não vai mais ter multidões gritando como en Petrogrado aquele dia
silêncio nós dois murmúrios azuis
eu e você dormindo e sonhando

nunca mais vais ter un dia como en Petrogrado aquele dia
nada como un dia indo atrás de outro vindo
você e eu sonhando e dormindo


Old Leon and Natalia in Coyoacán

this time there was going to be no snow as in Petrograd that day
the sky would be clear and the sun shining
you sleeping and I dreaming

Neither overcoats nor Cossacks like in Petrograd that day
only you and I just as I was born
Me sleeping and you dreaming

there would not be screaming multitudes as in Petrograd that day
silence we two blue murmurs
I and you asleep and dreaming

there would never be a day like those in Petrograd that day
nothing like a day departing behind another arriving
you and I in dreams and sleeping

All poems copyright © the estate of Paulo Leminski Filho, from Leminskianas: antologia variada, by Paulo Leminski, with the collaboration of Maria Esther Maciel; Célia Pedrosa y André Dick and with a prologue by Mario Cámara (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2005). All translations copyright © John Keene, 2015.

Brazil's First Black Chief Justice + PR Votes for Statehood

Brazil's new chief justice, Joaquim Barbosa

Brazil passed a milestone last month when Joaquim Barbosa, Brazil's only black current Supreme Court justice, ascended to the post of Chief Justice on November 17, 2012, becoming the first Afro-Brazilian ever to hold that post.  He is the third person of identifiable African ancestry to sit on Brazil's Supreme Court; the other two served in the early 20th century. Barbosa, who attended the University of Brasília and the Université de Paris II, and served as a visiting scholar at several US institutions (Columbia University and University of California-Los Angeles), initally assumed his Supreme Court seat in 2003 after being nominated by former president Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003. Despite the patronage of Lula, Barbosa has electrified the Brazilian populace and press through his role as the leading figure in the prosecution of the potentially worst corruption crisis in the country's history, the Mensalão scandal, which has engulfed a number of prominent members in the administration of former president Inácio Lula da Silva, and has led not only to prosecutions, but perhaps as well to the death of São Paulo State mayor, Celso Daniel of Santo André.
Barbosa's background differs little from a sizable portion of Brazil's Afro-Brazilian communities, which now account for 52% of the country's total population of 192 million people; he was born in the small town of Paracatu in Minas Gerais state and grew up in a working-class household, and after completing his studies served in various capacities for several of Brazil's governmental departments. With the retirement of his colleague Ayres Britto, also appointed in 2003 by Lula, Barbosa automatically became Acting President of the Court, but he already had been chosen to hold the seat, for a two year period, by his fellow justices in October, as part of a tradition in which the oldest justice who had not already assumed the post would do so. According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, in addition to inviting Brazil's first woman president, Dilma Rousseff, Barbosa also made a point of inviting notable Afro-Brazilians to his installation. Roberto Gurgel, Brazil's attorney general noted that "“In a society like ours with a large presence of blacks, it speaks very
well of our country, of our democracy, that for the first time a black
man becomes chief justice of the Supreme Court." Time indeed.
***

Puerto Ricans holding up their flag (File photo) 

I think I've missed the commentary on this, but I thought it significant that this past national election day, November 6, 2012, for the first time, a majority of Puerto Rican voters cast ballots in favor not of independence or continued Commonwealth status, but for statehood. So the dream of Dr. José Celso Barbosa (1857-1921), the (Afro-Rican) father of Puerto Rican statehood, has moved from background to the foreground. The plebescite involved two votes. In the first, by 54% to 46%, Puerto Rican voters rejected Commonwealth status, and in the second, 61% of voters called for statehood versus 33% for "sovereign free association" and 6% for full independence. About one-third of all the ballots, however, were left blank. Despite the vote, Congress must follow the US Constitution's provisions under Article 4 to take the steps it has for every state that has entered the Union since Vermont in 1791, and which it last did in 1959, when Hawai'i became the 50th state. There is no guarantee that the current Congress will do so.

