Die Pommern – Os Pomerano

Everyday I walk around Brazilian streets feeling like I stick out like a Garbanzo bean in a pot of chili. Brazilians pride themselves on their pop-culturally-rooted identity as a racially mixed people. “Brazilian” has almost become more of a race than a nationality, though unfortunately the racial politics of Brazil still continue to put whites at the top and blacks at the bottom of the racial food chain. Indians and people of mixed race have their own “racial capital”, as it were, in the pop culture market, though they still live below the glass ceiling that white Brazilians use as their floor. In a future post I’ll devote more analysis to the many issues of race in Brazil, or at least as best I can through this medium. For now, they’ll have to suffice as an anecdotal introduction to the following story.

The concept of who is “white” in Brazil is indeed as blurry as any definition of race here (or anywhere for that matter). But in the eyes of this descendent of Norwegians, Germans, English, and Irish (with tiny drops of Finnish and French blood), to be white in Brazil is to have Southern European ancestry: Portuguese, Italian, Spanish. To be white is to have straight dark hair and olive skin. Which makes me hyper-white. Incandescent white. When I walk down the street in Brazil, I glow. Naturally, everyone stares.

A couple weeks ago, I found streets in Brazil where for once I didn’t feel like I was wearing a scarlet F for foreigner.


In the middle of a Brazilian March, the sun rises at 5:30. By 6:30 the morning is already well underway, and the first grains of traffic are beginning to pour through the rush hour glass. At around 7:00, flat, coastal Vitória - where I had gone to stay for Semana Santa with Ricardo (I still need to tell his story!) and his family - has turned into the mountainous interior of Espírito Santo. I soon become more aware of my place in a small car passenger seat as it winds in and out of curve after curve on the sinuous mountain roads that have replaced the straight coastal highway. I am riding with Ricardo’s mom, Lígia Mallaco, to the town of Santa Maria de Jetibá. Lígia is a chronic care doctor in Vitória, but every Monday she makes the trek to Santa Maria, a town of about 33,000, to work at the local clinic there. Lígia, along with the rest of her family, is a Baptist. Her faith is very important to her, and after name, age and marital status, religion is the most important information she could glean from someone. When I told her I was Lutheran, she insisted that I join her weekly trip to Santa Maria in order to get to know the majority of the local inhabitants there: os pomeranos.

The Pommern people inhabited Pomerania, a land that once covered the northeast of Prussia and the northwest of Poland. Emigration from Pomerania began in the 1870s in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and the unification of Germany under Bismarck, as the Pommern people considered—and still consider—themselves distinctly Pommern, not Deutsch. About 4,000 Pommern left for Brazil, settling in the fertile valleys in the interior of the state of Espírito Santo, and establishing the towns of Santa Maria de Jetibá and Santa Leopoldina. A further contingent of Pommern settled much further south in the more temperate Brazilian states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Following Germany’s defeat and Poland’s thrashing in World War II, more Pommern emigrated to Brazil, as well as the U.S., Australia, and West Germany, leaving virtually any remnant of Pomerania to mere memory.

Santa Maria is only about 50 miles from Vitória. But after the two-hour drive through thick and virtually uninhabited Brazilian brush, my imagination could have fooled me into believing I’m hundreds of miles away from the urbanized coast. As I look at the faces around me, I could fool myself further that I was on another planet. Or in Germany. Or even back in Iowa, albeit on one of its hottest August days. Blonde, red, and mouse-brown hair falls over pale white faces. White and cream buildings with brown cross-latched wood frames line the streets. Street are named after such former local dignitaries as Frederico Berger and Guerlinda Nitz. Businesses lining the streets have names with more consonants than an entire Portuguese sentence.

