IAP in BRASIL! by Victor D. '27
my summer in january
While most of my friends were freezing and building igloos on MIT campus in Cambridge, I was enjoying lying on the beach in summer weather in the Southern Hemisphere as part of an MIT course: Race, Place, and Modernity in the Americas.01 which has a course number in literature, writing, women & gender studies, and urban planning! Approaching from an urbanism perspective, this course helped develop how I read cities and landscapes by learning to decode what lies beneath the immediately visible, including historical ecologies, erased communities, and the histories buried beneath our cities.
For 3 weeks, our class studied in São Paulo, by some metrics the largest city in the Western Hemisphere by population (beating out both New York and Mexico City). There’s really so much I could talk about, but here’s a snippet of what the class is about and what my life looked like here :).
Prior to arriving in Brazil, we were asked to read 2.5 books, several essays and poems, and watched a few films to prepare for our class discussions. So as I travelled between California and Mexico during break, I also lugged our course packet and handful of books. The literature primarily encompasses black and indigenous authors from the United States and Brazil, which allowed us to compare and contrast the construction of race in both societies.
Class is structured around two major components: class/discussion time in the morning and guest speakers/field trips in the afternoon. We were supposed to start at 9:00 AM and end class around 12:30 PM (though these times gradually shifted to 9:30 and 1:00 respectively over the weeks).
Most days, my roommate Peyton and I would walk about 10 minutes to the metro, ride for 3 stops, and walk 10 minutes to the Brazilian British Center for a total trip time of about 30 minutes, costing exactly 5.40 Reais per person. Unfortunately, not all stations (including the closest one to us) accept tap-to-pay and for some godforsaken reason São Paulo doesn’t allow non-residents to get a transit card (at least, as far as I can tell). So you have to go up to the ticket booth everytime and pay in cash to have the agent print a receipt with a QR code on it so you can get on the metro.
But the metro is super sleek and modern (the line we used to get to class even has platform screen doors), and I enjoy the experience of navigating the city on foot, so I felt the trade off for having my wallet slowly become heavier and heavier accumulating 10 cent coins was worth it.
This is easily one of the most intellectually stimulating, fruitful, and dynamic HASS courses I’ve taken while at MIT: the content that snakes between (among other genres) more technical critical theory readings (Djamila Ribeiro’s Where We Stand), novels (Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Itamar Vieira’s Crooked Plow), to exploratory essays and creative poems, and my classmates had illuminatory insights that really pushed me to read, write, and think differently about the material.
Furthermore, we also had an accompanying field trip for nearly every of the 14 class days. Here are some highlights + commentary:
Visit to an Indigenous Community
We visited the Jaraguá Indigenous territory on the outskirts of the São Paulo metropolis, where we got to hear about the history of the community and its fight for recognition, then walked through a segment of the territory seeing how colonization impacted the landscape there.
For example, there are remnants of what were likely 17th gold mines at the site, and although part of the forest is characterized by the native biosphere called Mata Atlântica, the rest has invasive eucalyptus planted. Like in California where I’m from, settlers planted eucalyptus because it grows quickly and they anticipated it could be used for construction materials.
Unfortunately, they tend to sap up so much water that they are unsustainable in environments with water supply pressures (such as California), and although São Paulo sits on top of vast water resources, recent droughts have placed significant pressures on the water system.
I appreciated drawing parallels between California and Brazil, especially how invasive ecologies echo histories of colonialism, with increasingly catastrophic consequences as climate change exacerbates extreme weather events like drought.
Buried histories in Sao Paulo
A cartography collective called Cartografia Negra gave us a tour of downtown Sao Paulo, telling us the Black history buried beneath the city. The famous Liberdade neighborhood, which is generally considered a historically Japanese neighborhood was largely built on an existing area which was then on the periphery of the city, largely inhabited by Black people, most of whom were displaced.
Across urban centers in Brazil, as immigrants arrived mostly from Europe and Japan, cities displaced and re-marginalized Black people in what were their neighborhoods. In the 19th century, as people began to understand germ theory and sanitation planning, social hygienism emerged as a public health/urban planning movement to “clean” cities, which largely took the form of displacing predominantly poor and Black people from city centers. A similar process occurred in the United States where urban renewal was often justified by characterizing minority neighborhoods as “slums,” mostly on account of there being a lot of minorities living there, described succinctly by James Baldwin as “Negro Removal.”
Today in Liberdade there are some cool torii gates and a bunch of Asian restaurants, and very little indication of the cleansing that occurred prior. This pattern repeats for many other ethnic neighborhoods in the city.
It reminded me of a class I took last spring (modeling pedestrian activity) where we had the opportunity to speak with a local organization offering after school childcare services (mostly for families of color) and documenting the history of East Cambridge, which historically was a black neighborhood. While the process of displacement differed, East Cambridge often isn’t thought of this way; histories both unconsciously and conciously buried.
Rio Walking Tour
Similar to above, we went on a walking tour of the Little Africa neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro with an anthropologist focusing on Black issues in Rio. In a pit with little indication marking what it is are the crumbling foundations of a dock where hundreds of thousands of Africans arrived to be sold into slavery: Valongo Wharf. In 2011, Valongo Wharf was unearthed—it’s incredible it still exists at all. After abolition, governments attempted to erase all evidence of these histories including destroying historic slave ports.
Just down the road, a family doing home renovations found a mass grave full of bones of predominantly children; Africans who died before they could be baptized were not afforded proper burials.
When walking through cities, we don’t often think about these buried and obscured histories, despite the fact that in most major North American cities as well, it is highly likely you are walking over a place of torment or mass grave, whether that be of enslaved and/or indigenous people.
Dancing!
The dancers and percussionists from Ilú Obá De Min (an African cultural collective focused on creating spaces for aquilombamento—Blackplace making) gave us a workshop! I got to play agogô, which is a bell instrument frequently seen in samba (I had been itching to play this instrument ever since I saw a jazz percussionist totally shred on one when I was in Rio last summer).
For me, it was especially impactful to see how our readings and films for that week (including Sinners) related to the music and how it becomes a practice for ancestral connection. After we tried all the different instruments, we all danced and played music together.
Museums!
Lastly, we visited a slew of museums, including the Histories of Ecologies exhibit at MASP (The São Paulo Museum of Art), the Museum of Favelas, the Afro-Brazilian Museum, and the São Paulo Bienal. For each, we were asked to write or record short reflections about pieces of art that resonated with us and themes of the course.
Outside of class, we got up to all sorts of shenanigans, including but not limited to watching the films for class together and TV shows, going to the hotel pool, nightlife activities (genuinely impressed by my classmates that could sustain more than two nights in a row of sleep deprivation), weekend trips to Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, and so, so many delicious meals.
I have many more Brazil thoughts (I didn’t even get into why I wanted to take this class!) but hopefully this was insightful to understand another side of coursework at MIT :). For me, it was impactful to revisit Brazil (I lived in Rio last summer!) and learn to understand its history and cities through a more critical lens.
- which has a course number in literature, writing, women & gender studies, and urban planning! back to text ↑