The Rio World

The newest Bostonians are turning the city into Brazil-away-from-home

by Michelle Chihara

photos by Geoffrey Kula

Snapshot one: In a crush of bodies, a promising young presidential candidate leaves a Harvard Law School auditorium. The students scrambling around him are mostly children of privilege, enrolled on Daddy's dime at Harvard, BU, MIT. But the students aren't American. They're from Brazil. The candidate is Harvard-educated Ciro Gomes, former Brazilian minister of finance and current presidential candidate, and the War Room atmosphere here has the added urgency of 23 million starving citizens and a national debt spiraling out of control 4500 miles to the south.

	The Rio World Boston de Janeiro For love of the game Brazil's Billy Graham Brazil's finishing school Dance till you drop (the other guy) A quick-and-dirty guide to local Brazilian life

Snapshot two: A group of young men is washing dishes in the kitchen of a well-known Boston restaurant and swapping scare stories about the INS. Some of the men are here on long-expired tourist visas; a few may have paid for a grueling illegal passage. Almost all have a high-school degree, and maybe a third have graduated from college. The men are various shades of "ethnic," but they're all speaking one language: Portuguese. Everyone in this kitchen is Brazilian.

Snapshot three: Urbano Santos, shop owner and father of three, stands in the doorway of his store and looks out at downtown Framingham. From his storefront on Concord Street, he can see a slew of small Brazilian businesses that in the past five or six years have turned a street with a 40 percent vacancy rate into a bustling commercial center. "We cleaned the city when we came," he says. "It was dirty and deserted, there were drugs, and we were a big part of the solution." Behind every proud banner declaring ORDEM E PROGRESSO ("Order and Progress," the Brazilian flag's motto) is a story like Santos's, in which years of hard work washing dishes or cleaning houses have finally paid off. "I came in through the back-yard door," he says, referring to a terrifying clandestine entry through Mexico that cost him $7000. "But I'll leave through the front."

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Ever wanted to visit Brazil? Stay put. Brazil is coming to you. The scenes above aren't projections; they're real. In the past 10 years, the biggest country in South America has sent a wave of people to Greater Boston that's rarely been matched in the city's history.

An oft-cited estimate by the Catholic archdiocese places the area's Brazilian population somewhere around 150,000. Community leaders think the number is probably much bigger than that -- more like a quarter million. No solid figures exist at this point, but by all counts, Greater Boston has the highest concentration of Brazilians outside of Brazil. The nonprofit business-development group Boston Advisors estimates that Brazilian businesses in Boston are already responsible for $40 million in annual sales.

And that's just during business hours. Culturally speaking, the Brazilian contribution may be more important, and even harder to quantify. Brazilians are well aware that their Carnaval sets the global standard for revelry: a nationwide bacchanal of floats, samba dancing, costumes, drumming, and song. It's the backbone of a rich artistic and cultural heritage that has seduced foreign writers from Elizabeth Bishop to John Updike, and that enraptured the American music world decades ago. In Boston now, you can now listen to Brazilian music every night of the week, from delicate bossa nova jazz at the Regattabar to pulsing Brazilian Top 40 at Venu. Venu's is one of four or five regular club nights in metro Boston where, if you dare, you can try to match the Brazilians dancing to Brazilian music. The scene is so rich that it just spawned its own newsletter, which lists dozens of events every month.

In Somerville, as many as 8000 Brazilians support Brazilian businesses in Union Square and have helped land a 3500-member Portuguese-language evangelical church on Washington Street. In Allston and Brighton, along Harvard and Cambridge Streets, the green-and-yellow colors of the Brazilian flag hang above storefronts in air scented with feijão com arroz, Brazilian rice and beans. And soon there will be more.

"We're trying to do Little Brazil, in areas where Brazilians are more concentrated," says Mauricio Cortes, the Brazilian consul general. "Like Little Italy, or Chinatown." He's currently working with Boston Advisors to site another group of Brazilian restaurants somewhere in Boston proper.

Brazilians have been around Boston in significant numbers for barely a decade. Many originally came here only to save enough money to buy land or a house back home. Now, they are claiming neighborhoods, starting businesses, organizing community groups, and having American children.

"They're starting to get assimilated into the mainstream of Boston. Their numbers are growing," says Mayor Tom Menino. "I see a community maturing."

Granted, the half-million-strong Brazilian presence in the US is not on the scale of a four-million-person potato-famine exodus -- at least, not yet. Urbano Santos has a stack of history books on his desk, and they're not about Italian or Chinese immigration. They're about James Michael Curley, the Kennedys, and other members of the last group of immigrants who came to Boston this thick and this fast.

