E11 The Untold History of Brazil: Language, Race, and Resilience

In this episode of From Where to Here, Alexandra sits down with Dr. John Maddox, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UAB, to explore the intersections of language, culture, history, and identity. Dr. Maddox shares how an inspiring Spanish teacher set him on a lifelong path in languages, how games and stories made learning accessible, and why perfection in language learning is a myth. The conversation spans from classrooms in Georgia to study abroad in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Brazil, weaving in insights about colonialism, race, and the African diaspora. Together, they uncover the untold stories of Brazilian history, especially the overlooked role of Black women in shaping culture, language, and resilience, and reflect on how embracing mistakes, differences, and shared humanity can connect us more deeply across borders.

Takeaways

1. The spark of a teacher matters. A high school Spanish teacher using games, stories, and immersion inspired Dr. Maddox’s lifelong passion for languages.
2. Language learning thrives on imperfection. Mistakes aren’t failures — they are stepping stones to fluency and connection.
3. Portuguese and Spanish are sibling languages. Though often seen as rivals, their shared histories shaped cultures on both sides of the Atlantic.
4. Brazil’s history is inseparable from slavery. It was the largest slave-based society in the Americas, and its cultural fabric still carries this legacy.
5. Black women shaped Brazilian culture in profound ways. From domestic and community roles to preserving oral traditions and influencing literature, their impact endures.
6. Colonial myths still echo today. Narratives like Brazil being a “racial democracy” obscure ongoing inequalities tied to race and history.
7. Puerto Rican identity offers parallels. Like Quebec, Puerto Rico maintains strong cultural pride through language and resilience despite political and colonial complexities.
8. Shared humanity is the antidote to division. Dr. Maddox emphasizes empathy, curiosity, and seeing cultural diversity as a source of growth, not separation.

=============================================
🔗 Links & How to Connect with Dr. John Maddox
=============================================
📍Get in Touch with Dr. John Maddox:
- https://ua-birmingham.academia.edu/Maddox

📍Links:
- Puerto Rico - zafacón (Instagram post): https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIqv1i6xVne/?igsh=ZzRkYzN3MzNkanJo

- Slavery and the Portuguese Language (podcast): https://tinyurl.com/bdx73kt7

📍Book Recommendations
- Black Notebooks, Niyi Afolabi -  https://tinyurl.com/ppfmyjdu

- Machado de Assis, Blackness and the Americas - https://www.amazon.com/Machado-Blackness-Americas-Afro-Latinx-Futures/dp/1438498810

- Child of the Dark, Carolina Maria de Jesus - https://www.amazon.com/Child-Dark-Diary-Carolina-Maria/dp/0451529103

- Africans in Brazil, a Pan-African Perspective, Abdi

=================================
Show Some Love
=================================
🎧 Subscribe & Follow: Don’t miss an episode! Follow From Where to Here on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

📩 Stay Connected: Get exclusive updates and behind-the-scenes content – Join my email list.

📱 Let’s Connect: Follow me on Instagram/TikTok @fromwheretoherepod and tag me to share your thoughts!

💡 Support the Show: Love what you hear? Leave a review or share with a friend!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:53 The Spark of a Teacher Changed Everything
• 6:45 Sleeping in Portuguese, Waking in Proficiency
• 12:19 Learning Hieroglyphics, One Impossible Word at a Time
• 13:26 Portuguese and Spanish: A Shared History Reveals Their Similarities
• 17:00 Falling for Portuguese and Finding Love
• 22:25 Studying in Mexico and Puerto Rico: A Rare Undergraduate Journey
• 29:24 Puerto Rico: Proud Roots, English Influence, and Words Like Zafacón
• 42:03 Brazil: The World’s Largest Historical Slave Society
• 51:09 Women Navigating Pressure, Injustice, and Care for Their Children
• 1:01:57 Slave Plantations, Abolition Myths, and Racial Democracy
• 1:06:46 Shared Humanity: A Form of Color Blindness
• 1:11:12 Truth, Dare, or Debunk Segment
• 1:28:28 African Diaspora vs. Economic Migration: Different Stories
• 1:38:16 Celebrating an 80-Year-Old Writer Finally Recognized
• 1:41:15 A Novel Revealing Hope, Loss, and African Heritage
• 1:44:11 Tolaricism: Slavery as a “Necessary Evil”
• 1:46:43 From Slave to Celebrity: Frederick Douglass’ Journey
• 1:48:00 How Peninsular Colonies Shaped America’s Cultural Mix
• 1:50:43 Colombia: Deeply Catholic and Shaped by the Inquisition
• 1:57:31 Colombia Champions Black Rights, Puerto Rico Evolves
• 2:00:28 Carnival, Culture, and the Limits of Political Activism in Brazil
• 2:06:19 His New Book: Lyric Poetry’s Rise Among Favela Authors
• 2:10:05 Stroganoff, Creamy Sauce, and Pikiniki Memories
• 2:11:55 Staying in Touch: Final Reflections

