FIELD REPORT:
RIO de janeiro


PART THREE: ON THE STREET

It's hard for me to imagine it, but my first visit to Rio de Janeiro was over 50 years ago. I was a freshly minted Peace Corps Volunteer, and Rio de Janeiro was our point of arrival in Brazil.

In those days, the city was a magical place to me. A famous song, known to every Brazilian, is named “Marvelous City", and it sings the virtues of Rio. From the time that the Portuguese royal court arrived in Rio in 1808 fleeing Napoleon's armies in Europe, it has been clearly the principal city of the nation. It was the political capital. It was the economic capital. And certainly it was the cultural capital of the country.

By the time Brazil's new capital of Brasília was inaugurated in 1960, things had already begun to change. Economic power was rapidly moving to São Paulo, and Brasília marked the move of political power from Rio to Brasília ...though that transition was not immediate. Nobody wanted to leave the good life in Rio to go live in a planned city in the outback.

Rio in the 1960s was an elegant city. I remember when some Peace Corps Volunteer friends and I went to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art. Most of us came from places in America where we had not experienced the glamour that the museum represented at that time. When one of the Volunteers asked the waiter why the menu was printed in Portuguese and French, the waiter replied in a hurt tone, “Madame, this is an international restaurant!". I remember that the butter that accompanied the bread was served on a fresh lily pad.

Once we left Rio de Janeiro to move to our assigned work communities in Brazil, our standard of living dramatically changed. As Peace Corps Volunteers, we lived simply in communities that were economically poor. Our Peace Corps group dispersed across the country, but in that era in South America all the volunteers lived in deprived communities. I was in the city of Recife. At that time it was the third biggest city in Brazil, but it was connected to the rest of the country by a dirt road. No one had running water in the neighborhood where I lived, and for a while I lived in a house without electricity.

For me, and I'm sure for all the Volunteers, the sparkle of Rio was a memory that remained. When I had my one year vacation I traveled back to Rio, and got better acquainted with Copacabana. I didn't stay there, of course, because it was out of my price range, but it was inexpensive to take a bus to get there. In those days Copacabana was mostly upper-middle-class and upper-class. The streets were full of people and the shops are full of fancy goods for sale. Everyone lived a short walk from the beach, and life was partly big city and partly resort.

The luster of Copacabana has gone. I've read that much of Rio's old money is still in Copacabana, but the new money has all moved further south. What was new 50 years ago is not new any longer. Most of the hotels in Copacabana that you see in the postcard images of Rio are still fashionable and fancy, but once you get a block off of the beach the changes to the area are more visible.

Rio still holds a fascination for me. Nowadays I like to stay in an area of the city called Santa Teresa. It is on a hill not far from the old city center, but it feels like a little town in the country. It is very residential. The old wooden streetcars still connect downtown and Santa Teresa. I got acquainted with the area a number of years ago from a recommendation in the South American Handbook, and I stayed at a hotel that was very minimal (and charged a minimal price, as well) and I loved it there. There were remarkable views of the bay from the picture windows of the breakfast room. The hotel is still there, and still has the same name, but it has now been converted into one of Rio’s most luxurious and pricey places to stay. Needless to say, I don't stay there anymore, but by chance I found an excellent BnB nearby. The houses in Santa Teresa are all old and traditional with wooden shutters that really open and close, and no glass windows.

Even though industry has moved to São Paulo and the politicians and lobbyists have moved to Brasília, Rio de Janeiro (although many people in São Paulo would undoubtedly dispute this) remains Brazil's capital city of the arts.

Everywhere you look in Rio there is art. There is graffiti art on the walls. There are museums in every direction. Live music is a part of the daily scene. And, if you believe the old stereotype of the people who live in Rio, life itself is art ...it is the art of minimizing work and maximizing leisure.

In December 2018 I was in Rio for a week assisting with a University of Oklahoma project involving the department in which I teach, and the work that I was there to do allowed me to see some sides of the city to which I had not been properly exposed in the past.

Graffiti was often irritating, but some of it was drawings that were very clever, and some even rose to the level of high art, maybe even profound art. This is what I think of as "unofficial" art, but the city also has amazing amounts of "official" public art painted on buildings, and walls, and wherever space could be found. It is not possible to look around in any direction without seeing some kind of art.

The museums of the city were what really took me aback. From the exuberance of the architecture to the interactivity built into the museum exhibits, it filled me with envy to think of people living in a place that offered such close encounters with creativity and beauty. The museums were not just about passively observing beauty, they offered opportunities to enter into the scene.

Also impressive in Rio is the degree to which the history of slavery is portrayed in the city. All of the historic places involving the slave trade are available to visit, from the location where slaves were unloaded from the boats to the cemeteries where early slaves were buried. The influence of Afro Brazilian culture is very strong, and it is very alive. For example, at the location in the city where arriving slaves were unloaded from the boats, there is a weekly evening of live music and dancing. The area fills with people of every race, but the evening is a celebration of Afro Brazilian heritage.

The culture of northeastern Brazil is nowadays also well represented in Rio. When I was in Brazil in the Peace Corps I worked in a community of rural people who had migrated from the back plans to the city. Just as the United States experienced a great migration from rural areas to cities, Brazil experienced the same thing but a few decades later than we experienced it. There was later a migration from the poorer Northeast of Brazil (where I was stationed) to the industrialized South and the migrants brought with them from the Northeast the very distinctive characteristics of their regional culture. This influence is still widely seen in Rio and São Paulo and urban areas of the South.



Prof. Rodger Randle

Director, OU Center for Studies in Democracy and Culture




OU Center for Studies in Democracy and Culture



Prof. Rodger A. Randle, Director
The University of Oklahoma Tulsa
4502 East 41st Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74135
Telephone: 1-918-660-3495
Email: randle@ou.edu