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A couple of years ago we had a gentleman ask if he could show a soccer game in the back room on a Wednesday night," says Bob Oguyn, manager of the Kells, an Irish bar in Brighton. The gentleman was Brazilian. "Next thing you know, we're swamped with 400 people, and we had to open up the front."

Since then, the Kells has become increasingly popular with the Brazilian crowd, soccer or no. "They're big Heineken drinkers," Oguyn says. "And Chivas. Cognacs. Really expensive stuff."

It was soccer that brought Brazilians to the Kells, and it was soccer that brought Brazil to the city's attention five years ago. In the weeks leading up to the 1994 World Cup, which the Brazilian national team eventually won, thousands of Brazilians flooded the streets, from Somerville to Framingham -- waving flags, hanging out of their cars, singing along while the samba blared. Beer flowed like water from a parking lot in Allston. Boston had its first real taste of Brazilian-style celebration. And that was just the beginning.

"The Brazilian community is no longer invisible," says Teresa Sales, a sociologist who studies the Brazilian population in Boston. When Sales arrived in the US from Brazil at the beginning of her research, she walked into a store in Framingham and thought she hadn't left home. That was in 1992. Now, from Hyannis to Marlborough to Somerville to Allston/Brighton, coxinhas de galinha (the Brazilian contribution to fried cuisine, with chicken), coconut milk, manioc flour, and guaraná, a Brazilian soft drink made from an Amazonian berry, are readily available.

Day to day, it's a vanguard of Brazilian-owned businesses that's introducing the country's flavor to Boston. Virtually all Brazilian businesses are small shops, restaurants, or service outfits. Aside from a faction of well-heeled students, the majority of Brazilian residents are working in low-wage jobs, saving money, and learning English.

"Brazilians are well represented in the restaurant industry," says a spokesperson for Legal Sea Foods. "They're the backbone of our labor market." And the same could be said of the house-cleaning, house-painting, and nursing-home-attendant industries. But that profile no longer tells the whole story.

Like so many others, Gilmar Pinto started off washing dishes here. "I thought I'd stay for maybe two years," he says. That was in 1981. Now, he's co-owner of the Midwest Grill in Cambridge, a community institution.

"We're starting to stay," he says. The Midwest Grill is a traditional Brazilian churrascaria (barbecue), where grilled meat is shaved off of long metal skewers by roaming waiters. A native of the state of Minas Gerais, birthplace of more than half the Brazilian immigrants to Boston, Pinto has now voted here twice and has two American daughters. He's active in his community, and he's even given up soccer in favor of jogging. Final proof that he's become an American businessman: besides his family, the one thing he misses is the Brazilian pace of life. "I miss having time," he says. "Time to have fun, to play football, to go the beach."

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Brazilians hail from the fifth-largest country in the world and tend to distinguish themselves from other Latin Americans. They're natives of a vast, multi-ethnic (and non-Spanish-speaking) country that, not unlike the US, has always received waves of immigrants, not donated them. For many Brazilians, relocation starts out as a temporary plan and becomes permanent by default.

"João," a Brazilian friend of mine in his late 20s, is willing to speak only on condition of anonymity. Inside Tealuxe, the chichi tea bar in Harvard Square, he squints at the selection of scones, specialty teas, and tea lattes, and orders coffee. After five years in this country, the Minas Gerais native is still something of a stranger in strange land. As a runner who brings food to the table in a restaurant, he has already become accustomed to a standard of living that even as a landowner he could not rival at home. But he misses Brazil, as do most Brazilians.

They use a word for missing that doesn't really translate, saudade, which sort of combines the meanings of "missing" and "longing."

"The only thing keeping me here is the money," João says. But he's not as unhappy as all that. He admits that he has come to like some aspects of life in New England.

"Yeah, people are cold here, more closed. But people respect your privacy here," he says. "In Brazil, it's talk talk talk all the time." He adds ruefully that he has even come to like winter.

In effect, João has a serious case of what one Brazilian business owner calls "the immigrant curse," a malaise that comes of too much time spent adjusting to one social and cultural climate while missing another. João is simply no longer sure where he belongs. "If I go back, I'll know where my place is," he says, "whether it's there or here. I think that happens to a lot of people who've been here for four or five years. They miss it, but they don't know."

João's homesickness might be cured by a quick visit, but visiting is the one thing that most Brazilians here cannot do. Leave the US carrying a tourist visa that expired four and a half years ago, and you squash all hope of being allowed back. Ironically, this means that when Brazilians do manage to secure green cards, the first thing they usually do is fly home.