Transcript

0:00

hi I'm Alexandra Lloyd a French Canadian who's called Birmingham Alabama home since 2,017 welcome to from where to here the podcast that celebrates the rich diversity of languages cultures and the stories that connect us all each month I'll sit down with inspiring guests from different backgrounds to explore their cultures languages and tackle some fun in our truth there or debunk segment whether you're a language enthusiast a culture lover or just curious about the world you're in the right place let's dive into your next favorite cultural adventure today's guest is a professor of Spanish at the department of World Languages and literatures at the university of Alabama at Birmingham for people that are local you know it as UAB where he has taught Spanish Portuguese and Latin American literature and culture in those languages he has even received prestigious awards like the President's and Dean's Awards for excellence in teaching in 2023 and a 2025 Fullbright Fellowship in Brazil he specializes in the cultures of the African Diaspora in Latin America particularly the Hispanic Caribbean in Brazil his academic publications include two books of literacy criticism on authors from Brazil Colombia and Puerto Rico today we're gonna be exploring his journey from US classrooms to Caribbean stories busting cultural myths and diving into Latin American and Caribbean literature especially around the African diaspora and identity Doctor John Maddox thank you so much for being on the podcast today it's great to have you thank you Lexi it's an honor to be here now can you we go back to the beginning and if you could tell us do you remember what first got you curious about language and culture was there a particular moment that started this journey for you yes I had a great Spanish 1 teacher in high school I lived in a lot of small towns in Georgia growing up and I moved to a new school in a small town called Alamo and we had a very good high school and it was small and the language department was Hannah so everybody took Spanish and I ended up in her Spanish English and journalism class and she uh took a group of students abroad which was my first time out of the country and I thought that was just a magical thing it was a a talent I didn't know I had of learning languages and it was a way to connect with a big world and that was really exciting to me and it created a community for me that's really lasted all my life since then I ended up knowing I was gonna be a a Spanish teacher I presumed it would be a high school teacher like Juana but when I went to the university of Georgia I found out hey maybe I could teach college and so here I am now we had no textbooks we had a lot of stories she would tell us stories about her family in Spanish and of course this is Spanish one it has to be accessible to us it has to be engaging for us so she used a lot of games she was a very creative person she would make up stories and would involve us in telling the story it's a it's a method they call TPR which is related to learning languages through stories and we would play kind of like board games or parlor games in the language uh which is a method that we use to this day because language learning should be fun it should be creative and you know I did a little interview with her when I was thinking about OK well what kind of job do I want to get which you know one of those activities you do in high school and she said I don't I don't work for a living per se I I play and I wanted a job where I felt like I was was playing or in the sense that I get to be creative and I get to connect with people and I'm having fun and when you say games so you're you're saying also you just started learning the language you're already getting that immersion through stories games just contextual learning too what kind of games can you play with just minimum understanding of Spanish for people out there that they're like okay that sounds great I wanna hear the stories I wanna maybe tell some right I wanna be involved in that game but I have no clue what I'm doing and I'm just starting out how would that work or what would you recommend well the simplest one is two truths and a lie there are a variety of card games that you'd play what we do to uh teach the students uh numbers is uh you play a game that's similar to 21 right where you want to get as close to 21 without going over right only we play 99 so you learn how to count to 100 so you want to get as close to 99 without going over and while you add cards to the pile and so you would add the two numbers of the top card on the pile and the one that you're adding and it tends to add up quite quickly the goal is to get to 99 without going over uh it's kind of like UNO in the sense that you have different numbers that can be like wild cards that can change the direction that can make it reset to 98 or 99 yeah you're playing you're playing cards you're uh talking to people uh you're interacting with them uh but you're also picking up how to how to use numbers in a way that's not just memorizing them in order were you particularly good in math would you say that or was just okay okay and something that caught my attention was you said I didn't realize until that time that I had a talent for learning languages I think there's different people that might think yeah you're either talented at it or you're not so they consider themselves not when they can't speak the language but then there's I think another group of people that think of it as you know you can learn the language you just gotta do the work for it like how do you look at this um do you really think you have a talent to learn languages cause it just comes naturally to you in a way I think we all have our own tastes we have our own talents we have things that come easily to us so uh this was an area that came easier to me that doesn't mean that it's an either or situation there are this certain tiny group of people that can just easily pick up languages like a sponge that's not exactly correct about anything that you learn in life for some people it's easier to do math for some people it's easier to do sports for some people that's just how we are balanced or slightly imbalanced as as people I would say that anybody can learn a language everyone should learn a language and it's not for the reasons that you typically see in movies I always hear that people say that you've mastered a language when you can dream in it first off you can dream in in bad Portuguese I've I've dreamt in in bad Portuguese so I had a dream where I was at McDonald's and I had just Learned the word for raspberry which was Morango Silvestre it's just wild strawberry right and it sounds a lot like the word uh frango chicken so I had gone to McDonald's and I'd ordered the wild chicken and that was my dream and so who did that help hahaha who did I who did I connect with with that with that I don't know who decided that that was the the way that you measure mastery we talk a lot more now about proficiency which sounds like hair splitting yes but the difference is can you use language to accomplish some kind of task or to communicate the message that you want to get across on some level that will always be imperfect just having a conversation like I just got back from from Brazil I was just talking to my wife and mother in law this morning both of whom are Brazilian and I asked if my if my Portuguese sounded any different after a semester abroad and they said no you you sound fluent you sound the same as you did before you still have an accent though and I said okay well haha I the the perfectionist side of me was a little disappointed but that's the reality is okay you're gonna have an accent in another language especially if you learn as an adult if you pick it up as a kid you're probably not gonna have an accent but you'll know what a kid knows I mean you we're not all discussing astrophysics in the 6th grade right I think that learning another language is an exercise in in patience an exercise in seeing the the impossibility of perfection or the downside to perfectionism uh I think that it's it's healthy to want to constantly be better at something I'm I'm thrilled about being able to always learn something from somebody I learn stuff from little kids right if nothing else what they call something or another in their their slang in their language uh at home but it's a process where you're gonna be imperfect but from Spanish one Portuguese one French one whatever you're in you're still going to be getting your point across and you're going to polish what you're saying gradually just like when we're writing an essay you write a first draft a second draft a third draft it's the same thing with a language you start out with saying burger and then you point right language learning always starts out with pointing a lot yeah a lot of gestures right so burger burger okay well then you move on to I I want a burger and then maybe you didn't say the verb the way that that you're supposed to okay then you learn to conjugate it you sound more and more natural eventually you'll be like me yeah you gotta get an accent I can't quite place yeah right and that accent will always be there and it's part of where you where you come from they always say that it's a a sign of bravery too because I couldn't agree more with that right so you're you're going through a process of trial and error of learning as you go you're gonna make mistakes but you're also gonna connect with people you're gonna learn a lot and you're gonna meet people that you wouldn't otherwise connect with people that's I mean that's what it comes down to what a better way to connect with someone than speaking their native language and we're gonna talk more about your trip to Brazil I'm excited to hear cause it's not your first time either going to Brazil speaking of proficiency how many languages are you proficient in I'm proficient in Spanish English and Portuguese Portuguese is a more scattered language than Spanish is you you may have heard of the the Royal Spanish Academy they they're the people that write the dictionaries and oh no and they determine the official grammar rules that that you get taught in school Portuguese is much more scattered so I I say that because I have a lot of respect for people from Portugal Lusophone Africa but sometimes they have to repeat themselves because it's it's a very different way of speaking and my French is is Duolingo French I just finished my first year of Duolingo Yay so so I can I can read pretty well and I'm still