Dr. José Celso
Barbosa (Wikipedia)

In CNN.com's article on the vote, Puerto Rico's Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock stated that the motivations behind the pro-statehood vote included the Commonwealth's ongoing economic crisis and its falling population. As of this year, 58% of Puerto Ricans live on the mainland instead of Puerto Rico's islands. With statehood, McClintock appears to suggest, might come greater economic integration and certainty for residents and businesses. Additionally, the 4 million Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico would be able to vote in national and federal elections just as the 5 million who live in the US mainland can now do. But is this what Puerto Rican voters really want? Another approach was not on the ballot, Jorge Benítez, a scholar at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, noted, citing those blank ballots and pointing out that many voters would rather that authorities review an Obama administration report that offers possible non-colonial options, an approach favored by the party that will assume the governorship.
Just a few days ago, on December 11, 2012, the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico enacted a concurrent resolution asking the Congress and President Barack Obama to respond swiftly and seriously in response to Puerto Rico's voters, thereby ending once and for all its territorial status and, like Alaska and Hawai'i, incorporating it fully into the United States and making it the 51st state. Last year President Obama became the first sitting president in 50 years to visit Puerto Rico, and he received overwhelming support from Puerto Ricans living in the 50 states, so he very well might press Congress to consider getting the process leading to statehood underway. Whether that squares with the wishes of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico is another matter. There is also the question of a possible 52nd state which would provide numerical, if not ideological balance: The District of Columbia. It too should be given full consideration by the Congress. One problem, however, would be that between the two entities, there might not be a balancing of Democratic and Republican Congressional votes, though Puerto Rico has repeatedly elected conservatives to its governorship, including the last before this most recent election. Post-colony or independent? El estado nuevo or lo mismo de siempre? 

NY Times Roundtable on Affirmative Action in Brazil

The favela of Vidigal, in Rio de Janeiro
(Photo: www.midiaindependente.org)

These days I'm trying to limit hyperlinks to the New York Times, which has now limited non-subscribers to only 10 monthly views (come on, NY Times!). If anyone had questions whether it was a newspaper geared towards people of means and their supporters, this pretty much answers it. (And I hope to post a short review of Chris Lehmann's nonfiction survey Rich People Things, which indicts the Times, very soon.) There are some simple ways around this, but I'm not going to post them, and not everyone will easily figure them out, so....

Anyways, the Times recently dedicated one of its roundtable discussions ostensibly to the topics of race (a constant tripwire for its writers, who seem incapable of mentioning the word "racism") and identity (and identification) in Brazil, titling it "Brazil's Racial Identity Challenge," though it focused on affirmative action in Brazilian universities, which is only one of the many race-related issues Brazil and most societies in the Americas, including the United States, face, an insight I would have thought would be clear as crystal given the recent Trayvon Martin murder and the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision, just the other day, to authorize strip searches of all admittees to prisons' general populations, a ruling that derived from a case originally arising out of an African-American man, Albert Florence, who police arrested and strip-searched in New Jersey because of racial profiling.

The roundtable featured 8 social scientists, authors and artists, 4 of them Brazilian, and two of them (at least) Afro-Brazilians. Unsurprisingly they didn't agree on all points, and the commentary was far too brief to address the complexity of topic of affirmative action, but all of them offered insightful comments. The comparisons to the US, particularly by the Brazilians, I thought, were especially worth thinking about.

Here are snippets from four of the commentators:

Melissa Nobles, MIT professor of political science and author of Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics

However, the [affirmative action university] quotas are working, although not without complications. Some whites have claimed to be black in order to gain entry, but these cases are relatively few. Of much greater importance is the fact that Brazil’s public universities now have sizable black, brown and poor student populations. And as some affirmative action supporters point out, the police seem to have little trouble determining who is black.

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology at the University of São Paulo

Symbolically those policies are important in showing that being black (preto or pardo) in Brazil today is no longer a source of shame but rather one of pride. Descent from Africa is openly assumed and socially recognized. The policies also demonstrate that publicly financed universities must care for the quality of the education they offer without degrading the fairness of their admission when it becomes biased by class, race or color.

Marcelo Paixão, Professor of Economics and Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Brazil could use U.S.-style affirmative action as a good practice to increase social conditions of the Afrodescendant population and other minority groups. But the U.S. and Brazil have different histories. We can't simply adopt the U.S. approach. Instead we need to understand how Americans fight against racism and disseminate racial diversity in different areas of social life.

Yvonne Maggie, a professor in the department of cultural anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; author of Guerra de Orixá and Medo do Feitiço; co-editor of Raça Como Retórica; and blogger at A Vida Como Ela Parece Ser (Life As It Seems to Be).

A Brazilian system based on group identities similar to American affirmative action would have to render separate that which is conjoined. For this to come about we would first have to establish potentially harmful policies delimiting distinct "racial" identities. This is precisely what has been happening in the last 10 years in Brazil since the first law was passed to create racial quotas for access to university. Since then, public school programs have sought to strengthen identities through courses that attempt to establish who is "black" and who is not, and, in many cases, courts have adjudicated on whether people who self-proclaim to be "black," as defined by law, are speaking the truth or lying.

