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.