pointing a lot that's awesome you are so well versed so now Spanish French are romantic languages Portuguese is it considered a romantic languages too yes OK so do you have a natural affinity for romantic languages or um is there is there a a common theme that you see and maybe with your studies there's something that you just have a natural affinity or that kind of like bring them all together more than let's say an Asian language it's easier it's easier it's easier so that's part of it I got the bright idea last year to take an online course uh huh with UNAM which is the the biggest and and most famous uh university in Mexico and it was hieroglyphics it was Mayan hieroglyphics the problem is and I thought it was gonna be like okay the jaguar represents power and the water means life no you have to be able to speak Maya which or a dialect of Maya there's there's 20 dialects of Maya today classical Maya don't get it mixed up right so it's it's different between what Greek people speak today versus classical Greek right and so the guy I was listening to this beautiful academic Spanish Mexican Spanish from this professor he's an anthropologist but oh my gosh they have three different ways of even thinking about a word so you'll have water OK I understand that so looks like a little wave but they have water with a dot which sounds like the combination of which sounds like another word in Maya and I couldn't wrap my head around it that was just too tough for me so it's a common error in Spanish to say that somebody speaks a Mayan dialect and it sounds like they're saying dialect of Spanish no it's it is like Mandarin or something completely unrelated Portuguese Spanish and French are much more closely related languages I would say that in my experience Spanish and Portuguese are the most closely related languages well I didn't learn a whole bunch of other ones to to compare them to but they've always had a shared history so it's a history of neighbors and rivals the word rival comes from the word for river right so if you think about the old days you would have one group of people on one side of the river and they had disagreement or whatever somebody moved to the other side of the river right and so they're constantly competing for access to that river access to resources access to transportation river is something that determined people's lives in a way even more so than we see today in the past and so they're kind of like siblings they've always been next to one another they're made of the same stuff what does that mean they were both part of the Roman Empire so they inherited that heritage they're both Catholic nations famously Columbus left Spain and then did a trick and returned to Portugal some people say that he was trying to see who would give him a better offer as far as how much of the New World he was going to get and how much of his resources uh which is a very shrewd game that nobles would play because the pope said alright your slice of the Americas what in Spanish and Portuguese you typically call America to this day your slice is over here Spain your slice is over here Portugal the the two squabbling siblings moved over to the other side of the Atlantic and kind of continued to squabble over whatever the conflict of the day was up to football rivalries like soccer rivalries between Argentina and Brazil to this day they're very much culturally connected they are very much connected in terms of language and if you've not had any experience with this language I think the big difference between Spanish and Portuguese for an American is we're constantly exposed to some aspect of Spanish speaking culture even if it's Taco Bell I think most of us know Taco Bell is not Mexico right even growing up we're like that talking Chihuahua feels like something's left out right but we we think we know something about Mexico so we think we're so we feel more familiar with Spanish right the accent different cultures that kind of thing whereas Portuguese we have less contact with it so uh we're a little more taken aback so the first reaction is this is funny Spanish no it's it's just a different language that has a lot in common because of that shared history and French I'm picking up because uh well UAV has a great French program I've got the resources to do that uh I would love to learn more about the French speaking Caribbean um and it's it's part of Learned society all throughout the 18th and 19th century and so it's it's just helping my understanding of the other languages that I've studied in and certainly in literature that is amazing did you ever learn languages simultaneously do you consider you learning them simultaneously or is do you learn some of the basics of one language and then you move to the next one what has been the winning approach in your case learning them both at the same time I'm I'm just gonna go back to my origin story with uh with Portuguese which is also the origin story of me and my wife yeah so love to hear because how did you to meet yes thank you I knew that I wanted to be a Spanish teacher I went to a junior college uh just to do my core and all that kind of thing called Waycross College and I went to the university of Georgia since I knew I wanted to do everything that I could with Spanish they had an immersion dorm which at the time was called Maryland and hall sorry they had a Spanish community and a French community and the guys community was always very small right languages is most of your classes are going to be majority female so they put the the French and the Spanish guys uh on uh half of a hall the other half was women studying French and the other side of the hall was women studying Spanish and all my friends were trilingual and I started feeling left out I'm like well I don't want to be the dummy that only speaks two languages so I said OK well should I study French should I study Portuguese for the reasons that I've explained before one of the young women in the Spanish side will learn Portuguese to to talk to me and my roommate well 20 years later I'm I'm still talking to her her name is uh Luciana Silva and I uh actually went to Vanderbilt University with her her roommate she's still a good friend of the family so it really changed my life I met my wife and I always tell students I can't guarantee you you're gonna meet your soulmate by studying another language but you will meet people that you wouldn't otherwise I never felt university of Georgia is a big frat school right that Greek life is is really big there I never really felt compelled to to do Greek life for anything when you say Greek life what do you mean okay in um at least in in the south of the of the US I think it's happens to a lesser degree in the in the north in the north you have the the Ivies which uh in the old days had the the club men right but Greek life is sororities and fraternities so it's it's very much associated with football culture with the alumni associations and so typically if you go to a school like university of Alabama University of Georgia you'll see these mansions and you're like well why do the students get mansions well that's not the students'mansion it's the Greek organization that's been there for a long time and they call it Greek life because it's always uh two or three Greek letters yes okay I wasn't familiar with that terminology but I I know about the fraternities and sororities okay so that's that's something I just Learned in terms of how they are referred to if you will welcome to Alabama yeah yeah but I never really felt I need to to join that that organization because my fraternity in a bigger sense of the word my my community was the fact that I speak Spanish and so if I met somebody who uh was a Spanish speaker a native speaker I'd already have something in common with them if nothing else I would have the interest in their their country and I think that was a myth that I I uh busted by start studying new languages you always hear the myth that native speakers are always gonna be jerks uh in the United States historically and sadly they would put Latino or Latinx students in special ed classes or uh if they were were if they started a school for Native Americans everything would be only in English and they would be punished for speaking their uh their first language right I have heard about that yes very severely and I know that it was uh uh there's been a lot of of discussion in Canada yep about similar colonial enterprises so I think with that baggage I think that or we'll project a lot of our stuff onto the French right and so we'll say oh well they're gonna be snobby to me they're gonna say oh you said this wrong they're gonna make me feel bad that wasn't my experience with Spanish and really with any of my French classes at all because people are grateful that you're making an effort to listen to them and to understand them even if you don't get it right the first time and I found that very encouraging because it's it's the opposite I was scared to study another language because I thought that people would be would laugh at me they'd make fun of me middle school and high school are not the times when one feels most secure in themselves right but I found that people were very encouraging and so that gave me an immediate connection with this the Spanish immersion dorm where I lived but also with the Spanish speaking community there at the university of Georgia yeah definitely I mean you have surrounded yourself with other like minded people that welcome and it's like you have a safe space to make errors I found that often time the people that end up not having bad intentions naturally but that are most likely to laugh about how you pronounce certain words are the people that actually don't speak another language so interestingly enough you spend a lot of time in different parts of the world living and working abroad including Brazil obviously was there a moment during that time that made you see American culture or even yourself differently I had a blast at the university of Georgia it was great I got the chance to study in in Mexico and then in Puerto Rico and I think that gave me an experience that few students have at the undergraduate level even at the university of Georgia because the classic study abroad is to go to Spain which makes a lot of sense my first trip abroad in high school was was to Spain it's very safe place it's a place where a lot of we get a lot of teachers from there it's a wonderful place with beautiful museums and all of that but that's kind of pushes students in one direction and