I'm curious to know what Brazilians think about this discussion, so if any Brazilian readers come across this blogpost, please do post some thoughts, but thoughts from any readers are welcome.

Resurfacing + More Brown & Black Brazilians + DR to Change Racial ID Categories + Rita Indiana's "Da Po La Do"

Surfacing finally and temporarily, from the bogs or thickets or trenches, or whatever is lined with pages and pages of prose! Today was the first day where I could actually take a long, deep breath and inhale the now chilly Chicago air. Over the next few days I'll try to finish the few stubs I began over the last few weeks, on many different topics, ranging from Christian Bök's visit to the university, to the most recent gathering of the Human Micropoem at Occupy Chicago.  And I'll try to finish my posts on some other thoughts as well.

***

Brazilian actor Lázaro Ramos

I saw today, on Mediatakeout.com, of all places, a link to this BBC article announcing that in Brazil, based on 2010 census numbers, a majority of the population now defines itself as either Pardo (brown/mixed) or Preto (black), which is a remarkable milestone given that country's (like most of the hemisphere's) centuries-long history of racist-inflected racial formation.  Reggie H. sent me another link, from AtlanticCities, on the same news. Out of 190 million Brazilians, 91 million self-identified as white, 82 million as mixed race and 15 million as black. "Whites fell from 53.7% of the population in 2000 to 47.7% last year," while the number of people self-identifying as "black" rose from 6.2% to 7.6%, while the number self-identifying mixed-race people rose from 38.5% to 43.1%.  As the Atlantic's Nate Berg writes

Race campaigners welcomed the growing number of self-declared African-Brazilians, but the census also underlined how the vast social divide between Brazil's white and non-white populations persists.

The 2010 census – a massive operation which involved about 190,000 census takers visiting 58m homes – found that in major cities white inhabitants were earning about 2.4 times more than their black counterparts.

(I'm not sure what a "race campaigner" is, but consider the source.)

In Brazil, which has the largest numerical black population outside Africa, unlike the US, there was more open racial and ethnic mixing from the initial arrival of the Portuguese and other Europeans in 1500, and over subsequent decades wealth, social status and a wider array of racial classifications allowed people to escape the US's hypodescent (one-drop) rule.  Central to this system was a process of not just physiological but cultural embranqueamento (or whitening) long held sway, alongside a national ideology of Brazil as a "racial democracy," thus blunting attempts by black and brown Brazilians to counter racist and white supremacist discourse, or organize nationally around anti-racism in the ways that black people in the United States (or Haiti, during its colonial period), with its apartheid Jim Crow system, could.

Brazil has long had black and brown activists working to challenge the racism there, and as I noted this past May, one of its major 20th century figures, Abdias do Nascimento, passed away this year after a lifetime of battling the dominant overt and casual racism there.  As I wrote to some friends today, I wonder how much Brazil's national affirmative action policies, which have proved controversial but have gained acceptance, have played a role, but also how much the sustained civil rights and equality efforts by Afrobrazilians have affected self-identification. It also made me think about Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS series, Black in Latin America, which I also covered in May. He barely touched on the shifts in self-recognition, making me wonder whether when he was down there for his series, did no one apprise him of these changes, even in the absence of hard census figures?  Had he known of this shift, I wonder how different his Brazil episode might have looked. He did, however, explore the economic disparities which continue there, as they do here and elsewhere across the hemisphere.

***

This news about Brazil, and Gates's reading of that country also reminded me of his treatment of race and blackness in the Dominican Republic.  While I won't gainsay his reading overall, I felt it could have been much more nuanced, based both on my readings of works on that country by Dominicans and Dominican Americans, but also on my experiences there. One thing I remember saying to myself after having gotten to know some Dominicans in the US was that I would never go down to DR and impose American views of anything on people there (I hold this view for every country), but also I would never expect people there to view themselves as "black" in the ways that black Americans do, especially given DR's agonistic and antagonistic history with Haiti. Yet having held to this view, more than once while in DR I have learned about the multiple and complex ways in which Dominicans there understand, address, perform, and inflect the concept of blackness. It is far more complex than Gates's or the standard readings and understandings of it, which tend to be static and often seem to overlook popular conceptions and formations concerning blackness.

