'Discovering' Brazil in Our Own Back Yard
The nation's largest concentration of Brazilians lives in Southern New England, and theirs is one of the region's fastest-growing yet least known communities. Wheaton College students in history professor John Bezis-Selfa's course Mundo Brasileiro: From Cabral to Cape Cod aim to answer a basic, yet complex question about this thriving and often "hidden-in-plain-view" community: Who are Brazilians?
"They are people whose ancestors may have come from Europe a century before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock," says Bezis-Selfa. "They may be descended from Portuguese settlers, German immigrants, African slaves, or from many others." Finding the answers means reading about the country's past and getting to know first-hand what contemporary life is like for Brazilians in Greater Boston. Each of Bezis-Selfa's students—mostly seniors learning about Brazil for the first time—will participate in a fundraiser to benefit the Allston-based Brazilian Immigrant Center and will organize a series of Brazilian cultural events on campus this semester. They will show Brazilian films, bring a speaker to campus (Boston-based Brazilian radio host Marlon Catao) and urge fellow Wheaton students to skip a meal, with the dining hall donating the proceeds. Ten percent of the students' grades will be based on such community-involvement activities.
Students will also individually appear as guest hosts on a weekly Brazilian music radio show Bezis-Selfa has hosted at Wheaton for three years. Each will choose several Brazilian songs, explain his or her choices in an essay, and share with the radio audience the historical and artistic significance of the musical pieces. Bezis-Selfa says student selections will offer listeners deeper insight into Brazil and go beyond the same handful of Brazilian songs with which even casual music fans are familiar.
It was a taste for Brazilian music and language that first attracted Bezis-Selfa to that country's culture. He is a San Francisco-area native whose own ethnic heritage is Latino and Greek-American. After studying Brazilian Portuguese in evening classes for three years, he first traveled to Brazil last summer and was deeply impressed. The trip convinced him to introduce his Wheaton College students to the thriving Brazilian culture in their own back yard. In September, Marcony Almeida, outreach coordinator with the Brazilian Immigrant Center, visited the Wheaton class to talk about the organization's work serving the Boston area's Brazilian community. Later students went to the center, enjoyed a lunch featuring feijoada (black bean and pork stew) and other Brazilian favorites, and explored the offerings in Brazilian stores.
During the last 20 years, roughly the age of his students, Bezis-Selfa notes, Brazilians have been rapidly entering the Northeast, especially Framingham, Marlboro, Hyannis, Somerville, Everett, Malden and Stoughton in Massachusetts, as well as Danbury, Conn., and several towns in Rhode Island. In fact, he says, Brazilians now outnumber traditional Portuguese-speakers, who typically settled in such cities as Fall River, Taunton and New Bedford over the last two centuries. "There are signs around us pointing to this surge of Brazilians in New England. Students enter the class unaware of local Brazilians, and then suddenly they see them everywhere," says Bezis-Selfa. "The most visible sign is the Brazilian flag, which every Brazilian store hangs as its calling card."
And there are plenty of Brazilians to fly their green, yellow, and blue flags. Some 30,000 to 40,000 Brazilians have left the second most populous country in the Western Hemisphere and now live legally in the United States. Bezis-Selfa estimates that the true population is perhaps five times that official number, since so many newcomers are undocumented. Where their numbers form a critical mass—in communities like Framingham—Brazilians have sometimes been met with anti-immigrant sentiment.
In addition to examining the complex factors contributing to Brazilian identity, Bezis-Selfa also hopes that as students are introduced to the history of Brazil they will gain a new vantage point from which to understand American history and national identity. By studying Brazil's experience of slavery and immigration, for example, Bezis-Selfa anticipates that his students will re-examine U.S. history. Likewise, the community-involvement component helps students explore an "alternative world," says Bezis-Selfa. He also hopes the experience might spur them to learn Portuguese and even travel to visit the country they will soon know.