I got the chance to go in a different direction I went to a town called Jalapa which is near Veracruz right there on the Caribbean coast uh Jalapa's farther inland at the town it was a sleepy little mountain town it's a college town and uh I was seen as a a unique person and as a sort of a curiosity uh because these were people that didn't interact with with Americans every day they didn't see Americans uh walking around Jalapa every day it wasn't a big tourist uh spot at the time at least not for internationals and we got to do classroom observations it was through the the the education department there at university of Georgia and so we go and observe different classrooms and really my favorite experience was to go out to a village where they grow mangoes that's their job that is the only yeah that is the only source of income and that's what you live your life around of course you have your Little River there and yes it was it had dirt roads and a donkey and uh and at least I saw a donkey I mean I don't know how many donkeys they had and they had a one room schoolhouse that was a great learning experience but we were treated like rock stars as the Americans are here I think kids get bored around the globe and they find ways to entertain themselves it's like the big strange pale guy is here alright let's go play they they they like to play uh tic tac toe El Gato we had a great education professor Misha Conman that was there she'd make faces with the kids and play around with them and uh and then they they go on recess and they're like take us to the river let's go to the river it's like the river is the best thing in the world of course you get to play around you get to swim they have a little rope uh like a tire swing yeah kind of thing to be seen as uh as different because of yes the way I look but also my my cultural background uh for other people to be curious about me uh was very interesting for me it's exciting and it's uh was the first time that I could objectify my lived experience I know that there are a lot of negative associations with the word objectify of course but to be able to take a step back and become a little less emotional uh or a little less defensive about uh how people perceive me was very helpful and it's it's kind of of helped me to gain a sense of humor right laughing about me saying a word wrong laughing about yeah maybe I do need to get out in the sun a little more or laughing about whatever right my socks are too high or you know whatever is different about me in a different context first to be able to laugh about it and second to say well there's more than one way to live there's more than one way to skin a cat right that was the beginning of being able to divorced myself from a little bit of the the sensitivity of being seen as the other without exaggerating how how much they othered me they were happy to see me most of them maybe I had a I had a good friend who's who's my friend to this day's a um a guy named Domingo and he would say yeah maybe a guy on the street gave me a bad look while I was walking down the the sidewalk my friend said well you know sometimes they think you don't know anything about us or they saw something on the news they didn't like and they think you had something to do with it and to be able to take a step back and say sometimes people will have a negative reaction it's not all about me yeah oh that's so good it's so easy to go that path though uh huh because it's the easy way right you see yeah the you'll hear people say okay this this country is anti American first off that's that's a really big statement um but sometimes people will have a reaction and it's not about being pro or anti American uh maybe they don't like something that the president did I'm not the president and I think that people understand that and I think that uh going to Puerto Rico was also something that helped me to understand that because in what ways you yeah Puerto Rico is a place where again I was seen very different I look different from most people uh there I was an oddity cause I was in classes for uh for native speakers and you would hear things about the US government because that's their government whether they want it or not and I think that Puerto Rico is a place where I came to understand what we call cultural nationalism is a is a case of that Catalonia we say Catalonia is a case of that in Spain where you have a very healthy clearly defined identity of this community yeah regardless of what currency you use regardless of the history of colonization they would be very critical and that you know some people would say at the time it was BK's BK's was a Navy base for many years it was a firing range and so it's very polluted was protested a lot at the time since then they've they've shut it down it's still very polluted uh and so you would you would hear people that have valid concerns and it's against the US government it's against something that's uh that America is very proud of which is its army uh its armed forces but you get to learn different perspectives and to depersonalize them and to see both sides of the coin or maybe you start to think about maybe there's more than than just one or two sides to this this argument so you mentioned it similar to Quebec and yeah I like what you said I'm curious about Puerto Rico what makes it that they have a strong culture like Quebec one that is pretty obvious is the language one of the official languages is French which is very different from the rest of Canada has Puerto Rico maybe the language is part of it but are there other areas or what stands out to you as Puerto Rico they have their own culture and they dissociate themselves from the rest of the US first I'm gonna gonna recognize that I got a somewhat of a skewed perspective uh I was studying at the university of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras the history of Puerto Rico informs its political parties and it's gonna help me answer your question OK so most of the Spanish Empire in the 19th century declared independence uh the only little holdouts were Cuba and Puerto Rico and Spain didn't want to what didn't want to lose Cuba because Cuba had that great sugar money sugar and tobacco and enslaved Africans that were making that happen and it was horrible it was brutal but it paid the bills so when the United States invaded in 1898 in Puerto Rico Puerto Rico was seen and Cuba countries that just didn't develop right because everybody else was declaring independence uh but they did not or honestly could not I think ever since then there's been even within Spanish speaking communities uh an othering of Puerto Rico they'll say oh that's that's part of the United States they're not part of Latin America most in my experience most of the people in Puerto Rico uh view themselves as Latin Americans if they live on the island they definitely live in Spanish and that's been a point of pride uh for them because we talked earlier about uh schools for Native Americans well the American government got the the bright idea to do the same thing in Puerto Rico but they were not interested uh from the 1920s 1930s to this day you'll have people that they study English but it's in many cases it's gonna be kind of like a studying Spanish or French yeah you you learn some to get by well they also have a movie theater and the movie theater typically is gonna have 90 if not 100% movies in in English right so they're immersed in the media of of the English language what you speak at home what you speak with your friends uh what you sing in famously we got bad Bunny conquering the planet right now is the Spanish language there's a lot of misunderstanding regarding Puerto Rican Spanish the No. 1 and most obvious uh influence on it is of course the English language because of uh of this this shared history and many people because they're US citizens they have US passports uh they can travel the the 50 United States freely and many people will come to United States and in many cases to work uh maybe you'll go back to retire on the island or a million combinations of coming and going between the continental United States they have contact with the English language but most people are not going to live their lives in that language on the island and many of them will unless they're college educated and and pursue English at in their career uh they're not they're not gonna speak fluent English uh so in Puerto Rican Spanish the word for counter is counter el counter all right and your what uh OK let me get a get a dollar out of my wallet alright the the sentence I'm gonna get a dollar out of my wallet Voy a sacar un peso de mi wallet the miwale the miwale yeah so um yeah and and of course they'll call the the US money by Spanish names you got a peso peseta bayon all right so those are um those are examples of cultural resistance really yeah of preserving a culture that had its had a big media boom in especially the 50s and 60s of pride in in things that are uniquely Puerto Rican of the island so you've got a pride of place which is also pride in their dialect which would not only be influenced by English but also by being kind of in the margins of the the Spanish Empire and now in some way in many ways in the margins of the US Empire and so you'll see people using older words or words that uh just aren't used anywhere else like the the most useful word I found is is safacon what does that mean that's one of the classics is safacon uh a safacon is the trash can no right so in in Spain they'll call it a papelera the thing you put paper in alright you'll you'll at Mexico Bote de basura the bucket of trash right uh but it's a safacon and there's all these different uh theories uh as to where that came from most people will say it came from the English safety can the problem is that nobody says safety can in English so I don't know where they they get get that idea from I'm guessing well maybe in the Navy I don't know it's comes from the word safa which is a a related to an Arabic term which means the thing where you uh you you're reading the Bible about people washing each other's feet right so in the in the Arabic speaking world of course uh you got many people that live in desert environments that kind of thing uh you wash your feet when you come to somebody's house the safa cone or the safa right is uh the the the bucket or the box or the container that would gather the waste from washing people's feet interesting so that's that's the going theory for uh the Safacon right yeah and that's not a that's not an English word