Nowtopia in Brazil

Just wrapping up a fantastic 12 days in Brazil which started with flight delays and lost luggage as I arrived in Sao Paulo, only to rush on to Porto Alegre with borrowed clothes for the release of the Brazilian edition of Nowtopia. The publisher, Tomo Editorial of Porto Alegre, who I didn’t really know much about before arriving, turned out to be a very well organized, intelligent, respected small publishing house there, and I am very happy and proud to be associated with them. João Carneiros and Nazareth and Krishna and the rest of the staff were wonderful, and did a great job on book production and setting up a couple of events for me to launch the book and handling sales. And we had very good results: over 200 books sold in a little over a week of its availability!

My friends at Café Bonobo hosted me and the presentation in Porto Alegre, and I had a great time trying to read the translated version of Nowtopia excerpts in Portuguese. Apparently I didn’t mangle it completely because many people told me they were very happy with my effort, even if I knew I did a pretty terrible job on pronunciation and emphasis. I was asked during the question-and-answer period about my attitude towards veganism and I suppose that left a bad taste in a lot of mouths in Porto Alegre. There are a lot of vegans among the cycling crowd there who were the natural constituency for Nowtopia, but some at least are disgusted by my alleged “hypocrisy” for not being vegan. I explained that I was a liberal on this question—people are of course free to choose what they want to do in terms of eating and ethics. But that was not an adequate answer for the neo-Calvinist vegans in the crowd, for whom their choice is the only ethical choice. I tried to explain how some of my friends who were once vegan had stopped for health reasons (in some cases) and the last person to ask me a question instead launched into a diatribe about how those friends of mine were “not failed by veganism! They failed veganism!!” Wow! Between that, and a facebook commentator by the name of Waldimir Evangelista Vegano, I don’t think there’s any response at all. They have strongly reinforced my first comment, which was that too many vegans are somewhat authoritarian about their attitudes, which seems to be rooted in a puritanical neo-Christian moralism. Not all vegans are like that, and my hosts are lovely people who do not impose their principled veganism on those around them, by contrast. In any case, I love Porto Alegre and look forward to more visits in the future.

Anyway, that was the first stop, and I saw quite a kerfluffle on facebook after I left, but I decided to let the folks there have at it without my participation. I don’t have much to offer, except I do recommend Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma for a more interesting lengthy rumination on eating and ethics than what for me is the all-too-narrow agenda of veganism.

There is a big bus strike going on in Porto Alegre, and I was asked about it by every media interviewer. My regular point in such situations is to emphasize the power the workers *could* have if they would continue to run the buses but refuse to take fares. The population would immediately be strongly in support and great solidarities would be created between workers and riders. And most likely the owners and managers would rush to settle the strike as soon as they could. Oddly, both the Sunday newspaper Zero Hora that ran a big spread on my book and visit, and the statewide television clip on TV Globo in Rio Grande do Sul, included these comments about the bus strike! Here’s a poster attached to the wall where Mona Caron passed by last year and painted a mini-mural.

Next stop: back to Sao Paulo. I stayed with old friends, saw a lot of people I’ve known for some years now, and met many new friends too. I managed to pull off my impersonation of a reader/speaker of Portuguese for a second night, and again we had a spirited discussion afterwards, minus the descent into moralism. Later in the night we passed cachaça around the table a half dozen times at a nearby restaurant before I drunkenly walked home to my friends’ house near Vila Madalena. I love Sao Paulo. It’s like New York or Mexico City: huge, chaotic, unmanageable, ultimately unknowable for the visitor, but also welcoming, exciting, mysterious, and full of promise. It’s a city I will return to again and again.

While I was in Curitiba for the Forum Mundial da Bicicleta III (next post), I enjoyed visiting the Oscar Neimayer Museum, a point of great civic pride in Curitiba (and a site for some of the Forum’s panels and parties). It’s a trippy building, and very photogenic like a lot of his works. An architect friend I was standing with said, “yeah, he makes great sculptures, but he hated people! He made them go inside his buildings!” Hah! High Modernist Hell I guess you could say.

About a dozen of us also got treated to a ride out of town to Curitiba’s “City of Industry” where there is a squatted community with strong political organizing going on. It’s called Nova Primaveira (“New Spring”) and it’s a typical Brazilian favela made of scrap lumber and corrugated metal, tapping nearby electrical lines and water supplies for basic services (without paying).