Such names, however, are the only Pommern words to be found in written form around town. The Pommern language is strictly oral. Pommern children learn to speak it from their parents, yet learn to read, write, and speak Portuguese in the local schools. Indeed, the Pommern are not the only folk in town. The streets of Santa Maria de Jetibá—Jetibá, by the way, is the name of a local species of tree—are also filled with the Southern European and Afro-Brazilian faces one would expect to find in any Brazilian city or town. My tour guide for the day is a friend of the Mallaco family, Paula, herself a descendent of Italians and Portuguese. Her mother runs a successful beauty salon in town, and through her mother’s clientele, and just through being a social butterfly, Paula seems to know just about everyone in Santa Maria. As we walk up and down street after street, she smiles and waves hello to nearly everyone we pass, and even stops to talk to several close family friends. To most, her greeting is the standard Brazilian “tudo bem?” To those who are obviously Pommern, it’s “ales gaute?” Forgive me, I know only about 17 words in German—and I’m writing my phonetic interpretation of the Pommern greeting, since, like I said, it’s a non-written language—but I can’t help but think, isn’t ales gaute pretty close to alle gute? Ja?

The day has its traditional Brazilian breaks: lunch round midday, a small sesta afterward, a break for coffee and a snack in the late afternoon. In between, however, it’s all Santa Maria. Paula, and later her sister Polyanna, takes me around to see typical Pommern flower gardens, a local egg farm (Santa Maria produces the most eggs of anywhere else in Brazil), a small coffee farm, the local cemetery, and, of course, the very Nordic-looking Lutheran church. All Pommern are Lutheran. To convert to either Catholicism or any of the dozens of Brazilian Evangelical sects amounts to heresy, and is punishable by excommunication not only from the Lutheran Church, but also from one’s Pommern heritage. Much like Amish who become “English.”

This practice highlights perhaps the most important feature of the Pommern. Although they won’t hold back a “bom dia” or an “ales gaute” from a non-Pommern, the Pommern are by and large a reserved people who keeps its affairs occulted from the non-Pommern public. Lígia, who relies on her warm and caring personality when treating her patients, has commented on how virtually impossible it is for her to get Pommern patients to open up to her during visits. She has also cited how rampant rates of alcoholism, depression, and domestic violence further complicate the obdurate nature of most Pommern. A battered Pommern women is sadly more inclined to remain steadfast to her roots (i.e. her abusive and likely alcoholic husband) than to open up to a “foreigner” like Lígia in order to gain reprieve, lest she risk further beatings or, worse, excommunication. In unfortunately not-so-extreme cases, suicide, and often the murder-suicide of an entire family not unlike the tragedy the Iowa City community recently witnessed, becomes the solution to the above dilemma. On the morning drive out, Lígia informed me that Santa Maria de Jetibá has one of the highest suicide rates per capita in the world.

Before heading back to the local clinic to hitch a ride back with one of Lígia’s colleagues (Lígia had recently begun to stay overnight at a hotel and work at the clinic on Tuesday as well), I stand on the balcony of Paula and Polyanna’s home and take some pictures of life in Santa Maria in the remaining minutes of daylight. About 100 yards away in the street below me my eyes catch a boy rocking lazily back and forth on his bike. His blonde hair and pale skin give him away as Pommern. As I capture his soul in my camera, I can’t help but wonder if maybe he’s my 13th cousin, 4 times removed. Really, we are, all of us human beings, related, sharing a common great-times-10,000-grandmother who roamed the savannahs of East Africa with her children who were constantly looking out to the horizon and wondering what futures lay beyond. Thus, for me to feel any greater relation or closeness based on “race” to this boy below me than to any other of my umpteenth cousins around me, in Brazil or anywhere, would simply be ridiculous. Still, though I am certainly equally as closed off from his culture as any other foreigner around him, after 6 weeks of stares, of glowing like a radioactive Garbanzo bean in Brazil—and being referred to once as a “bicho goiaba”, a bright white larva that infests guava trees—in the presence of this Pommern boy I can’t help but feel a tiny bit closer to home.


But then again, for me, a white American who can go pretty much anywhere in the world that his government will let him, to lament any racial discrimination directed at me is WAY out of my league.

