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The Portuguese have naturally been the largest group of immigrants, and they still come in at the rate of 15,000 a year. They are mostly laborers and farmers, servants or gardeners. Also, certain ancient city trades are theirs: old-newspaper-and-bottle-dealing and knife grinding. In the cities, a great deal of freight is pushed about on hand-carts, and this too is the prerogative of the Portuguese. The actual official name for these hand-cart men is “Donkies without Tails.” Their usual costume is wooden clogs, extra wide trousers, undershirts, and large floppy berets, and their faces are handsome, simple and stolid, compared to the often ugly, but subtle and mobile faces of Brazilians of several generations’ standing. In endless jokes the Portuguese appears as absurdly literal-minded and naive. In the 19th- and early 20th-century Brazilian theatre, he was always represented as a loudly-dressed bumpkin, given to big gold watches and heavy watch chains. In Portugal on the stage at the same time, the Brazilian was always represented as a loudly-dressed bumpkin, given to big gold watches, etc., etc.
After the abolition of slavery, European immigrants started to arrive in large numbers, going mostly to the States of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. Germans, Italians, and after 1908, Japanese all poured in. There are whole towns and villages of Germans in the south of Brazil. At present there are probably about half a million Japanese in the country, who are contributing enormously to the improvement of agriculture, particularly to fruit-growing, in the southern states. São Paulo has Japanese grocery stores, bookshops and even Geisha girls. The 6 million Italians have adapted themselves best of all, probably because the climate and working conditions are not unlike those of Italy, and Portuguese is easy for them to learn.
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The founder and hero of the Indian Protection Service was General Cândido Mariano Rondon (1865–1958). He came from Cuiabá, capital of the State of Mato Grosso, and was himself part Indian. In 1907 as a young captain, he was given the task of building a telgraph network to link Mato Grosso with Amazonas and with the outside world. This meant exploring thousands of square miles of wilderness for the first time. Rondon’s story is full of heroism and self-sacrifice. He believed that the Indians should and could be “pacified,” as opposed to one popular opinion of the day which was all for exterminating them. The motto he gave the Indian Service was “let yourself be killed if necesaary, but never kill,” and many of his lieutenants, soldiers, and workers did just that. He tried never to interfere with the Indians’ way of life. There are still shameful stories of land-greedy men who cheat or murder the Indians, and sad “publicity stunts” involving them, but Rondon set a high standard of behaviour towards primitive men. The territory of Rondônia (larger than the whole of France) is named for him.
Just before the First World War Theodore Roosevelt went on a hunting and exploring expedition with Rondon. (He found, sad to relate, that there was just as good game in South America as any ever shot in Africa.) He pays high tribute to Rondon in his book “Through the Brazilian Wilderness,” which probably brought Brazil to the attention of the average American for the first time since Dom Pedro II’s visit to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Rondon discovered fifteen major rivers, one named for Roosevelt, built over fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines, and discovered many previously unknown tribes of Indians.
But the Indians continue to be a problem. Tribes that have never seen “civilization” are still turning up, while those that have seen it are gradually dying off in disease and degradation. Sometimes the problem is a dangerous one. As this was written, the body of a young English explorer was found, pierced by seven arrows of the Caiapós’. The isolated rubber-collector or cattle-raiser of Mato Grosso or Pará, living in the atomic age, still has more to fear from arrows or blow-pipes than from bombs.
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One night on board a ship going down the muddy Amazon a young woman doctor was telling stories. She had been fifteen years with the S.E.S.P., the Serviço Especial de Saúde Pública, founded jointly by the United States and Brazil in 1942, and soon to be taken over completely by Brazil. She was twenty-three years old when she entered the S.E.S.P.; she had gone up to Santarém, then another hundred miles or so by launch, and landed with her instruments and a few books at a small village on the Rio Tapajós. The first night a group of wild, ragged men asked her to make out the death certificate of a fellow-villager whose body had just been found in the river: death by drowning. She asked to be left alone with the body and found that, although it had been in the water for some time, the man had died of a stab in the back. Quite alone, at night, knowing that the murderer or murderers must be in the threatening group of men, she had refused to sign the death warrant and ordered someone to go for the nearest police representative — half a day’s trip by motor boat, — she loved her work. She thought that the Indian Protection and the S.E.S.P. were the two best-run services in Brazil.
Small, fat, animated, dark, probably with Indian blood, she was a “modern” Brazilian woman. There are not many like this Amazonian doctor, but there are a few and the numbers are increasing.
Brazil is a man’s country. The double standard could scarcely be more so; little boys are spoilt, according to Anglo-Saxon notion; everything in the home revolves around the head of the house or the son of the family, often referred to simply as “the man.” The male, o macho, is the all-important, all-admired, principal. Women are: “the mother of my children,” “the bearer of my name,” and “religion is for Women.”
But nothing is that simple. Even if poor women trail behind the men, carrying the baby in their arms and the water-jug on their heads, even if the Women’s Pages of the papers are of an unbelievable vapidity, and even if men stay in one room at parties talking of politics & real estate and women stay in another babbling about servants and babies, things have changed a great deal since the first Portuguese carried off the Indian girls. In the old days women were scarce and were kept in harem-like seclusion, peering out at the city streets through muxarabis, or in the dark inner rooms of the old farm houses. For three hundred years they were rarely taught to read or write, and they were married off as young as twelve to neighbours, cousins, even to uncles. All the early travellers’ accounts speak of the timidity of Brazilian women and how rarely they were seen by male guests. They grew white and fat in the darkened rooms, rarely walking, swaying in hammocks, or sitting cross-legged on pillows, while their husbands, according to most accounts, made merry in the slave quarters. After several generations of that sort of life, often the men had not much enterprise, and the wife would, in reality, run the sugar- or coffee-plantation, sitting on her pillows, being fanned, sewing, but issuing a stream of orders all day long.
It is only in the last hundred years that women have been educated in Brazil, and now lower-class girls even more than boys are lucky if they get a year or two of school. Upper-class girls go to convent schools, some good, some bad. But one cannot help but feel that the nuns have too often encouraged complacency and snobbery, not noblesse oblige. In spite of general kindliness, too many upper-class women still treat their servants or social inferiors in the old 18th-century way and let their children grow up doing the same thing.
Since women were illiterate there were naturally no women writers. We can learn the woman’s side of 19th-century life from visitors like Maria Graham or the letters of the many foreign governesses. Some of the talent wasted can be guessed at. The Diary of “Helena Morley” (Alice Brant) is an authentic diary kept in Diamantina in the ’80s by a young girl, certainly a novelist manquée. Women are now prominent in Brazilian letters. Cecilia Meireles is one of Brazil’s best poets. Clarice Lispector is a short-story writer and novelist of considerable originality; and there are many others. The best known of all is Rachel de Queiroz, who at the age of eighteen wrote a short, brilliant novel about Ceará, The ’15, the year of a particularly dreadful drought. She came to Rio, wrote plays and novels, and for many years has had a page in O Cruzeiro, the biggest weekly, in which she is consistently and courageously on the right side of political and social causes. During the Vargas dictatorship, when many intellectuals were arrested or exiled, she spent six months in jail, incommunicado. In 1961 President Quadros invited her to be Minister of Education, and later an ambassador. Although she refused both positions, this was the first time in Brazil a woman had been so honored.