calling myself gringo

a couple months ago, i met another first-worlder at a combination music parade and human rights protest in maré, a complex of favelas in rio’s north zone that’s currently being occupied by thousands of federal army troops along with the state police.  he seemed nice, and given the setting, i figured he would have a pretty decent sense of what was going on around him.

when i called myself a gringo, though, he gave me a vaguely familiar wincing look, and started to explain that he couldn’t stand that word.  he told me in good (albeit whiney) portuguese that he found the word gringo to be offensive, that it reduced him to a symbol instead of an individual, that it didn’t take his personality, his values, or his actions into account.

i’ll admit that when i first came to brasil after my sophomore year of college, the whole gringo thing threw me off, too.  i didn’t want to be defined by a word that separated from the people around me.  having finally made it past high school, i wasn’t eager to take on a label that implied not only a permanent outsider status, but also a heaping dose of awkwardness, a gawky, sunburned, clueless inability to understand jokes told in local cadences, or to follow people’s footwork on dance floors or city sidewalks.  i wanted to be seen for who i was, not as a caricature.

this was in 2002, and the us government had already made invading iraq an inevitable conclusion, so the first question anyone asked me when they found out i was american was: “did you vote for bush?”  i was pissed the first few times i heard it:  here i was, interning with a human rights-centered theatre group, volunteering in favelas, and swooning over lula at his campaign rallies.  i grew up in cambridge, for fuck’s sake – how could anyone think i would even dream of voting for bush?

i can’t remember if someone explained it to me or if i had enough sense to figure it out for myself:  people were asking me that in order to find out who i really was, to be able to move past the image of trigger-happy american power that’s been a lot more than a caricature in brasil, latin america, and most of the rest of the planet, and at that moment was switching back into high gear.

calling myself gringo means that i’m aware of that and capable of taking it seriously.  it’s a small step, but it means i know that, although it might not personally be my fault that knee-jerk violence is one of the main images people hold of the united states, it sure as hell isn’t their fault.  and even though i grew up learning about victor jara and desaparecidos on arlo guthrie and holly near albums, i also grew up with a us passport, taking advantages of all the spoils that the first world had to offer me.  the word gringo carries within it some of the weight of all that history and those expectations, and it’s exactly because of that weight that it also carries with it a chance to challenge that history.

there’s another point, maybe less dramatic but also important:  gringo is a commonly used word in brasilian portuguese, and it really isn’t my job to teach brasilians how to use their native language.  learning how to navigate in that language, and to continue to work at it – to hone in more on its nuances and learn not only how to express myself and and be myself in it is an important and never-ending process.  the title of this blog, “gringo que fala,” means “gringo who speaks,” and that’s as much about having a handle on portuguese as it is about trying to speak truth to power. (along those lines, there’s still another point:  the word gringo isn’t especially pejorative in brasil, and it’s often used to describe all foreigners universally.  this understandably pisses off spanish-speaking latin americans, who use the word more specifically and with more of an immediately felt sharpness).

calling myself gringo is not meant to be an apology for the past, or even for current atrocities; but i hope it shows that i’m aware of a whole long and violent history that has created a gap between me and the people i live, work, study, and create with on a daily basis.  i also hope it shows that i’m learning, and listening, and doing what i can to help bring our experiences closer.  calling myself gringo means that i recognize that i’m implicated in structures that have been around for a lot longer and had a much bigger and more physical impact than i have.  it means that i understand why people want to know whether i voted for bush, or what i think about the 1968 declaration of martial law in brasil, or about augusto pinochet, or drone warfare, and that i understand why, once in a while, some people won’t be able to move beyond those facts even after i’ve repudiated them.  it goes back to the unspoken cycles of violence i mentioned in my previous post:  there’s a whole lot more going on in any given interaction than just my delicate first-world feelings, or my first-world empathy, or even my most well-intentioned actions.  if i really want to be seen as an individual here, the first step is recognizing everything that works to strip the individuality from the people around me, and that – whether i like it or not – tends to link back to a whole long line of gringos.