Cruzeiro vs. Atlético: O Clássico

***NOTE: Unfortunately, none of the images that appear on this post are mine. I didn’t have it in me to bring even my little camera into the chaos that is O Clássico. You don’t bring your babies into the middle of a war-zone.

Imagine, Iowans, that Ames and Iowa City were the same city – i.e. that ISU and UI were located in the exact same town, and that their football teams shared a stadium. Everyday you’d walk along the street not knowing if a passerby was a friend or foe. During football season, the Hawks would have their home games, and the Clones theirs, and this hypothetical city would belong to whoever’s team had such a home game on a Saturday. But at some point during the season, the two teams would have to play each other. It would in essence be a home game for both teams, and on this fateful day it would be revealed, either within the gladiator arena or in the parking lots outside, who was friend and who was foe. Imagine such a hellish world, and then multiply all the passion, the pomp and circumstance, and the slightest will to pop that jerk Clone fan in the face times 100, and you have O Clássico – The Classic – which pits Belo Horizonte’s two local soccer teams—and their fans—against each other.

100 years ago this year, the Clube Atlético Mineiro, known simply as Atlético, or by its mascot Galo (Rooster), was formed here in Belo Horizonte (Mineiro is the adjective for this state, Minas Gerais). Originally, as was the case with any soccer—who are we kidding, football—club in Brazil at the time, Galo was a team of the elite, and subsequently only hired players that likewise came from an elite pedigree. I.e., no Afro-Brazilian players need apply. In the middle part of the 20th century, smaller clubs from the interior of Minas Gerais started hiring players from poorer backgrounds, many of whom were Afro-Brazilian, and many of whom were much better than their cake-eating counterparts. These smaller teams began to beat up on prestigious urban teams like Galo, and to save face Galo decided to change tactics. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Since this time, Galo’s identity has shifted at the end of its century of existence to a team of the masses, a team of the poor, the favelados, those that live in favelas.

87 years ago this year, Galo’s rival, Cruzeiro Esporte Clube, known simply as Cruzeiro—or, to keep pace in the rhyming wars of the two teams’ songs, Zeiro—was formed by Italian entrepreneurs in Belo Horizonte. Cruzeiro has followed nearly the same path as Galo in terms of being a team of the elite in the beginning and incorporating poorer, Afro-Brazilian players near the middle of its lifetime—in fact, Brazilian national team hero-turned-has-been Ronaldo, who came from a poor family in Rio, played for Cruzeiro in the early 90s, starting at the tender age of 17. However, though today the team enjoys a following of both rich and poor—really, Galo has rich fans and poor fans alike as well—Cruzeiro has maintained, more or less, its image as a team of the elite, quite possibly in a way to preserve some uncommon ground to separate it from Galo. From an outsider’s perspective, whatever the line is that separates the identity of these two teams and their fans, it’s blurry at best.

Each team has its run-of-the-mill fans, who follow their beloved club and detest their rival, but their fan-ship is all talk. At the extremes of each side lives the vanguard of each team’s fan base. For Atlético, it’s Galoucura, a contraction between Galo and Loucura (madness), thus meaning something like “Rooster Madness,” though our Hawk’s Nest would be something semantically closer, albeit not nearly as crazy. For Cruzeiro, not surprisingly due to the club’s Italian roots, there’s the Mafia Azul, the Blue Mafia (Cruzeiro’s colors are blue and white, Galo’s black and white). These fans on the fringe have their own organizations, their own shirts and pants that have a variety of slogans (one I saw for Mafia Azul said, “You either run with us or run from us – only God can judge us”), and images of their respective mascots in battle gear (I forgot to mention that Cruzeiro’s mascot is a fox—there are a lot of shirts with the image of a fox eating a rooster). Why battle gear? These groups have more hatred for each other than the average fans, and when given the chance their members won’t hesitate to take their natural Brazilian machismo one step further and beat the piss out of their rivals until they're dead or the police come and break up the fight.


