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.