Brazil
The Largest Portuguese-Speaking Country
Brazil has everything. Its teeming rivers and mysterious jungles are the
last major frontier on earth. Its thunderous cataracts dwarf Niagara and
the falls of the Zambezi. Its 3000-mile Atlantic coastline has enough white
sand beaches to accommodate all the world's bathers. Its burgeoning cities
and pristine capital are for those who savor the ultimate in modernity. By
contrast, its baroque hill towns rival Southern Europe's. Those of its
painters and sculptors who do not turn abroad for international chic are
inspired by the riches of a unique culture. Composers and poets reflect the
rhythms and language of the people, thereby drawing sustenance from the
soil as creators among us have not for generations.
Above all there is Brazil's incomparable "racial mix," a phenomenon without
precedent on this planet of ugly prejudices. The aboriginal Indians, save
for scattered jungle tribes whose exploitation has always been beyond
control, were assimilated by the Portuguese centuries ago. Miscegenation,
in fact, began at Bahia in the early 1500s when the sailor Diogo Alvares
Correia took the legendary princess Paraguassú as his wife.
Descendants of the African slaves, whose skin-color varies from blue-black
to golden, constitute a majority of the population. Millions of Portuguese,
German, Italian and Slavic immigrants made their homes in southern Brazil
between the time of the Abolition of Slavery (1888) and World War II,
maintaining a balance of the population between Caucasian and African. The
few hundred thousand Japanese who came to Brazil after WW II have become
the nation's most skillful and prosperous farmers and also form a large
portion of the population of São Paulo.
What strikes visitors to Brazil the most and remains in their memory is the
friendly nature of the Brazilian people. Their hospitality and joie de
vivre charge the atmosphere. Their natural exuberance, and unfailing
desire to be helpful, their innate good manners in every social class, a
politeness born not out of servility, but of security. The Brazilian knows
who he is. He is compensating for no sense of inferiority because he feels
none. The driving force is optimism. Even the poorest favela-dweller has
pride in his country -- its history, its culture, its racial harmony.
(Excerpts from The Brazil Traveler by Selden Rodman.)
