Awakening in São Paulo
My name is Luis Filipe, I am a 19 years old Brazilian citizen and I have lived in São Paulo for almost 2 years. My life has been changed considerably since the day I moved to the biggest city in the southern hemisphere, and I’m here to tell you why.
I was brought up in a small city and had always dreamed about moving to big city because I saw it as a way to find freedom. When I was 17 years old, my dream finally came true was accepted to a college in Sao Paulo. However, I could not have imagined what was to come. During my first week in São Paulo, I had an awful experience: I saw a homeless person lying dead on the street, right next to my new house.
Because I thought that I should take care of my own business in order to survive in this big city, I tried to ignore the horrible fact that there was a dead person on the way to my new house. Nowadays, I wonder what the cause of this person’s death was; did he starve to death? Was he ill? Did someone beat him to death?
A year later, I saw another man come close to death. My neighbor jumped out of his window on the eighth floor in an attempt to commit suicide. When the ambulance took him to the hospital, I had the misfortune of hearing other people from my building say things like “He should’ve died” and “It would be one less problem to deal with”. How can people be so mean to each other?
São Paulo is known as “the city that never sleeps” but is apparently filled with people sleeping on the streets and to what it means to be human.
It took me a couple of months to realize that seeing a dead man with no family, no identity, no home, no food, laying down in the middle of an urban city is not normal, nor acceptable. Likewise, it should be unacceptable that people are driven to mental illness and to commit suicide whilst we turn a blind eye to all this chaos. I needed time to process all of the new information and moral conundrums this city was exposing me to. Dear reader, you may think I’m too slow for taking so long to heal or even to acknowledge the lack of compassion I was feeling, but what if I told you that this is the reality we have in Brazil?
São Paulo is not the dark sheep of all Brazilian cities; they are all dark. Brazil is an amazing nation of unquestionable biological and ethnical diversity, but it is also the leader of inequality. São Paulo is just a good representative of both the diversity and inequality that persist in our society; it is Brazil’s richest city, with also the greatest rate of inequality. The income of the top 10% most affluent households in the city had an income 39 times higher than that of the 10% least affluent.
I usually joke with my friends that the best places to identify and analyze inequality in Brazil are the borders between the Paraisópolis Favela, Morumbi (one of the richest neighborhoods in the city), and my college campus. The first location became famous after a picture, captured by Tuca Vieira, went viral on the internet and conquered attention worldwide:
©Tuca Vieira
©Kinema Filmes
The second location is what I’m here to talk about. It is clear to us from the picture that Paraisópolis and Morumbi are two worlds apart, separated by a tiny grey wall, but sharing the surface of the same city. On the contrary, my college campus has thicker walls. Sanfran is how we call the Law School of the University of São Paulo, the best law school in Latin America.
I chose this image because it shows the streets and life around the grey building of the oldest University in Brazilian. Sanfran was created in 1827 under the Brazilian Empire government (we were colonized by Portugal) when there was still slavery in Brazil (slavery was abolished only in 1888). Back when the University was funded, as you can expect, only the elite was able to go study there.
Centuries have passed and only in 2018, when I started college there, did the Law School start using racial quotas in their admission process, revealing its reluctant position in the use of affirmative public policies in Brazilian education. The class of 2018 is making history, and this makes me deeply proud because things are finally changing for the better. Nevertheless, there is still widespread poverty and massive social issues around the school, which probably cannot be easily detected when we look at the image above.
That is why I want to talk about my routine as a student at the Law School of the University of Sao Paulo.
Sanfran is located in downtown São Paulo, therefore, students are daily faced with the chaotic urban dynamic of the big city. I am constantly made aware of the air and sound pollution, fast-paced people and awful smells, but what is most shocking is the discrepancy I see between what is inside Sanfran’s buildings and what is right in front of the entrance - the real world.
I have classes with the children of millionaires and the most respected jurists in Brazil. In my first year, students would even take classes with Brazil’s Supreme Court minister Ricardo Lewandowski. Around campus, I see students carrying around their thousand- dollar MacBooks and there would be teachers wearing expensive suits and formal clothes, most of which costing more than a Brazilian working-class person makes in a half a year of work.
My colleagues attended the most incredible high schools and took the most expensive prep courses. They collect and read very expensive law books that they have bought. Meanwhile, what happens on the outside? Well, when you step out of the University, a homeless person asking for money or food will probably approach you. Perhaps you will get to see a poor woman sitting down, right in front of the institution, breastfeeding her kid and selling objects to make ends meet. You might step into human pee puddles or, if you choose to enter the school through the back door, you might see human poop right next to the entrance. In the morning, you will see a big line of homeless people on the backstreet, in front of an association that supports them. A few miles away, you will reach a square in which drug users roam, bathe and sleep.
Some people are afraid of going there because of the high violence and assault rates registered. At night, students form big groups to walk together safely to the metro station. Once a group of students were attacked and robbed on their way home. I know what you are thinking… What a mess!
Inequality here may not be as visual as it is in the picture of Paraisópolis Favela, but it is discrepant, and we experience it daily. But what about me? It took me some time to realize the mess I was living in, I felt powerless, sad and demotivated, as if I was part of a big lie the university tries to sell others through its speech of glory, tradition, and power.
But whose power, and to what purpose is that power used?
What bothers me the most in my story is that it took me so long to identify the abnormality in the reality surrounding me.
I thought my new life was normal, since I couldn’t do anything to change the environment around me, but I was wrong. After a while I became deeply unhappy and tired of being demotivated by the [lack of] dynamic in my classes. People would tell me that it is normal to feel this way when you are in college, but the truth is that nothing was ok. We are often pushed to believe that there’s no way out, that the world is static, and change is unlikely to happen or not worth pursuing because of its high cost. We are raised to believe that inequality and exploitation are normal, that the status quo hurts nobody, that those in power deserve it and are there because of their efforts. This is often untrue.
These words remind me of another experience I had, during my last month in São Paulo before I decided to move away. I was walking through Paulista Avenue when I saw a line of kids from the kindergarten, waiting with their teachers to visit the Art Museum of São Paulo. Beside the line, a homeless person was sleeping on the floor, in absolute terrible human conditions. What hurt me the most was the fact that the kids looked at him and had no reaction at all. They seemed to view him as a part of the urban scenery, just like a lamp post.
I started wondering why the kids were acting as if this was normal, but then I realized that if it weren’t for the kids, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed the man on the ground. The truth is that we grow up in this society pretending not to see our wounds – humanity’s wounds. We raise our kids to protect them from danger and the unknown. Since we don’t understand social issues entirely, they might have become this “unknown danger” we’re so scared of looking at. Moreover, we do not only blind ourselves, but we also expect each other to act as an emotionless machine when we tell people not to feel, not to question and not to think. We tell people that the world is the way it is and what it’s impossible to change it; we believe we are powerless.
I want to end this text saying that we are not the powerless ones. Change is not only possible, but it is needed. Everything flows – πάντα ῥεῖ (Heraclitus) – and everything changes as long as we keep the engines working and as long as we become brave enough to admit that some things are not ok.
Wake up, turn the lights on even if it means just looking around, analyzing where you are in relation to others. Question. Do not just look away. Shine a light brightly, even if from the end of the tunnel.