that they're saying they're saying a very old Spanish word uh mayonnaise for jeans which the word for jeans is jeans that's interesting so yeah they have so it's it's this combination of kind of a funny Spanish with of course to them it's not funny it's it's just a dialect right mm hmm so you'll have funny Spanish with English mixed in and you got that famous accent right so uh ours turn into L's at the end of a syllable I say Puerto Rico right it's Puerto Rico Puerto so the R is more is deeper the R is it's like an L so all of your verbs comer Beber vivir right uh huh comer bibil bibil interesting so that that's informal comment Puerto Rican Spanish right so if people wanna sound more formal if they wanna be more standard whatever that means they will they'll try to avoid that just like me trying to to avoid saying something in my southern accent right yeah cause yeah uh may may have in some spaces it may have a negative association uh but it's it does contribute to okay maybe I need to listen to that sentence again as a student okay I've got something else to to learn uh and that's really exciting it is very similar to how our dialect is in Quebec okay versus French spoken in France and even anywhere around European and in Europe as a whole I think part of that is that we are so secluded Quebec is so secluded compared to the rest you know Europe like you have all these countries even including countries like Congo that will speak French Morocco they're they're still far out but closer to each other in a way where they can keep the same dialect or the same way of pronouncing words if you think about the colonization and what that happened so it seems like Puerto Rico has some similarities with Quebec in the language area right and how proud the pride too that they get out of the way they live and a lot of other areas how they yeah how they live their life really right The University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras is the flagship for uh preserving Puerto Rican culture they're very proud of that of that role if you look at a political map uh it's not that the island is divided into left right right it's uh the political divide is between what should our relationship be to the United States and it's been that way for 100 years interesting okay right uh well it's been exactly this way for closer to say 60 or 70 years so the status quo is uh we typically call them a Commonwealth and then most Americans don't really think about what that means in Spanish they are officially called an Estado Libre Asociado a free associated state so are we free are we associated what does that mean right so uh you'll have one party that says we need we need to be the 51st state 51st state right same tax rules same criminal laws same everything right that's one way to go the status quo is this kind of mixture right of US citizenship with other things that are marked by the official language is one of those big culture war things what should be the official language in the state house right that kind of thing so you got those two options you can be a state you can be a Commonwealth or you can just be independent but don't you need to be financially independent too to be able to support OK right which is why Quebec is still part of Canada in some ways cause the law never passed and well that's another story it's the it's the same story I would say most Puerto Ricans will say I'm a proud Latin American okay so you're gonna be a Latin American country that's completely independent from the United States no no I don't want that because what does that mean okay Puerto Rico is is if it were the 51st state it would be the poorest state it's always been that way under under the US so if you lose US citizenship you lose your passport we're having a huge debate over over immigration in this country so you could be deported from the United States for the first time okay on top of that you would lose snap the equivalent in uh in Puerto Rico what what we used to call food stamps right so you would you would lose uh something that helps you feed your family you would lose something that helps you to pay for housing and it sounds like a terrible idea at that point and so that's why 90% or more picks one of these two options of uh status quo or statehood but the holdouts are in the university because this is this is where the Dreamers go and so the Dreamers will say other countries declared independence and they're OK somehow some way they're not perfect places we're not a perfect place but we can pull this off because everybody else did in the in the form of Spanish empire uh there will be people that are have more more of an economics background that say if we did this uh a key issue there is like food sovereignty if we just grew our own food that would be a huge economic change for us cause they import all their food from the United States and they export a lot to the United States and other countries so food sovereignty uh there are all kinds of economic and social and and political issues it's like okay well if they're independent the fear used to be aligning with Russia then you got another Cuba on your hands right so some of the people at the university will be like I wanna be another Cuba Cuba's great Castro did the impossible he got the United States out well Castro did other things that not everyone is on board with I think that that's one reason that that independence is not popular in Puerto Rico and it's also why it's confined largely to academic spaces and to activist spaces because the the pro the role of the professor is to share ideas to publish ideas not necessarily to carry out the implications of those ideas and if you are a business person if you have a family that you're concerned about uh maybe you're gonna be more risk averse then if if you're talking about an idea you're talking about your child or you're talking about your uh the food you put on your own table and that's that's uh not been demonstrably uh most people aren't ready to take that risk but since they can preserve their their culture and if like we just had Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York if you can uh share your flag if you can speak your language if you can share your music that's one reason that cultural nationalism is still alive and well uh whereas uh the political side is more complicated puzzle that is interesting and like you said you're not trying to push ideas on people but rather getting educated on the topic so then you can make a more educated decision you can make it the decision that is best for what you think is ideal for society but also for yourself and speaking of cultural differences I'd like to know I'm still learning about Brazil's history with race could you help me understand how black women have shaped Brazilian culture cause that's something I think that is a big topic that you have written about so I'd love to hear your thoughts Brazil is the largest slave based society or historically was the largest slave based society in the history of of humanity when we talk about modern day slavery we talk about racialized slavery which uh effectively began with uh the with the Portuguese uh colonizing Africa and changing the status of the captives that they brought back from sub saharan Africa Brazil was so dependent on enslaved Africans because you just do the math Portugal was a tiny little country even if they just sent all of their prisoners and anybody that they could make up an excuse to send to work in Brazil the population simply would not be enough to create the workforce that they felt they needed at the time why did they need such a huge workforce the reason Brazil's called Brazil is because the Portuguese got there and they they asked themselves great what what can we do with this and they found trees that they could use to make dye to dye cloth red that's Brazil wood so they they took all of that that they could and then they kind of sat on it for the better part of a century and said well the Pope gave us this land how can we get any money out of this you know if we're having some some empathy for people they had poor people in Portugal at the time you had lots of second sons that were never going to inherit the farm or the property or rise up in the social sphere and in the political sphere and the way to do that was to go to the New World and make money and then come back richer than you left the way that they found to come back richer than they left was sugar uh they figured out the Portuguese did in uh SAO Tome Principe uh which is now an African uh nation that you could could grow lots and lots of sugar as a single monocrop as opposed to a bunch of little things like a garden to feed yourself right so they Learned to make these massive fields of of cane which we now associate with modern uh agriculture but they needed a huge workforce to cut down all that cane maintain it so the that's why there were so many black people in Brazil from the start along the coast okay the second thing is that Brazil is where the Americas saw their first gold rush there's a state called Minas Gerais and the Minas are the mines uh and they found you'll see all these you'll see cities with names like Diamantina the Diamond Place right so to this day Minas uh is a great source of of mineral wealth and so they brought many enslaved Africans to pull all that wealth out of the ground uh I've Learned recently that uh African peoples in in many cases had an understanding of mining that the Portuguese did didn't so one of those historical ironies is that you learn from the Africans how to make mines so that you can enslave Africans to put them to work there another irony is that this is a place Mina Gerais particularly Poru Preto which I got to to visit is this huge gorgeous colonial town it's what it's uh it's one of the best preserved examples of baroque architecture in in the world uh it's it's a boom town so you have lots of money happening very very quickly you have lots and lots of for lack of a better term of uh illegitimate babies why because you have white guys who have carte Blanche with any woman who is not white almost I may be exaggerating to to an extent I mean they might get some kind of of dirty looks maybe they'll have to to repent at church guys could do pretty much anything they wanted to with definitely with enslaved women but with most women of color and so you have a a large mixed race uh population and in the city if you were lucky enough to just be born into this world with a white father who is a landowner who had all these