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South America » Brazil » São Paulo » São Paulo
September 1st 2005
Published: September 13th 2005
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São Paolo: Social Observations Part I: The Museum. (NB this entry is long)

Bruno’s anxiety over his VISA interview had been growing steadily over the month of August but reached its peak in São Paolo. He spent a lot of time staring off into the distance and even said at times that he wasn’t hungry (!!!!). Yes, a true rarity for the Brumaster.

So what could we do to distract him? We went to a museum about São Paolo and Brazil in the nineteenth century. It’s housed in a building that was supposed to replicate the palace at Versailles, but they ran out of funds and instead ended up with an abbreviated version. The model that they had constructed, which took the two years initially allotted for the construction of the actual building, is on display inside. The dream in miniature that just didn’t quite make it to reality.

The musuem is more educational in terms of what Brazil wants to be than what it is or was. It is mostly a collection of objects cataloging upper middle class life: furniture, clothes, weapons, litters, money, newspaper articles. Dramatic paintings of the Independence movement (NB: “Independence” for Brazil meant that the Portuguese prince declared himself Emperor of Brazil - way to throw off the shackles of colonial oppression) take up considerable wall space, along with equally dramatic paintings of the Portuguese conquistadors landing among the natives and bringing Catholicism to their poor heathen souls.

Those paintings were the only hint that there were a people inhabiting present-day Brazil before the Portuguese arrived, and there is nothing in the museum about their effect on present day Brazil. The musuem also nearly forgot, ahem, slavery - there was one small painting of African slaves in the gold mines of Minas Gerais in the basement, opposite two vast murals depicting the Portuguese court. The only other mention of Africans we saw was an illustration depicting blacks on the beaches of Rio, forced to stay there at night in the hopes that they would breathe in the germs and thus protect the white population from catching cholera, tuberculosis, and other diseases endemic in the burgeoning metropolis. Sick, sick, sick.

Amidst all of these upper middle class trappings there was no mention of the source fo their wealth, how it was the African and indigineous populations that supplied the labor on the vast coffee, sugar, and rubber plantations that made it possible for Senhora to order chairs from Paris. I found it strange that a museum dedicated to the nineteenth century could ignore 1888, the year slavery was abolished (the last country in the world to do so, by the way.) And this in the country with, by some counts, more slaves than any other colony.

When I left the museum, I felt that I had been in another world. The contents, the container, and the manicured gardens around it seemed to have so little bearing on the life I saw around me, and the Brazil I had encountered in the previous three weeks. The musuem in that sense is a metaphor for Brazil; trying to be Europe but not quite cutting it. There is always an official story, but it is never accurate and comes across as self-conscious and pathetic. Expecially disappointing because the real story (whatever that means) is so much more engaging and vibrant.



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