Modo de vida, imaginário social e cotidiano

The dissertation explores cultural representations of the new Latin American city that has emerged since the waning of national-popular development and the advent of neoliberal globalization. The discussion focuses on Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City in the 1980s and 1990s. The main argument is that, with the withering of the modern city and its narratives, new (post-civil and post-national) subjectivities have emerged, and that cultural cartographies of the city can help us to better grasp these new configurations. The first chapter, "A Totality Made of Fragments," examines the construction of the image of the city in Modernist culture as an allegory for the totalizing and integrating impulse of the nation in the work of Fuentes, Sábato, and Vargas Llosa. The second chapter, "Reading the City Like a Text," explores the relationship between walking in the city and writing about the city in Rubem Fonseca's and Clarice Lispector's texts on Rio de Janeiro, focusing on these texts' critique of literature and literacy. The third chapter, "Public Spaces and Urban Geographies of Civility," engages uses and figurations of public spaces as sites for the expression of civil society. By reference to Poniatowska's chronicle-testimonio about the student massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968 and Eltit's novel about Santiago de Chile under dictatorship in the 1980s, this chapter offers a critique of the normative ideologies of civil society and public space. The fourth chapter, "Homosexual Desire and Urban Territories," examines a novel by Zapata (1979) and an ethnographic study by Perlongher (1987) in order to map out how cartographies of queer desire in Mexico City and São Paulo disrupt public space's drive towards closure and universality. The fifth and final chapter, "Deterritorialization and the Limits of the City," concentrates on neoliberal globalization in the 1990s in Buenos Aires. It combines analyses of cultural theory, fiction, and film in order to show the emergence of new, post-national subjectivities that are reshaping the city in ways that depart radically from Modernism's drive towards integration, citizenship, and national culture.

In the 1950s Brazil experienced transformative changes including the nascent emergence of democratic elections after 15 years of repressive dictatorship, the suicide of its President and the construction of a new federal capital city in Brasília. Optimism and a forward-looking spirit, summarized in the 1956 Presidential motto, "50 years of progress in 5," suffused all spheres of the national experience. The modernization of Brazil would translate into the end of underdevelopment and a structure of dependency put in place with colonialism. My dissertation explores this historical moment through the Rio de Janeiro-based geometric abstract art movement, Neoconcretism. I study how this group of artists intersected with and contributed to the growing network of modernizing institutions that held the promise of a Brazil finally "catching up." Influenced by early twentieth century European avant-garde art styles, Neoconcrete art brought together an art practice and theory based in expressiveness, intersubjectivity and sensorial experience, which continues to influence contemporary Latin American art production today. In this project I argue that Neoconcretism was a transformative cultural force that shaped Brazilian modernism and national culture. Neoconcrete artists and aesthetic ideals contributed to many areas of national production including literature, the newspaper industry, education, and architecture and urbanism. Departing from scholarship that examines Neoconcretism within the internationalization of Latin American art, I am especially attentive to the influence of local discourses on its stylistic and intellectual formation. Given the group's collaborative nature, I use an interdisciplinary and cultural studies methodology to examine the artworks and writings of the group members in relationship to the national project of modernization and nation-building developed by the governmental sectors, private institutions and the intellectual and cultural classes. My dissertation underscores the way culture operated as an essential political tool, distinct from traditional genres such as propaganda, in the production of the "national". The collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the Neoconcretists structures the organization of the dissertation and each chapter is conceived as a dialogical relationship between members of the group and Brazilian society. Chapter one establishes the broader Brazilian concrete project, and positions the emergence of abstract art in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as directly tied to the developing political and social climate proposing the construction of a "new" Brazil. In chapter two I argue for the equally generative roles of word and image in the production of meaning in Neoconcretism through an analysis of Neoconcrete poetry and the two main theoretical texts that defined Neoconcretism. I demonstrate how the movement was marked by positions of anti-progress and anti-rationalism that challenged the dominant political ideology. Chapter three turns to the Brazilian newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, which served as a place of employment for Neoconcrete artists, as well as a place of publication and circulation of Neoconcrete artworks and writings. I argue for the paper's generative role as a site of publicity for the group and its significance as a place of translation between high art and popular culture. Chapter four puts Neoconcretism and the construction of Brasília into direct engagement to argue for the influence of the national architectural boom on the artistic production of the Neoconcrete artists, but also to demonstrate how their works performed a critique of the state-sponsored project of modernization. In the dissertation I argue that the study of Neoconcretism unsettles any single narrative of Brazilian modernism and provides a lens to re-evaluate Brazil's "Years of Confidence" and the making of the nation through industrialization.