other benefits or you were a what they called a concubine at the time if you were a free woman of color who negotiated the system uh to less to your own benefit but more to your children's benefit then you could actually rise up in society and have um material benefits and legal benefits that you wouldn't see in the United States at the time so where do black women fit into all of this there were women who were cutting cane yes there were women who are working in the mines but typically they would gravitate uh towards men because that was the the goal was to get the largest strongest man to go and work in the mine and sadly until they were worked to death I mean there was very very very short life expectancy working in in mines with no modern protections women were often uh domestic workers as well enslaved domestic workers and to this day many black women are gonna be what they call an uh an empregada uh they're gonna work as maids and they're gonna work in in the home uh as a more modern version of of this legacy of women being in the house in servile roles uh being in the house and vulnerable to unwanted advances many of which resulted in mixed race uh children okay I have a question and that might be a really off question maybe it relates maybe not all I can think is the Pocahontas like is my Disney um how do you say metaphor uh relevant here or not at all where it's kind of like a Smith was the white male that comes on territories where Pocahontas I mean the movie like people know it come to take over the land and the story behind the story the Disney story is actually what you're just talking about is this today's episode is brought to you by Birmingham Bread Works they've been serving up amazing sourdough bread European style pastries pizza soup sandwiches all made from scratch since 2,014 everything they make is fresh no preservatives no additives just simple clean ingredients their cafe is the perfect cozy spot with natural lighting warm wooden tones and art from local students and photographers it's perfect to grab a coffee or something delicious to eat plus they're big on sustainability as a gold level member of the Eat Earth Aware team stop by Birmingham Breadworks and taste the difference of fresh local food the same story is it they're parallel inspired by yeah Brazil's version of Pocahontas or the equivalent of Pocahontas is called Iracema which is this very romanticized okay here comes the colonizer he's just smitten by this warrior uh god is of a different race uh and then they have their their child together and then he goes back to Portugal and she dies so um it's this 19th century everything's kind of sad at some point there are parallels there because these were were women had many of them faced different options than men because of the of the history I just described there were women who ran away and who lived in what they called quilombos a quilombo is something that emerges in a space where you don't have any abolitionists around you most Americans think of escaping slavery as Frederick Douglass's story or of sojourner well not just sojourner truth but of of Harriet Tubman the underground uh railroad where the journey is north because in the north no matter how many problems there are in your life you won't be a slave right what happens if there's no place to run like that in the case of of Brazil they would run to wherever they could get away and in many cases uh people would form communities uh and in in some cases even uh live in in African based societies and the most famous one of those is in Palmares it was it was uh LED by a re uh a slave rebel named Zumbi who ruled as an African king over this gigantic swath of uh of land it was it was about the size of Rhode Island something like that and so uh first I want to say that yes there were female Maroons however uh they were women were pressured due to their context to take different avenues so if you're working in the house you're under more constant surveillance so you're gonna be watched more often and secondly you have a child in many cases because this is I mean we talk about birth control and women's right to control their own bodies today there was no debate over that if if you were uh if your body could produce a child it's very likely that you soon would in in this society so most women if you look at the historical documentation are most concerned about what's gonna happen to my children and so when you're put into that uh position you negotiate with an unjust system and so it might mean doing whatever pleases your enslaver so that you can get manumitted right manumission is just being being being um liberated from slavery you get a and you're in slavery in in the sense of your husband is that what the in the sense of yes well I mean uh he wouldn't be your husband because you're not married to him OK you're stuck in this this role of of lover concubine lover that that illegitimate uh relationship so you would negotiate with him so that either you could be manumitted and have more rights you're still a black woman in a racist society uh so you would have uh the right to I don't know open up a food stand right to this day in in Bahia which is the the has the largest concentration of black people because of this history of sugar uh you'll still see women selling a food called acaraje uh in the in the street um there were women selling akarashe some of whom were were still enslaved and they were were earning trying to earn their freedom in many cases uh and other other women were free women of color and so you would do that so that you have more opportunities primarily so that your child has better opportunities you could buy your child's freedom you could have the the father of the child uh recognize him with his name or be his godfather in a in a context everybody's Catholic it's a way of establishing social networks and benefits maybe he'll get to go to school right and learn a trade right most the vast majority of enslaved people couldn't read they weren't allowed to but if they could learn a trade like they could make something to sell at the market that's a better life yeah than than being an enslaved person on the on the plantation so this is the historical backdrop for the importance of black women in Brazilian society this barrier to the written language which today is continued as uh less access to uh to education or to quality education primarily through college right um I'm not saying there are not college educated black women there are but it's going to uh create a situation where people rely on oral traditions to inform their poetry but to inform their religion and their life so Brazil is the world's largest Catholic country with the caveat that many people are Catholic plus as they they say in orange and orange is the new black so you'll be Catholic but you are negotiating right Pocahontas may have had her own language she may have had her own she probably had her own religion uh before uh the christianizers uh came well in in the case of the African people uh what they would do is they would follow orders while the priest or their enslaver or whoever is in charge of them were around and so when there are feast days like saint days they will celebrate said saint but in order to preserve their African beliefs their African visions of the world um they would say OK well we're looking at Saint whoever it might be in the Spanish speaking world it would be Santa Barbara it's one of the famous ones in the Portuguese speaking world it would be Nossa Senhora da conceição right um they'll we're looking at a an apparition of the Virgin Mary uh but it really represents a an African goddess it really represents the sea or a river right and so a whole religion it evolved uh primarily from uh Yoruba people uh with influences from uh from what was called daome at the time and they preserved these these faiths as what's now called candomble which uh tends to um in many cases reject the association with Catholicism you've got umbanda which is still very much associated with Catholicism and so you'll see a lot of people that uh will go to church on Sunday and go to Catholic Mass they will also attend a service at a a Centro Espirita a spiritual center or a terreiro which would be an African based spiritual center so that they could preserve that African heritage in many cases even among white people because the the faith spread throughout the community and so this is another example of how these oral traditions along with the history of slavery yes along with a history of resistance to slavery have informed African women's experience in Brazil but their uh their influence is gigantic uh there are linguists that say that uh the Portuguese language spread throughout uh Brazil because of enslaved people learning the language right so if you look at the the the percentage of the population that was of African that is of African descent there are people that say maybe half of the country is has African descent if you look at that history of enslavement and how you're treated better if you speak Portuguese because this is not a great learning environment right yeah if you couldn't speak Portuguese they would call you bolsao which is the idiot right the the because you can't communicate with people and you're only good for grunt work right but if you can speak you can be used in a different way on the on's uh on the plantation you have better chances at freedom better chances for a better uh future for yourself and for your family and so it's no surprise that that African people and mixed race people learn the Portuguese language and spread it throughout the what was then the empire and think of the the importance of mothers and maternal figures you had black women in the 19th century I I know and and surely before that that would be wet nurses that would be what wet nurses so these are the women that would would nurse uh that would give breast milk to the uh the children because it was considered un uh improper for the white women to to do that and so these are the the literally the bodies that fed everybody in uh Brazil and in other contexts it would be indigenous women that did similar things but uh they they literally raised the children they were in charge of of helping them to learn language because they were they were charged with making sure the child is is cared for and so these are in many ways the mothers of of the nation and that's not to in any way insult white women or or the the women who through chance were born into a a higher rank cause you don't decide that yeah