All right, that should be sufficient background for the average Gringo to understand the craziness that is football in Brazil. Now let’s get to the game itself.

So Ricardo, the kid I live with from Vitória (I still need to tell his story), is a huge Cruzeiro fan. I came here neutral, but have since been baptized by this Mafia Azul commando-in-training as a Cruzeiro fan, albeit a mild one. Two weeks ago we went to a game between Cruzeiro and one of Minas Gerais’ small interior teams, Vila Nova. It was a brilliant game; Cruzeiro played terrible until the final 15 minutes of the game, coming back from 2-1 down to win the match 3-2 on a PK with 5 minutes to go. The game mattered little, however, and thus only about 10,000 or so fans showed up to the Mineirão stadium, which can comfortably hold 80,000, though has in the past seated—or rather stood—over 100,000. After this game, Ricardo was set on going to O Clássico to make up for such a rather tranquil match. I was leery. Everyone I’d talked to about O Clássico had told me how dangerous it was, how easy it would be to get caught in the crossfire between Galoucura and Mafia Azul. In the end, however, I made up my mind to go. A friend of a friend stood in line to get our tickets, which sold out in less than 8 hours. (As a side note, the tickets are CHEAP here! Student tickets cost 7.50 Reais, about $4.50, while general admission is still a mere 15 Reais, or 9 bucks. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gary Barta!) Ricardo and I, along with the grandson of Dona Dirce, Lucas, decided to take a bus from Coração Eurarístico to Pampulha, a wealthy neighborhood on the north side of the city where the guy who bought our tickets lived, which was conveniently a 10-minute walk from the Mineirão. This was a HUGE mistake. The three of us resolved to wear nothing at all having to do with Cruzeiro, which turned out to be the best decision any of us had ever made in our lives. As soon as the bus stopped at the southern edge of downtown, about 30 Galoucura members hopped on, and almost immediately began singing their war songs—dozens of them. Fans of both teams have pretty ugly chants they shout at one another. The Hawkeye creed that “I’d rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother at Iowa State” doesn’t even come close to the dirtiness—and, admittedly, creativity—of the mud these two sides hurl at each other. One of the cleanest and most popular, which both sides use equally (as I said, it’s a war of rhymes), goes “Ei, Galo/Zeiro, vai tomar no cu!” (“Hey, Galo/Zeiro, you’re going to take it in the ass!”) During the 45-minute bus ride to Pampulha, the three of us sat still and never even thought of making eye contact. Luckily, our silence in the midst of this maelstrom didn’t give away our allegiance.

Once we arrived in Pamulha, we chilled for a bit at the ticket-buyer’s house (I missed his name) and waited for some more friends to arrive. We ended up heading off to the Mineirão in a group of 9, which included two other Americans—the first I’d met since arriving here, who ended up being missionaries and friends of a friend of the ticket-buyer. Once again, we were lucky to have worn nothing Cruzeiro, or anything blue for that matter, as the route from the ticket-buyer’s house to the Mineirão took us right through the Galo “tailgate” as it were. Droves of crazy, drunk Atlético fans were getting away with as much mayhem as they could under the constant vigilance of the omnipresent Military Police, ready to break someone’s skull upon with their batons at a moment’s notice. We made our way to the Cruzeiro side of the stadium and, after being patted down by the MP, went in to find some seats. We were in the lower deck of the stadium and amid the throngs of fans we were lucky enough to find seats that gave us a pretty decent view of the field. I wish I could’ve brought my camera in to capture the scene we walked into. The Mineirão is more or less an oval. Behind one goal sits (again, read stands) the Galo fans, behind the other those for Cruzeiro. Along the sides of the oval, taking up about 4 whole sections on either end, is an empty buffer zone, home to only the MP and their German Shepherds. Absolutely no chances are taken that could result in all out war breaking out! For a good hour before the game, each side’s fans hurled slurs at each other as their teams warmed up on the field and innocent—and ignored—pairs of Galo and Cruzeiro fans marched around the field holding banners that read “Atlético and Cruzeiro: United for Peace” and “Cruzeiro and Atlético: United to Fight Tuberculosis.” Just before the opening whistle sounded, the upper deck on each side kept with tradition and unfurled their team’s enormous flags, showing the team logo and colors. To the humiliation of Galo fans and much to the delight of Cruzeirenses, the Galo side unfurled its flag upside-down, a HUGE disgrace to their team. Our group joked about how the people responsible for this atrocity would be killed. Sadly, though I don’t know of their fate, this could very well be more than a mere joke.

