ADVENTURES OF A “GRINGO” RESEARCHER IN BRAZIL IN THE 1960'S

Takeoff and Arrival in Rio My first experience with Brazil, a country that later on would evolve into a vocation and a “passion” as a university professor, researcher and writer, began very simply, characterized by my upbringing and youth in a small town in Kansas. I had won a Fulbright Grant to do research and field work for my dissertation in Brazil and defend at Saint Louis University in Missouri in the USA. The grant covered a calendar year beginning in June, 1966, and ending in 1967. The theme would be the folk-popular literature [literatura de cordel] of Brazil and its relation to Brazilian erudite literature. So it was that in June of 1966, a young man of twenty-five years of age, born and raised on a farm near a small town of 7000 persons in the center of the State of Kansas, I found myself on board a Pan American 707 jet with a Brazilian destination, specifically to Rio de Janeiro where I would begin this true “odyssey” in my life. The idea was to depart from Kansas City, Missouri, fly to New York City and then join the international flight ending in Rio de Janeiro. This would be my first commercial flight (I had only flown on one or two single-engine aircraft in my entire life). My parents drove me to the airport in Kansas City, Missouri, from the farm in Abilene, 160 miles away, where my air line ticket was supposed to be waiting for me. It wasn’t there. The people from Pan Am telephoned the Fulbright Commission in Washington, D.C. and after a few nervous minutes, printed the ticket. After a frantic and hasty goodbye to Mom and Dad, I ran though the airport, out the door to the tarmac where the huge Boeing 707 with its engines running awaited the tardy passenger. Out of breath, I climbed the steps, was directed down the aisle and plunked down into my seat. The stewardess told me to fasten my seat belt and then, half out of it, I began the adventure. You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy. The beginning of the 1960s was a period of great hope and optimism for us in the United States. The Viet Nam War had not yet grown into the bloody, tiresome sinkhole that it would become at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. It was still the age of the “New Frontier” of the John F. Kennedy era, the Peace Corps, and the great Alliance for Progress with our friends from Latin America, this even though we all were still deeply saddened by Kennedy’s assassination and death in 1963. So it was that the flight from New York to Rio carried a large contingent of young Peace Corps Volunteers on their way to duty in Brazil, and I, the young doctoral candidate found myself squeezed between two of them on this flight. This was significant because I would have many encounters with the Volunteers in the future days and months in Brazil when we would ameliorate our homesickness drinking a Brazilian draft beer [um choppe] or Brazilian “margarita” [caipirinha] and talk of the country we had left behind. But that was where the similarity would end; we had totally different objectives. There is no way that three years of graduate study of the Portuguese language and not even the courses on Brazilian Literature or Latin American Studies could prepare me for the shock of arriving in the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. I discovered right away that studying Portuguese was one thing; being and living in Brazil was quite another. I knew the basics and more of Brazilian Portuguese, but Rio frightened me! Still today I can recall the taxi ride from the international airport of Galeão on the Island of the Governor, then through the north zone of Rio (a terrible shock for the young North American) then through the city center along Avenida Rio Branco, along the beaches of Glória, Flamengo and Botafogo, passing through the tunnels and then into incredible Copacabana where at the end of this unique place on the planet I was lodged in a small, modest hotel. I spent the whole time in the taxi speaking my bookish Portuguese to the driver. There is no sensation in the world for the student of languages than that first time in the country of the language studied when you actually listen to the language spoken and realize that it wasn’t fiction, no. Brazilian Portuguese really was true! I should point out that among many of the aspects of preparation for Brazil for people of my generation was the film “Black Orpheus” [Orféu Negro] by Marcel Camus, with music by Vinicius de Morais and Luis Bonfá. When I discovered in the taxi that I could understand much, if not all, that the driver was saying, and I saw those famous scenes from the film dreamed about so many times since – it all was right in front of my eyes! It was just too much! From the small hotel in Posto 6 I could see the six kilometers of the crescent of Copacabana Beach which reminded me of an image from the poetry of the Spaniard García Lorca (I also studied Spanish in graduate school, in fact Spanish was my first language with Portuguese as a minor). Sugar Loaf was visible at the far end of the beach, and Corcovado was in the distance, high in the air to the left. If this was paradise on earth, I was there! The young man from the plains of Kansas would never be the same. Throughout this book I will talk at length about the humble characters of the “Literatura de Cordel” and their world. But my astonishment as a gringo seeing Copacabana was no less than that of the Northeastern “hillbillies” [pau de arara] in their stories in “cordel” when they arrived in Rio from a long, difficult migration and saw the same thing.