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Exactly why this cold, reserved New England city has attracted a Brazilian immigration wave is a complex question. After a growth rate dubbed a "miracle" in the 1970s, in the 1980s the Brazilian economy struggled with hyperinflation, an unstable currency, and raging unemployment. Mineral exports during World War II and a couple of other tenuous connections had established links between Boston and Governador Valadares, a city of 160,000 in east-central Brazil. Brazilian society tends to revolve around tight social networks, so when Brazilians go, they go where they have family and friends -- and for a lot of them, that means somewhere inside Route 495.

By now, the network is so strong that the Boston/Brazil connection has been institutionalized. Mayor Menino and Rio de Janeiro mayor Luiz Paolo Conde signed an agreement in November 1998 to promote high-tech trade and tourism between the cities. Framingham has had sister-city status with the entire state of Minas Gerais since 1996. The mayor of Rio has even invited Menino to visit that other harbor city to the south. If his schedule permits, the mayor says, "I'd love to go."

And if the Brazilian presence is just percolating up to the surface here in Boston, the exodus is a hot national story in Brazil. The Brazilian newsmagazine Época recently ran a cover story with the headline (translated from Portuguese): SUCCESS IN THE LAND OF THE DOLLAR: THE BRAZILIAN INVASION TRANSFORMS BOSTON INTO THE CAPITAL OF IMMIGRANTS.

Inside, the story continued: "Determined to amass dollars and get ahead, Brazilian immigrants in Boston work hard and turn themselves into the new emergentes of the Boston aristocracy."

The word "emergentes" refers, perhaps with a touch of irony, to Brazil's economy -- it's an "emerging market." Overall, the article paints a glowing portrait of a tough group of entrepreneurs who have made it in America. Only the story's conclusion is bittersweet: "The offspring of the first generation of immigrants will eat feijão in a can. They will carry, from early on, a passport with a blue cover. They won't be nostalgic for Carnaval, for open-air soccer matches . . . "

Sales, the sociologist whose book on Boston was just published, says the article is her country's first positive media representation of what is otherwise seen as a painful loss -- and a perplexing one. Even Brazilians aren't quite sure why certain cities in Brazil are sometimes infected with a Boston-bound fever. Governador Valadares is famous in Brazil for its Boston emigration record: 40 percent of families there are said to have at least one family member in the Boston area. Another city in southern Brazil, Criciúma, has now sent about a tenth of its population to Boston, according to the Brazilian magazine Veja. No precise numbers exist on this end, but walk onto the dance floor on a Saturday Brazilian night at the Somerville Holiday Inn, and you can't throw a rock without hitting a Criciúma native doing the samba.

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A huge percentage of the Brazilian population is "undocumented," the euphemistic term for an illegal alien under US immigration law. And that population is not exempt from the problems that other marginalized groups have faced.

"I worked for a guy at first who used other Brazilians," João says. "He found people who had just arrived, who didn't speak any English. He would say, `Oh, I'll pay you $350 a week,' and then you would get maybe $100."

Today, the Brazilian press carries reports of underground despachantes, traffickers in Brazil who charge $3000 to $7000 reais (about $1500 to $3000 at the current exchange rate) for a complete set of forged American papers.

In Brighton, police officer Joey Caesar guesses that the black-market price for a driver's license alone could be as much as $2000 at this point. "All you need is one corrupt employee," he says.

Caesar is a São Paulo native and a full-time detective who also works as a liaison with the Brazilian community. He still speaks with a soft Portuguese accent, and he says the black market is only one way that the system takes advantage of new immigrants. He's particularly concerned about what he calls the "culture shockers."

"The kids come here, they're 10, 12 years old, and they didn't have a choice. They miss home. They get picked on and they don't really blend in as easy. But they learn fast. Then they speak the language all of a sudden, and they're translating for their parents, and that undermines their [parents'] authority. The parents are working so hard all the time that they're never home anyway. And the other Brazilian kids who've been here a little longer, they pull them into these gangs."

The "culture shockers" take advantage of the marginal status that created them. "They target other Brazilians, because they think the other Brazilians won't press charges," Caesar says. Community leaders, from the consul to social workers in Somerville, are losing sleep over two 18-year-old Brazilian men who just went to the Nashua Street jail on gang-related charges.

But all things considered, in a community of thousands, two people isn't all that bad. Overall, Brazilian immigrants don't seem to be getting into much trouble. Employers rave about their hard work and honesty. Police officials speak glowingly of them as model citizens.

