Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
highway Padre Manoel da Nóbrega, where street lights begin) “because the drug
traffickers usually dump the people they kill on the road and it is dangerous.” In fact,
the local newspaper Tribuna de Santos often brought news of shootings and killings
in the “poverty belt” around the Mongaguá beach resort and other towns such as
Peruíbe and Itanhaém, farther south down the coast of the state of São Paulo.
But when I asked Suely if she dreamed about the Land-without-Evil like Mbyá
men and women told me they did, she started crying again and replied:
No, there is no more hope. I guess we don't qualify anymore for that. That is
something my father would talk about, the old people, but only for those who
lived the pure life [ vida pura ]. But we are all damned, there is no way out.
There is that saying that goes: “Whoever is born in the trash, dies in the trash
[ Quem nasce no lixo, morre no lixo ]. So we will die right here.
Diego, her 9-year-old son, joined the conversation and replied to the impertinent
observation his mother had made earlier about his future plans: “No, mother, I will
not be a tin can gatherer like my Dad. I will be a singer! And I will take you away
from here!” Suely replied: “Nonsense! What an idea, a singer? Is that what you've
been learning at school? God bless you! You will work on the banana farm, much
better than on the dump, hear me. But with all these worms inside your head, you are
not going anywhere! You will gather cans just like your Dad!”
A few months later I walked into a small market in Mongaguá looking for black,
strong tobacco that karaí Henrique Firmino had asked me to buy. I met Suely at
the register purchasing four liters of cachaça (sugar cane rum). The woman was
disturbed when she saw me, grabbed the bottles and left right away. Later on that day
when she saw me through the window of her shack going up the hill to her sister's
house, she shouted:
See, that's why we don't qualify for the Land-without-Evil anymore! We drink!
Yes, Aldair and I are drunks [ bêbados ], we drink everyday! Come in and have
a drink with us, so that you can understand.
I did go into her house, where I spent two days listening to her, and her two sisters,
Nazaré and Dolores, who later joined us from their homes located next door on
the sandy hills of Itaóca. Each one of them recounted life histories filled with
emotional and physical abuse, whether as domestic servants working for the rich
in Mongaguá and neighboring towns, or as the wives of white men who subjected
them to domestic violence. As scholars working in other parts of the Americas
have documented, 15 these patterns of violence against women do not originate in
the “cultural” or “psychological” traits of impoverished populations, but rather
from a concatenation of social forces that conspire to promote extreme poverty
and suffering among Indigenous and other minority populations. These include a
model of development focusing on export production, as well as rampant political
corruption. At Funai, for example, between 1997 and 1999, at least 13 contracts
established between the regional administration in Bauru, São Paulo, and the
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