Today our Portuguese class continued our presentations. I did mine today, and I think it went pretty well, although it is hard to say since we never got a rubric or syllabus. Afterwards we did some more advanced work with the future subjunctive which was pretty frustrating for most people in the class (since the whole concept is strictly Portuguese and does not really have an equivalent in Spanish or English). For lunch we ate at the street feira by the school, today has been the coldest day that we have had in São Paulo thus far and rainy, but the pastel vendors were out and having a warm savory pastry to eat really made up for the chill! After lunch Aileisha, Angelika and I walked to the Barra Funda metro/train station to make our way to Luz and the front of the Museu da Lingua Portuguesa to begin our walk through the immigrant neighborhood of Bom Retiro which was where the movie we saw yesterday was filmed. We stopped by several of the landmarks in the film, Parque da Luz, the Yiddish theater, and an old Hungarian Jewish synagogue. The neighborhood has passed though many phases of immigration, Arab, Jewish, Korean, and now Bolivian and Peruvian and it was interesting to see the physical evidence of these groups on the landscapes and names of buildings. Today, the area is known for its small clothing factories and fabric stores, and the area is where most stores in other areas of São Paulo and Brazil come to buy stock for their stores (marking up prices along the way). For example, I saw dresses and blouses in the shop windows that I have seen on Paulista for three times as much.
At the end of our walk we went to the Memorial da Resistencia de São Paulo which is partially located in the old secret police detention center where leftists and anti-government organizers were brought during the dictatorship. However, we discussed how the use of the building (only half is the memorial, the other part is a regular art museum) and the presentation of the information really reflects the Brazilian attitude towards the military period and the abuses committed under it; that it is better left forgotten. Brazil has only in the last five years set up a truth commission to really address the political violence and oppression that occurred, and this has been an unpopular move in some areas of the political arena.
The museum itself is bright open and refurbished. You feel as if you are walking into a chic apartment building or office space. The memorial is also small, with two information rooms about the building’s history and technological surveillance and another with a timeline of ‘memory’ (not history) of repression and resistance from the 1890s on wards. Then you can walk into three brightly lit and refurbished cells (with more of a boutique hostel feel) that fail to give the viewer an accurate sense of what it would be like to be living in a dark cell for months with maybe 10 other people, and to have people coming and going from interrogation and torture sessions. We also learned that due to issues of formalized/official space and the functioning military justice system (in which if a person got their case before the military courts and proved that they had been tortured they would be let go since torture was illegal in Brazil), most of the violent tortures took place across the street from the headquarters in what is today a residential apartment building.
After we left the Memorial, we walked back towards the Luz train station where most of our group left to return home, while a few of us (Andrew, Jenike, Molly, Genevieve and I) stayed to go to the Pinacoteca which is a really neat, large art museum. The museum houses a wide range of art, from historical portraits and landscapes to modern sculpture and installations all in a really neat old building. We spent about two hours wandering around the museum before it closed and saw a lot of really great work by Brazilian artists and a visiting exposition of 16th century Chinese paintings. The museum really was eclectic and had something for every type of art lover. After the museum closed our group split up and went home to warm up from the cold rain, as the museum did not have heating so we were a bit chilled!
The cell in the Memorial da Resistencia
This is a picture of arrests from the invasion of PUC by the military police for housing leftist professors and student organizations
A sculpture from the museum
A contemporary Brazilian artist
The Luz train station at night
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