This community is quite organized though, and our hosts Bruno and Rodolfo went to great effort to help us meet some of the inhabitants, including Doña Isufina who is official leader of block F, and Chocolate (pronounced in local Portuguese as Chocolahtchee), who is a big neighborhood organizer and also an incredible craftsman. He has taken the flip-tops of aluminum cans and made extremely rugged, durable chains from them, a full curtain of which is hanging in a local gallery in town. At some point these folks, who live in view of a modern Toshiba factory (nearby are Swedish multinationals Volvo and Electrolux among others), resisted a plan to run a road down the middle of their community, refusing to allow themselves to be divided in Nova Primaveira 1 and 2. They are part of the Movimento Popular de Moradia, or the popular movement for dwelling, and they meet every Friday night, apparently routinely carrying on well into the early morning. They are focused on getting a particular apartment design to be adopted by the local officials, and are already recruiting additional families to join the community so that when the first wave gets properly housed, there will be others to keep the political movement alive (recognizing that most people, once they’ve gotten their new apartment, tend to demobilize politically). They are also seeking a “social rent” which is kind of like the U.S. Section 8 subsidy for people who can’t afford prevailing rents.

To get to this neighborhood in the far reaches of the industrial suburb we had to drive by a ridge-top develop of high-end apartment highrises in an area with no sidewalks, wide one-way streets with high-speed traffic, and a Bus Rapid Transit line running down the middle. This calls itself “Ecoville”!—you’d be hard put to find a less ecologically sensible design than this car-centric development, BRT notwithstanding. Apparently about 60% of daily trips in Curitiba are made on public transit, so the efforts of previous administrations to create a network of high speed buses were somewhat successful. That said, Curitiba is also the city in Brazil with the highest per capital car ownership, and the streets are full of barely moving traffic for hours every day.

Road widening, freeway building, airport expansion, and other infrastructure projects are underway everywhere I went, trying to get ready in the next few months for the big influx of visitors expected for the World Cup. Brazilians are getting ready for that in a variety of ways too, some planning protests that they expect to be quite large when the world’s attention is directed at Brazil during the tournament. The government is also quickly passing new laws to criminalize further various types of public protest (the same Workers’ Party government that has been so offended by U.S. NSA snooping on Brazilian internet and telephone communications). We’ll see what happens in a few months!

After the Forum wrapped up in Curitiba, we went on an amazing group bike ride, busing some 20 kilometers to the top of the Serra da Graciosa road. It was built originally in the 1870s, when Brazil was still a slave culture. The road in large stretches is made up of granite bricks and since it is in original Atlantic forest (Mata Atlantica as they call it here), it is also quite wet, often inundated by heavy rains. And that’s what happened to us on this ride, as we slowly made our way down the long descent over the slippery bricks.

But before we could make our ride, we were stopped for nearly two hours by the Brazilian Federal Police, sort of the highway patrol, but they have a checkpoint at the starting spot, and they simply would not let us go. Somehow the three or four cops who were there decided that some elaborate bureaucratic permission was needed—and missing—and thus we would not be able to ride. Our ride organizers spent a lot of time negotiating and cajoling and after an hour the cops relented a bit and let us all sign a roster with our names and ID numbers. I of course just made up a random number. Another 45 minutes went by with the cops wasting time on the computer and just being arbitrarily authoritarian and obstructionist. Finally we were allowed to proceed, and about 75 of us poured on the road.

It felt great to be in the forest, and before long we were winding down a steep incline into fog and mist, everyone grinding their brakes down to nothing. About halfway down heavy rains started, and I got so utterly soaked it was funny. I haven’t been so wet in memory.

Unfortunately my backpack is not that waterproof and some of my papers and wallet were not in plastic and got quite soaked too. Anyway, by the time we rolled out at the bottom of the hill, we still had another 15 kilometers to go on a long straight relatively flat road to get to our end point at Morretes. After another heaping Brazilian buffet, we rushed to catch our 3 pm train, a train built also in the 1880s, an incredible ride up through the dense rainforest to a bridge that is considered a remarkable engineering feat for its time. The onboard tour guide also told us the tunnels along the way had been built with only black powder, thus making progress through the dense granite cliffs very slow. Ruins along the way illustrated how vibrant this train line must have been in its heyday, a line bringing Yerba Maté from the coastal plain up over the mountains to Curitiba. Of course the train and the road were both built by slave labor in their time. Amazing to think they’re still functioning, though now purely as tourist experiences.

We had a book salon at the end of the Forum and once again we had a lot of fun, selling books like mad, while I sat signing them for all my new Brazilian friends with great pleasure, and having an amazing number of photos taken too. I loved visiting Curitiba. Of course I was being feted the whole time, and was surrounded by a lot of wonderful people who made sure I lacked nothing. Not a bad way to travel, to tell the truth! I look forward to reciprocating the hospitality for my Brazilian friends when they come to San Francisco in the future.