One issue that Gates talked about--and fascinatingly to me, he seemed to act as if this were not an active discourse among black Americans--was the presence of the indio, or "Indian/Native American" racial-ethnic category.  According to the Dominican newspaper Listín Diario, however, the DR's Central Electoral Board (JCE) has sought "to classify Dominicans as mulattoes, blacks and whites, eliminating the traditional 'Indian' category." To achieve this shift, specialists from the Organization of American States and the JCE drew up a bill to reform Electoral Law 275-97, which will be presented for approval to the general assembly of the judges of the JCE prior to sending it to Congress. On their cédulas, or ID cards, Dominicans would have three categories--"white" (blanco), "mulatto/mixed race" (mulato), and "black" (negro)--to chose from.

I think it will be interesting to see the breakdowns if and when this policy goes into effect, since it involves racial/ethnic self-identification, but I told a friend who lives down there that no matter what, I think the last category will be the smallest. I am especially curious to see what the breakdown's are among younger Dominicans (and I see this with many of the younger Dominican baseball players in the Major Leagues, as with younger writers, musicians, etc. down there).

***

Finally, speaking of DR, I was also reminded of Rita Indiana's video, for her new song "Da Pa Lo Do," that Anthony M. posted on his Monaga blog a month or so ago. Rita Indiana, a talented, out young poet, author, songwriter and musician, explores the idea of DR's border with Haiti, brotherhood and connection, and Hispaniola's insoluble roots. The video, which she made with her girlfriend and frequent collaborator Noelia Quintero, is quite beautiful, and do watch it if you can all the way to the end.



da pa lo do from Engel Leonardo on Vimeo.

Abdias do Nascimento RIP

Checking tweets before bed, I saw Tara Betts' note about and link to the New York Times obituary for Abdias do Nascimento (1914-2011, at left, photo by Bia Parreira), one of the extraordinary figures in Brazil's contemporary history. Nascimento advocate for the rights and cultural of Afro-Brazilians, and major contributor to that culture and the society.  A playwright, poet, scholar, teacher, artist, activist, and politician, Nascimento had never softened his voice in calling out Brazil's racism and countering its prevailing ideology, still dominant despite major intellectual and cultural shifts, of itself as a "racial democracy."

Among his many social, political, economic and cultural interventions were his founding of the Black Experimental Theater in Rio de Janeiro, in 1944, which became a site for the production and celebration of Afro-Brazilian dramaturgy and culture; his participation in the first Congress of Brazilian Blacks, in 1950, sponsored in part by the acting troupe, which staged one of Brazil's best known exports of the mid-century, Vinicius de Morães's Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus), which Marcel Camus adapted into the award-winning movie of the same name; and his role in the 1945 founding of the Afro-Brazilian Democratic Committee to free political prisoners held by the right-wing Vargas regime. Later he established the Ipeafro (Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Afro-brasileiros), the Institute for Afro-Brazilian Research and Study.

Nascimento spent nearly 20 years in exile after Brazil's 1964 military coup, living in the United States, where he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and in Nigeria, returning in the 1980s. Yet while in exile, he helped found the Democratic Labor Party of Brazil, and after the resumption of democracy he served as a federal deputy and senator, and as the Secretary for the Defense and Promotion of the Afro-Brazilian Populations in the State of Rio de Janeiro in during the 1991-94 term of Leonel Brizola.  As the New York Times writes, Nascimento gave one of his final interviews to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as part of Gates's Black in Latin America series on PBS, which I wrote about a few weeks back. You can watch the Brazil episode here.

A native of Franca, São Paulo, and a graduate of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies, and the Oceanography Institute, Nascimento authored many works, including Africans in Brazil: a Pan-African perspective (1997); Orixás: os deuses vivos da Africa (Orishas: the living gods of Africa in Brazil) (1995); Race and ethnicity in Latin America - African culture in Brazilian art (1994); Brazil, mixture or massacre? Essays in the genocide of a Black people (1989); Sortilege (1978); and Racial Democracy in Brazil, Myth or Reality?: A Dossier of Brazilian Racism (1977). He also founded the important journal Quilombo. If you read Portuguese, O Dia has posted an obituary here. Scholar Molefi Kete Asante wrote a tribute posted on Dialogues.

One of my great hopes was to meet Nascimento before he passed. I nevertheless have a small link to him; a few years back, I came into possession of several copies of K. Anthony Appiah's and Gates's magisterial Encyclopedia Africana, and it so turned out that a Brazilian correspondent mentioned that Nascimento might be interested in one, so I sent it to him and he brought it down to Nascimento. It was a small (but heavy) gift of tribute to an amazing figure, and I have always hoped that he had the opportunity even to flip through it once or twice, to see Aaron Myers's fine entry on him.