Sometimes, problems are just a matter of working out a few cross-cultural kinks. At a meeting in Framingham two years ago, cops sat down with community leaders to swap notes. "The officers came to learn about Brazilians," says Fernando Castro, a local business owner who was present. "They were asking us about our community. I'll tell you one thing we told them. They said Brazilians were getting out of their cars. We told them that's what you're expected to do in Brazil. And some of them said they'd been offered bribes . . . " Bribes are also, sometimes, expected by police in Brazil. "Now at least they know how we operate," Castro says. "It made their lives and our lives much easier."

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As they begin to solidify their presence in Boston, Brazilians -- like all good Americans -- are becoming seriously concerned about their image.

"Brazilians are not just samba and cerveja [beer]," snaps Heloisa Souza, the wiry and animated leader of the Brazilian Women's Group. "Brazil is Brazil."

The Grupo Mulher is a Somerville-based networking, support, and discussion group for Brazilian women. Sitting around a table at the Powderhouse Community School, group members talk about everything from housing problems (many new arrivals are stymied by Boston's astronomical rents) to baby-sitting woes and getting your husband to take out the garbage.

These women are glad to be here. But they still struggle with what one of them calls "daily culture shock."

"I'll never get accustomed to the way of life here," says Regina Peliciao. "When I pick up my kids at school, when they come out of the school they run out and they throw their arms around my neck and I kiss them and pick them up. The American kids walk over to their car, open the door, and sit down. Ploomph."

And so surfaces Brasilidade, a term coined to mean Brazilian identity. Brazilians are supremely worried about being seen as rowdy, trivial, or problematic. They resist being lumped in with other Latin and South American populations, both because it's an American reflex to merge significantly different cultures into "other," and because they sense existing discrimination against Hispanics. So while they are quick to say that Brasilidade exists, they are slow to define it. Certainly, Brasilidade is not just samba and cerveja. But especially in a city where the T closes barely past midnight and New Year's Eve happens at 7 p.m., Brasilidade at least involves samba and cerveja.

Sure enough, Catia Dovale, another young mother in the group, eventually can't help bringing samba into the discussion. "Listen to Brazilian music," she says. "Listen to samba -- it's a music of love, of passion, of sex. It's a happy music."

Dovale is understandably torn between wanting to remind America that, yes, Brazil has a high-tech sector and the urge to root her identity in a rich and textured culture. So she loves samba but has no patience for American questions such as "Have you seen a computer before?" "I used to work in a bank!" she fumes.

But ultimately, Brazilians rarely complain about the way America is treating them. Brazil itself still functions largely on the basis of personal favors, connections, and social status. America is more a nation that plays by the rules. For all America's lingering inequality and prejudice, the dollar can still be a great equalizer.

Peliciao, for instance, is a self-employed house cleaner. In Brazil that's a servant's job and would be considered shameful. Not here. "It's only other Brazilians who look at me like this," says Peliciao, looking down her nose to indicate aristocratic dismissal. "They don't understand that here, I'm a businessperson."

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One man sits at the very top of the pyramid of Brazilian businesspeople in Boston: Henrique Meirelles. Ensconced in a plush suite of offices high above Boston Harbor, Meirelles is the head of international finance for the new banking colossus Fleet Boston. Before the merger, he was president and COO of BankBoston.

Among local Brazilians, he is a minor celebrity -- a distant but real reminder of what is possible. From his lofty economic vantage point, Meirelles tends to see things in simple terms. He understands that Brazilians are affected by their experience of an American meritocracy, but says, "I think that at the end of the day, what is happening today is because the American economy is good. The [Brazilian] economic crisis brings the sense of a lack of citizenship, because the real citizenship comes when you have the opportunity to have a standard of life that is improving. Incidentally, the US is offering this today."

To Meirelles, our good fortune seems to look more like a current trend than a national destiny. And in the eyes of that other Brazilian economic thinker, presidential candidate Ciro Gomes, the United States' current hyped-up stock market seems downright untenable.

"It's a game of musical chairs," he told a rapt student audience at Harvard recently, "We shouldn't invest our capital there, because the music is going to stop, and someone's going to be left without a chair."

God forbid Bostonians should ever be left looking for a place to sit. But if we are forced, like today's Brazilians, to consider a precarious exile in another country, we might consider Brazil. Who knows? By then, samba and the martial art capoeira may have put Riverdance out of business. In any case, we already share similar cultural metaphors: America calls itself a melting pot, while Brazilian culture, specifically its musical and artistic culture, prides itself on "cannibalism" -- on a notion that Brazil can ingest and digest a myriad of influences and ideas, only to spit out something new.

Next time our fortunes turn, we might try letting ourselves be ingested by Brazil. We will, at the very least, already be familiar with it.

Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.