The game started with Cruzeiro on the attack early, keeping Atlético on its heals for the better part of the first ten minutes. From then on, the quality of offense on both sides dropped dramatically, making the rest of the game an ugly and anticlimactic defensive struggle. The game ended a 0-0 draw, with fans more hushed and disenchanted than I had first envisioned two weeks before. We scurried out as soon as the final whistle blew to beat the crowds. We chilled at the ticket-buyer’s house for a little bit before getting a ride back home, wanting more than anything not to repeat our bus fiasco from earlier that afternoon. On the way home we passed through Praça 7 de Setembro, a downtown square where Galoucura or Mafia Azul meet up after a victory to unofficially “claim” the city. Despite the marked MP presence, the praça was virtually devoid of hostile life.

This morning at school, fans from both sides wore their team colors with pride, each side believing that their team had played less ugly than the other. As I stood chatting with friends outside in the history and geography department courtyard, I watched as a student in a Galo jersey and another in a Cruzeiro jersey were about to cross paths. In a moment of rare Brazilian sportsmanship, instead of a sneer, instead of a verbal jab, instead of merely ignoring each other, the two fans smiled and cocked their heads back, giving each other a low-five as they each walked by the other. If even for a second, and albeit in the calming shade of palm trees in a well-off university campus, all was right in the football world of BH in that moment.

Correction to a Photo Below

A friend of mine here at PUC-Minas who has been following my blog told me that I got it wrong with this photo:Yes, there is class divide in Brazil. Yes, this divide can be seen in material juxtapositions almost everywhere you look. However, this photo is not one of them. The houses on the hill above the PUC library are not part of a favela, but rather a "middle-class" neighborhood. Favela, I have learned, is not a term that can be thrown around loosely at any conglomeration of multi-colored and capriciously built houses on a hill. Just goes to show that this Gringo has a lot yet to learn. Indeed, if I've learned anything after 5 weeks in this country, it's that this is a country that's always full of surprises.

How to cross the street like a Brazilian

Every city has at least one intersection where the eternal clash between cars and pedestrians comes to a head, where each one’s determination to reach point B collides—sometimes literally—with one another. There are many such flash points in Iowa City, though none greater than the T-intersection at Iowa Ave. and Clinton St. There, airhead sorority girls and oblivious frat boys—9 out of 10 likely hailing from the Chicagoland burbs—scurrying off to class see a green light in front of them atop a bright orange don’t walk sign and somehow deduce that it is indeed their right to cross, predominantly when traversing east-west between downtown and the Pentacrest. What results is a city planner’s nightmare: traffic on Iowa Ave. gets backed up two blocks because only two cars at best can find a gap between the tide of ignorant jaywalkers in order to finally turn left or right onto Clinton St. It’s any wonder why the third car from the front, the one unable to get through, doesn’t see the white walk sign like a pedestrian sees the car’s green light and justifiably floor it onto Clinton. The problem, of course, is that pedestrians can’t kill cars.

Brazilians would find themselves right at home at the corner of Iowa and Clinton. Even in a car and bus happy city like Belo Horizonte, walk signs—while indeed ideal—are optional. All that matters when crossing the street in Brazil is timing. Rhythm comes natural to Brazilians, and thus it’s no wonder that so many Brazilians can just look at a stream of oncoming cars and know just when and how fast to hit a hole in between them, a la Frogger. Usually this timing is respectful of drivers’ right of way, though often it can be subjective. For instance, in a steadily crawling line of traffic, many a Brazilian will dart in between cars, buses and motorcycles, giving each the standard thumbs up to thank them for unwittingly—and most likely unwillingly—halting their crawl in order for him or her to cross the street.