This study is about thirty migrant Afro-Brazilian families in Sao Paulo and New York and the kin and social networks within which they conduct their lives. It focuses on a process that has received little attention from social scientists analyzing the kinship patterns of any migrant urban population: namely, the development and maintenance of domestic groups as well as their change over time. Since urban researchers investigating the effects of mass migration on the ethnics or nationals who make up this migrant population have tended to view this process only in terms of polarity, as either "destructive" or "positive", and to overlook behavioral variability within migrant groups and change as well, my major objective in this study is to present a more balanced account of Afro-Brazilian families: to document stable as well as "chaotic" periods in a family's life cycle, to show behavioral variability as well as conformity, and explain social change. Thus, the dissertation spans several decades in the life cycle of Afro-Brazilian families. It begins in Casa Verde, the research site in Brazil, explaining how this area developed within the context of urbanization in Sao Paulo. Later, it is centered around married couples, the progenitors of the family explaining how they came together and made their way to Sao Paulo. It focuses on the structure of these families during the reproductive years, defining the conceptual boundaries of the family or kin group, and depicts the structural forms characteristic of domestic groups in Casa Verde. Then, focusing on organizational aspects of domestic life, it explains how social relationships are structured by analyzing marriage and the range of domestic relationships found in the community. Lastly, in the concluding chapters of the dissertation, turning to the family during its dispersal and renewal phases, I show how families are restructured when adult offspring leave home and migrate to other areas in Brazil or the United States.

In this thesis I examine the divide between graffiti writing and graffiti art in São Paulo, Brazil, arguing that privileging graffiti art perpetuates the marginalization of graffiti writers, especially in the context of São Paulo positioning itself as a 'creative city.' The actions of graffiti practitioners can be connected to those of artists during the military dictatorship (1964-1985) in Brazil, as interventions in the city and society. The contemporary graffiti scene in São Paulo, as is also observed in other major metropolises, is an unequal one: graffiti art is praised while graffiti writing is criminalized.

This dissertation documents the ways in which communication theory and mass media influenced artists' turn away from object-oriented art to more experience- and idea-based art practices in Brazil during the 1970s. Spanning the most repressive decade of the Brazilian military dictatorship, this investigation chronicles the artists' turn to conceptual strategies that included poetry, their bodies and new media, within the unique historical specificities of the Brazilian context. Focusing on artworks produced in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, this study includes works by Sonia Andrade, Arthur Barrio, Paulo Bruscky, Analívia Cordeiro, Fernando Novaes Correia, Anna Bella Geiger, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino, Antonio Manuel, Cildo Meireles, Geraldo Anhaia Mello, Leticia Parente, Julio Plaza, and Regina Silveira. Influenced by information and media theories, particularly as expounded by Marshall McLuhan and Décio Pignatari, Brazilian artists sought to encourage an awareness of the structures shaping knowledge as well as those maintaining political power and class inequality. Within a repressive system marked by censorship, the visual arts provided a platform to voice defiance to existent aesthetic, political and social boundaries and fomented unexpected pockets of freedom. This study eschews the biographical model of narrating art history and privileges the artwork and its attendant social, aesthetic and political context. The narrative unfolds by establishing the circumstances around which the selected artworks emerge and in which they interact and circulate. Chapter one serves as an introduction to the historical and artistic concerns of the 1960s and, in particular, describes the conditions in which the Brazilian avant-garde emerged. Chapters two to four clarify how the encounter between art and information can intervene in established media circuits. Brazilian artists' invocation of bodily, electronic and graphic interventions not only challenged restrictions put in place by censorship sanctions but also inaugurated new aesthetic possibilities for Brazilian art.

The subject of this research is how women feel about their children--how pleasurable and how burdensome they perceive their children to be. Although this is a relatively unstudied topic, a woman's perceptions of her children may affect her own well-being and that of her children. Therefore, it merits inquiry. The research is based on two surveys of women with children living at home--318 mothers from the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil and 549 women from the Chicago metropolitan area of the United States. The research model proposed that a woman's social class and cultural affiliation affect her perceptions of her children and her own well-being by regulating the objective conditions of her life and her perceptions of those conditions. The model was estimated using hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The findings suggest that cultural values, beliefs, and traditions influenced the Brazilian and U.S. women's perceptions of their children, especially by providing meaning to their social relations. Social class differences were interpretable only within the overall cultural framework. There was no evidence that a Brazilian woman's well-being was affected by her attitudes toward her children. Findings about Brazilian women's well-being may not be applicable to U.S. women, however, because of differences between the two countries in the meaning of social relations.

