CLACS Blog

Cheers from Sao Paulo, again! Today is my last day here – and Friday was my last day at the Ouvidoria. Since I came to Brazil, I’ve been researching denunciations of police corruption at the Police Ombudsman. As it usually happens in every field work, I had some minor problems that, at the end, opened some other opportunities to develop my research.
I was supposed to collect around 800 cases at the Ouvidoria and I thought I would have time to do so. Yet, due some changes at the office – the nomination of a new Chief Ombudsman and consequently the beginning of some rearrangements there – I ended up “losing” one week because they didn’t have time enough to select/separate the cases I needed to copy. When they did so, I (re)started my work, but this time, instead of being alone in a room like in the first two weeks, I worked at the attendance room (where they receive, classify and refer all denunciations). In other words, the delay gave me the opportunity to observe a little more how the institution works – thus, even though my research isn’t about the institution itself, it definitely helps me contextualize and further understand the denunciations I’m working with. For instance, in a conversation with what one could define as the” non-official chief of the attendance”, he told me: “Ouvidoria is lap”, which means, it’s a place where people can talk and complain about any kind of police misconduct; where those who feel their rights have been violated will be heard with attention and respect – maybe it’s not for grant the fact that most of those who do this work are social assistants. Even if their work isn’t effective – in the sense that the denunciations should develop into fair investigations and, whenever the case, the punishment of those convicted – the very fact that citizens have this space where they have the freedom to talk, to expose their ideas and fight for their rights is in itself a major feature of what many thinkers call Democracy. Finally, maybe it’s not for granted as well the fact that many insane people (which are called “official nuts” because they’re always the same ones) constantly call and/or go to the Ouvidoria to denounce and complain about all sorts of conspiracies against them, which poses another interesting question: how one can really know what is hallucination and what is reality? Well, I guess this would be a beautiful theme for another study…

Greetings from São Paulo.
Since I arrived here I’ve been researching and gathering material on police violence and prison rebellions as part of a larger project on the shortcomings of the Brazilian democratic regime as it exists since 1985. More specifically, I’m interested in exploring a legacy of torture and violence in the State security apparatuses inherited from the country’s military dictatorships, and the silence around this issue in Brazilian literary and cinematic production. Ultimately, I’d like to examine this symptomatic evasion in literature and film, and its subsequent displacement onto themes of gang and prison violence.

Initially, my plan had been to focus my research in the archives at NEV (Núcleo de Estudos da Violência), an institute connected to the University of São Paulo (USP). Yet as soon as I arrived and began talking to researchers and scholars, I found out about a special seminar on the thirty years of amnesty in Brazil, organized by Janaína Teles and Márcio Seligmann-Silva, which was going to discuss the amnesty law created immediately following Brazil’s last military dictatorship.

The seminar, which was organized in part to raise awareness about the issue, and partly to create pressure on the government to revisit the amnesty law, couldn’t have been more helpful or a propos of my subject. I therefore spent my first week in São Paulo accessing material in the NEV archives, and my second week attending the various round tables of the seminar. Round tables were organized around topics such as: “The International Rights of Human Rights Faced with the Impunity of Dictatorships in Latin America,” “The access to information and public archives”, “Settling accounts with the past; Truth commissions”, “Amnesty in Latin America and in the Inter-American system of human rights”, among others.

The seminar was held in the Law School of the University of São Paulo, and hosted speakers from all over Latin America, the United States, Germany and South Africa (although unfortunately the South African speaker canceled at the last minute). These included ex-political prisoners, who provided testimonies, and important personalities such as Nora Cortiñas, from the Madres de la plaza de Mayo, Peter Kornbluh, from the National Security Archive of the United States, and Pedro Nikken, ex-president of the Interamerican court of Human Rights.

Over the four days, a fruitful comparative approach was developed; a point reiterated by several speakers was that a society that doesn’t punish its torturers and criminals ultimately fosters a climate of violence and impunity. Carlos Alberto Rozanski, president of the Federal Criminal Court of La Plata, spoke of the need to condemn former State torturers, and provided Argentina as a model that Brazil could follow. In his words: “Yo creo que sin verdad no se puede haber justicia, sin justicia no se puede haber reparación, y sin reparación no se puede haber memoria”.

This raised a crucial point that I am exploring in my work on Brazilian literary and cultural production, which is an apparent absence of memory, manifested as an evasion of the theme of political and State violence. Professor Márcio Seligmann-Silva, a literary scholar and professor at UNICAMP, spoke very eloquently about this culture of forgetting in Brazil, which contaminates the cultural sphere and produces a literature of silence.

I’ll be returning to New York in a couple of days, and I look forward to examining the material I collected at NEV, and to following the leads provided in the various talks given at the amnesty seminar—a wonderful and unexpected bonus of the trip.

The other day I was walking by the library at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and noticed a series of tall, skeletal-like trees next to me. They were “spent” magueys; once the plant reaches sexual maturity it sends up a flowering stalk about the height of a small tree and then withers. It made me think more concretely about the incredible time investment that people in the pulque industry made in these plants. It can take between eight and twenty-five years for one plant to reach maturity and, if you don’t “castrate” the plant in time, it’s impossible to harvest it for agua miel (the unfermented precursor of pulque).
Since trying a “curado” pulque (flavored with tomatoes) from Xochimilco—a place that keeps coming up In the eighteenth-century records I’ve been looking at—I’ve been thinking a bit about the risks of a lost investment in a maguey in terms of the liquid itself. Pulque spoiled quickly—within a matter of days—and If you didn’t judge the market correctly, you could lose an investment measured in terms of years. I’ve found repeated mentions of colonial-era prosecutions for the adulteration of pulque through the addition of fruits, roots, or herbs. Of course, most of these records emphasize that the purpose of said alteration is to make a stronger beverage, but I wonder if this doesn’t reflect more the prejudices of colonial record-makers than the realities on the ground. Mixing juices and other materials with soured pulque (in the period I study, referred to as tepache) would result in a stronger drink, but mainly because the pulque itself becomes stronger. The question becomes, is the adulteration of pulque mainly a way of disguising the flavor of soured pulque in order to sell it? And how does one find the answer to this?
Furthermore, the desiccated plant remains were, at the time of the Conquest, a form of fuel for Tenochtitlán. Looking at the spent plant, I could certainly see why… but what happened to them during the colonial period? I’ve been spending some time with the AGN search engines trying to find this info…

The 2009/2010 school year has begun at NYU and there are many exciting things happening at CLACS this semester. Ada Ferrer, who was previously a CLACS affiliated faculty, is now the Director of the center for a three year term. Students have returned from summer research trips and there is a new incoming class of students who you can read about at, http://clacs.as.nyu.edu/object/clacs.people.gradstudents

Unique to this semester is the presence of James Dunkerley who is currently the Andrés Bello Chair in Latin American Cultures and Civilizations at the King Juan Carlos Center. Dunkerley will be giving a lecture on November 17 titled, “Andrés Bello and the Role of Scholarship in Nation-Building” and is teaching the course “Ideas and Power in Spanish America: 1512 to “Now.””

CLACS is also very excited to present the Fall 2009 Research Colloquium Series titled, “Cuba: History, Culture and Revolution.” The Series will host nine scholars from the United States, Spain and Cuba and the events will take place on Monday evenings from 5-7pm in the KJCC Auditorium following the graduate course of the same name, which is taught by Ada Ferrer. Details for the Research Colloquium Series can be found here, http://clacs.as.nyu.edu/object/clacs.events.colloquium