it's just I mean it's really a chance right whether this is the patriarchal society that people were were born into uh but it does uh shed a light on an a very underappreciated population until definitely until the last 70 years and more so in the last 20 years I say the last 70 years because that's uh taking into account the gigantic impact of one author the one of the most well known or or most uh one of the best sellers of uh Brazilian literature that's only recently been seen as Brazilian literature is the account of a a black woman who lived in a favela who lived in a slum and who made her living picking up trash she picked up paper to recycle it and her name was Carolina Maria Jezeus and I would say if not all black writers today all black female writers say I was influenced by this woman who despite all of these barriers that she faced and the very very difficult life she had this is a woman who had a had two had a had a second grade education was able to publish her diary who saw herself as an an author who no matter what she faced she still said I'm going to be a writer even if it means picking up the paper out of out of the trash and writing my stories on it and sending it off to be published because that's that's the life that she lived and many of these these writers today will look back at a at a person like that and say if she can do it I can that's motivation right there uh huh okay I have one more question on that topic and I'd like to know when we talk about that slavery has it evolved into a modern type of slavery or has it gone away completely in today's age many people will tell you that it's gone away in today's age Brazil has always been concerned about how it's seen by other countries and that has to do with the history of colonialism if all the money's in Europe you want to look good for Europe if all the money is in the United States you want to look good for them as well so uh Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery in the New World right so they made it to 1888 so they were just 20 years uh or so no they were doing the math uh is 12 years from entering the 20th century with slaves and a king right so again we're we're talking about spaces where you're trying to negotiate in a space where all the other countries have done something and they expect you to do something as well in this case the great abolitionists that were putting pressure on Brazil were not the United States it was England and they have a a an expression pra inglês pra inglês ver you make up the house so that your neighbors don't come over and see a dirty house in the same way uh when you've got a slave plantation you make sure that everybody has nice clothes they're well kept and if interviewed they say how are you being uh the outsiders say how are you being treated wonderfully well it's all scripted it's all scripted it's like right that's not the day to day the way they experience it that's just the face they're putting out in the world right so that's the facade the facade for the for the abolitionists and so there this myth emerged of a gentler slavery and the the icon of promoting this uh this way of of thinking is a man named Gilberto Freyre and he wrote a a book called The Masters and the slaves and it's it has ramifications for all of of Latin America because it creates the myth of a slave plantation as a family a the myth of a slavery that just wasn't as bad as other kinds of slavery well then you would ask yourself well where's the the bad slavery in this equation the bad slavery is in the United States we had a civil war we had uh all kinds of of documentation largely from the abolitionists of how badly enslaved people were treated in this country in the case of of Brazil they would say well look we have all these mixed race people in our country surely that means that since everybody has a little bit of uh black ancestry that you can't hate yourself you can't be racist if you're part black that convinces some people in Brazil to this day uh and you'll you'll hear people say that we are a racial democracy the opposite of a racial democracy is a racial dictatorship which would be the Jim Crow South and uh later on the Nazis well you can still be racist and not be as bad as the Nazis however we met we yeah measure these things right uh but that'll be a way of uh of dismissing people's arguments saying you know why aren't there more black professors why aren't there more uh black politicians um why is it that people who are mixed race will tend to say oh I'm not black I'm mixed when in the United States many of these people would identify as black this created what they call a mestizo myth or mestizo myth where everybody's supposed to be mixed up even when they're not even when most people in the upper middle class to the rich people everybody's white if you're in a space like Bahia where the population again is vast majority is black people and then you would have maybe a mixed race person who is a upper middle class that mixed race person in many cases will because of their environment they'll say I'm not I'm not black they'll even say they're they're white in some cases and definitely in the past they would because it's a way of denying being associated with those below you on the social scale so uh we talked today about the the myth of racial democracy many people to this day say that it exists that there's no racism in Brazil you hear something similar in Puerto Rico and throughout the Caribbean there's no racism here Castro said he fixed racism in 1962 it took him like the revolution's 59 it took him less than three years to fix racism well that's quite an accomplishment there regardless of your ideology right whether it's a country where you're uh a dictatorship who's a military dictatorship whether it's a communist dictatorship whether it's an actual political democracy people tend to deny racism by saying that racism is something that is a United States problem or a South Africa problem we don't have that problem because our slavery was better or not as bad that's typically how it is our slavery was not as bad that's their perception from out there yes OK it's it's a common perception and because everyone is related to a black person somehow then surely we can't be racist I can't be racist against myself the the reality is if you view yourself as superior to others that's typically gonna be associated with your skin color even if you're not conscious of that fact and we we hear about uh color blind racism in the United States we'll we'll have people who think that black people are dangerous they don't wanna live next to black people in their mind they're not being racist they're just being safe right so okay I I said that was my last question on the topic but I actually have a follow up to that cause you're going into the topic when you talk about color blindness you know if I think of a child the child doesn't see the color they're just learning about the world they're innocent in many ways about just the people about the danger do you think it's something that is picked up on people adults that surround themselves that then they become having clear positioning on topics such as race or is it related to the experience they go through themselves I'm curious what do you think affect that shift because it doesn't happen I don't think you're born with it you know that's where I'm going with this I don't think you're born with it so somehow you develop a sense for having an opinion on a topic whether it's good or bad uh huh how what have you seen or or what's your thought on that I think that we are are born into an unjust world uh huh and so even if we're not overtly saying or doing racist things I think that when people say I'm not racist in some in some cases they think I've never yelled a bad word at somebody I've never denied somebody a job because they're of their race that kind of thing uh but even if you're not aware of of your the consequences of your actions on other people uh you can still hurt people just like a little kid can accidentally hurt somebody when they're playing sports uh and I think that that raises a a similar question you need to ask the person that got hurt as well as the person who uh accidentally hurt that person even if they weren't aware of uh that they of of their actions so I think that we can't forget people's inherent value as humans uh and that believing in a shared humanity which could be interpreted as a kind of color blindness is something that the world needs more of I I think that if you hear in the news that empathy is weakness or compassion is weakness you're going in the wrong direction as a society but I think that a child is born into that unjust world and needs to be uh educated as to the history of why do we live in this neighborhood and not this other one uh why do you go to this school but not this other one uh or what's the value in the fact that your school has people from different backgrounds in it different cultures different languages that are associated yes with people who look differently uh and to view that diversity as a as a positive uh thing I think that has to be an active process because the child is innocent but the child is born into this unjust world someone's going to tell them uh or do something around them that's going to teach them that their body determines where they're gonna fit in society whether that means as a boy or a girl or another gender right or as a black or white person what does it mean to to be neither of those in a system that is was initially made for those those two options right and I think that educating people to be aware of cultural and racial differences is very important because you can be color blind yes but take actions that are still harmful to other groups and then without realizing it you've continued the cycle of an unjust world we can't fix everything but we can make things better now let's do a fun game that I call Truth Dare or debunk for each round you'll either choose a truth where you share a surprising cultural fact a dare like teaching us a phrase in your favorite language or a debunk where you clarify a common stereotype about your culture you're Native American but obviously you're well versed in many other cultures so if you want to add from other languages other cultures or perspectives you are more than welcome to do that which one should we start with truth dare or debunk hmm let's start with debunk debunk so debunking a myth about your culture what would it be I would say that as a college professor mm hmm I just wanna