Really, crossing the street in Brazil is a metaphor for being Brazilian. City-dwelling Brazilians are almost always on the go, and they’re better than even an “I’m wolkin’ heah!”-screaming New Yorker at fending off any impediment standing—or moving at 40 mph—between them and their point B. This culture of disregard goes for fellow pedestrians as well as moving vehicles. When getting on or off a bus along with a dozen other people, you don’t form a single-file line and politely offer to let someone who arrived within a split-second of you to your position in that single-file line to pass in front of you. Instead, you jostle shoulder-to-shoulder, bottlenecking up or down the steps of the bus so quickly that you’re in your seat or a few stops away from your stop before you realize exactly how you got into your eventual single-file position. On crowded streets and even more crowded shopping malls, when you’re about to cross paths or bump into someone, they move out of your way, you keep on truckin. Indeed, life in Brazil is a contact sport.


It’s not just with physical point B’s that Brazilians practice this culture of disregard. In fact, such a culture is at its finest when Brazilians are trying to reach some agenda that they’ve made up their mind cannot be left unfulfilled. To be Brazilian is to have a sense of malandragrem, which translates into something not so wicked as wickedness, yet not quite as innocent and childlike as mischief. To be a malandro is to have a willingness to take advantage of or in someway profit off of your fellow human being. For instance, a few days after I arrived here I mentioned to the Vice-President of the BH Rotary Club that I’d like to teach English somewhere if I could. She told me she had a friend who ran a small school that needed a teacher to start that next week. She said it was very close to where I lived and it would be really easy—hardly any real teaching would be involved, I’d just have to follow along in the book with the students, who would buy books of their own. Turns out the school is 45 minutes away by bus, and the students still haven’t bought any books, which means I have to improvise out of my teacher’s manual for each hour-and-a-half class twice a week. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing it! The point here is that to help out her friend get to his point B, the club VP softened reality a little bit.

Another example of Brazilian malandragem is piracy. Yes, just as in the U.S., piracy of CDs and DVDs is illegal. The difference is that here the law is hardly ever enforced. A block from my apartment, right in front of the PUC-Minas campus, on a main street that sees a police care drive by at least once or twice an hour, a woman has set up her shop of a vast selection of pirated CDs and DVDs. A few blocks down the road, another guy has done the same. They were there the day I arrived. They are still there. One day I walked by the female pirate with some friends from my class, and they both stopped and pawed through her wares for a few minutes. They didn’t buy anything, but they treated her business as they would any other normal business that legitimately acquired its stock. Here, the Point B of the Brazilian people is to be entertained, and they won’t let the $20-30 pricetag of a retail store stand in their way. Last week I watched the recent smash hit Brazilian film Tropa de Elite (“Elite Squad”) with Ricardo in the apartment of our sweet old nextdoor neighbor Dona Dirce. This sweet old woman, who wouldn’t harm a fly and who wouldn’t think about robbing anyone, had bought a pirated copy of the film. Ricardo later told me how much he detested this aspect of Brazilian culture, and how he believed that by undercutting the entertainment industry through this broad daylight black market, the country would be hamstrung from ever experiencing vast growth in this sector. Really, I shouldn’t be so critical. CD ripping and burning has become just as institutionalized in U.S. culture as it is here. The difference is that the average American will rip and burn to give to friends freely, and buy movies and music through either online or instore retail outlets. Only a small fringe delves into the black market to either buy or sell pirated movies or music. Here, if you want to buy Tropa de Elite, you don’t go to the video store, you go down the block and visit your friendly neighborhood pirate. Deftly dodging traffic along the way.