The purpose of this study was: (1) to describe the present ethnic situation of the Italian immigrants who participate in some type of voluntary ethnic association in the city of S ao Paulo, Brazil; and (2) to analyze the expressive culture used in the manifestation of their Italianita, the Italian ethnic identity. The basic methodology used was an ethnographic study carried on during the months of October of 1985 to February of 1986, consisting of interviews, life-histories, questionnaires, and participant-observations of the events held by the Italian community. In addition, an extensive review of literature covered the historical context of immigration in Brazil. The community was described in terms of its social and political organizations, i.e., how it operates within the pluralistic society of S ao Paulo. To function, the community supports committees and associations; has a specific clientele, i.e., Italian immigrants from the post-World War II period, who present a strong feeling of Italianita, albeit being assimilated into Brazilian culture; and presents dance and music as major factors of its vernacular expression. However, no folk dance was found as significant for the community, except for the Tarantella, which has become a symbol of Italianita when in fact it may be appealing for its characteristic rhythm. Folk music, on the other hand, was found as the strongest element to the expression of this community, mainly for the traditional group. In fact, the community is divided into two factions, the traditional and the modern, many times conflictive in their ideals. The main conclusions were that Italians are not unique as an ethnic group, i.e., they follow the same attitudinal and behavioral patterns as do other ethnic groups; ethnicity is individual and situational and consequently the degree of assimilation should not correlate with the degree of ethnicity, and both should not correlate with participation in ethnic associations. Although not manipulative outside the group's boundaries, ethnicity is manipulated inside the groups, mainly by the prominenti, as a means of achieving power and control. Because of the strong assimilational phenomenon that occurs in S ao Paulo, the future tendency of the Italian community is to disappear unless a subsequent generation takes charge in reviving this particular culture.

Despite the popular adage that blacks do not vote for blacks, using original survey data, I find that Afro-Brazilians in Salvador and São Paulo who identify as black (preto or negro) vote for black politicians more than Afro-Brazilians who claim lighter colors. This is a significant finding because it means that Afro-Brazilians do not choose identities idly. Rather, identifying as black is a form of black consciousness. In Salvador, the most cited black (negro) politician was President Lula and in Sao Paulo, it was Celso Pitta. Racialization is the process of attaching meaning to places or people. Efforts by black movement activists or organizations that promote positive images of blackness and Africaness can lead to positive racialization. Most Afro-Brazilians who named Lula as a black politician, think positively of black men. These Afro-Brazilians have the ability to positively racialize prestigious occupations as places blacks can occupy. Afro-Brazilians who named Lula are younger and middle-aged. Most Afro-Brazilians who identified Lula as black self-identify as negro. It is likely that negros identified Lula because of his support of racial policies. My hypothesis is that in cities with middle-class Afro-Brazilians, leftist politicians who identify as black (negro) or are identified by others as politically black, will use racial cues. I am correct in some cases and not in others. Some politicians in conservative parties use racial appeals. Others were not identified as black. In Salvador and São Paulo, politicians who use explicit racial appeals discuss racism and racial policies. Politicians who use implicit racial cues refer to culture. In Salvador, they usually refer to Candomblé, an African-derived religion. A traditional notion of Afro-Brazilian culture is used in Salvador. Modern cultural notions of blackness such as Hip Hop are used in São Paulo.

The phenomenon of children living in the streets--street children--is international and has led to the development of an occupation known by several terms: street youthwork, detached youthwork, street social education or street education (in Latin American Portuguese/Spanish terminology, "educacao de rua"/"educacion de calle," or "educacion social de rua/educacion social de calle"). Street social educators have an impact on street children's lives and on the communities from whence they come. Their potential for basic street level group and neighborhood organizing has been shown in Brazil. Street youthwork represents an emergent occupation oriented to working with the poor in their own self-interest on issues related to their everyday lives on the street and towards their possibilities for economic mobility. This first study on the emergence of street social education in Sao Paulo, Brazil examines street youthworkers' everyday practices, and includes street youthworkers' background, beliefs, knowledge and skills; i.e., how they do street work. Given the magnitude of the international problem of street youth, street youthwork is a critical partial response. This descriptive, qualitative study on the nature and realities of street youthwork is based in Brazilian history and on semi-structured interviews with Brazilian youthworkers, children and other adults; examination of personal documents and public data; and participant observation. Brazilian street youthwork is a dynamic, phenomenologically and politically oriented pedagogy, and as such, offers a direct challenge to dominant philosophies and practices in formal and non-formal education with street youth. The findings are of interest to those in youth development, youth services, youthwork, child/youth care and child/youth policy.