say that there's a a myth right now that college is just a place where you go to get your job skills where you learn how to make money and then you go out in the world and make money and I just wanted to remind everybody that life's more than that and I I think the students know that I respect that we all have bills to pay and I know that we we live in a in a country that has a lot of student debt I respect all of these things I want everybody to be able to pay their bills but I think the college is also a place to grow into adulthood of course you're an adult when you start but I think that you're at a a place in life that is really unique and I I encourage students to get to travel uh because this is the point in your life where it's uh it's gonna be easiest to to travel I hope you find someone you love I hope you find a great job as a student and that you're very happy but when you have these things in your life you have to think about more than yourself if you're a a young person who is in college or who just got out of college it's just you and you are discovering the world and you're discovering new things for the first time take a gap here go abroad learn another language meet people that you never uh would have met otherwise because it's not your last chance to do it but it's a great chance to do it and after that yes become a doctor become a lawyer become something that makes you happy and pays the bills but take time for yourself and view education as a chance to grow into a more complex version of yourself and I I think in some ways a a more beautiful version of your of yourself because you will change uh through travel and through meeting new people through culture and language that is well said should we do a dare sure could you teach us a phrase in your native language or any language that you like I'm pretty sure there by listening is gonna gonna speak pretty good uh English that's right haha um what and one of my favorites in in English is uh is quicker than a dog's hind leg oh OK that's an expression say that one more time see I'm I'm I'm switching coats alright so we got quicker than the longest quicker than a dog's hind leg you say that someone is a liar or is false then you would say that person's crooked you typically hear about crooked politicians right or maybe a crooked lawyer that kind of is kind of creative with the rules right so that's that that person's crooked right um but you know where I come from in South Georgia you say that person's crooked in a dog's hind leg'cause uh uh it's not like a person's leg that's nice and straight you get that little bend back there uh huh haha okay so if I try to say it you said it very fast I don't know that I pick I mean I picked up on it if you say it slow or I'm gonna try to repeat it sure crooketer crooketer then a dog's then a dog's hind leg hind leg right so it's hind it's hind quarters like behind right yeah uh leg okay nice nice okay how about the truth now sure what is a surprising cultural fact that people should know about that is actually true that is actually true so something that people think is true and it's true so you want to reinforce it you've you've got to read a lot in college and I have a lot of students that are are shocked because I teach uh classes that are like are in in uh English but they're about culture I've taught several Brazilian culture classes uh I'm teaching introduction an introduction to World Cultures in um in the fall uh and students will be shocked and I don't know if they're just trying to play the system or if they're just being honest but I'll get comments at the end of the of the semester and they'll say there is so much reading in this class so I'll cut the readings in half next semester there's so much reading in this class so I I why are students having that reaction I think part of it's generational um I am I was born in 1981 whatever that makes me uh we have uh millennials we have Gen X we have all this and that we have all these labels but I I remember a time before uh before smartphones and so I I've always loved the library to this day I think it uh that the the library is it's a safe place uh for kids to just go explore whatever is is interesting to them and and to entertain themselves right but I think that smartphones as a society I'm I'm addicted I'm not gonna judge anybody but I think that smartphones have caused us to read constantly in small chunks yeah and I think that especially as students come in at 18 and most of their social interaction either has been on their cell phones in written language or otherwise they're consuming media that is taking a TikTok or whatever we're becoming more impatient as a society because we're used to pressing a button and getting what we want even if that's an image or a word right and so if you have to sit down with a novel and just dive into that novel and just sit with it um not every student has had that experience or not every student has done that for fun mm hmm and I think that reading is something that more and more students view as something that you do for work instead of for pleasure and so as a uh literature scholar person who loves books so much that he writes books about books haha yes that's literature it just goes on forever yeah uh that's something that I'm I'm still figuring out how to to reach the students and say there is a value in being immersed in information even if you're not reading literature maybe you're not into fiction OK immersed in history immersed in society immersed in theories of whatever you wanna study immersed in science get immersed in that please so uh I think that the habit of constantly reading and then if you go to uh graduate school you read and eat and sleep finding a passion that can keep you engaged even when okay I've gone through a quite a few pages here is part of what college is for is finding what you love and being immersed in it through language and readings the cornerstone I'm sorry yeah you have to you have to go through it what about audio listening for the books is this something that is possible and welcome maybe there are some limitations but I'm just you saying that make me realize how much I used to read books like big books and especially starting in high school during that time and then the more time went by the more I diminished the amount of reading not that I didn't like cause I used to love reading and I was like a big writer in French cause that's just the the equivalent of your English right now I'm really much so all about audiobooks uh huh because I can multitask I can be at the gym I can be cooking I can be relaxing doing something else and also listening I can uh huh so what kind of uh options do students have maybe it hasn't reached that point yet but I'm just curious if that's something I think that's a an opportunity for teachers to be creative and to make the class more relevant I've I've uh taught classes where the final project was a podcast I've collaborated with uh Doctor John Moore's uh class uh where we we uh got to meet people from uh the local NPR station uh and and you know they gave the the students a a workshop on how to make a podcast I have the students make imovies uh I'm sure that Android will come out with whatever they call those movies but yeah uh you you take a classic idea which is you learn a language through a skit you have all the fun and the and the kids get in in um I say the kids the students get in touch with their their uh inner children right you get to play it uh at school maybe one last time before you go off to be an oncologist or something that's very serious business and you get to film it and you and some of the students are very well informed with technology and so you can have special effects you can edit it they discover literature in a different way because of uh these skits uh as for uh the the role of audiovisual media in in learning I think it's a fantastic resource for uh language learning without a doubt because my argument for literature was well you won't always have a Mexican friend to bother to speak Spanish with right at some point they want to be left alone right or you won't always have a Brazilian to talk to so the book is there to keep your Spanish or Portuguese up uh when people are not around well we live in a world where you can see just about anything on the planet in your cell phone and the benefit to that is you can actually hear the language a lot more uh which is gonna help you to understand understand people when they talk understand native speakers uh you'll understand your vocabulary will grow so that people will uh speak fast around you that's always the complaint when you start out so gosh they talk so fast is that audio visual will allow you to slow it down like most YouTube videos you put it on 3/4 so it doesn't sound like they're underwater and you can pick up a lot of language that way so I think audio that digital media is really the place where most things that involve language will go in the future more and more uh and I think that there's a great opportunity there so long as we kind of temper it with being able to consume a long text and the patience that comes uh with that but I think that YouTube is fantastic and the more the area grows we're we're just going to have better and better resources for for learning languages let's do two more truth dare or debunk I'll let you pick one and I'll I'll pick the second dare dare okay dare to teach a phrase or an expression in your native or favorite language what is the color of a burrow that runs away oh that's a joke hahaha what is the color it's that color between brown and gray huh that exists in Portuguese oh nice that's the name of the color that's the name of the color oh my goodness this is a long word it sounds like a sentence wow that's an interesting fact right there mm hmm now I need to try to pronounce it that's a hard one a a Koh koh okay so decolor a cor de burro de burro uh huh so burro is the burrow okay right quando foge quando foge when he runs away when he runs away okay so that was a sentence mm hmm well yeah but that's what is the color that's the color even though the first part you said the color so that was like a sentence you were making correct well that's that's how you say it yeah I mean like if you did a little sentence diagram like it's just the color and then all these other words are describing the color so it's that's the the phrase like everything would be called an adjectival right it's describing that one word that is so cool yeah if you if you if you don't trust somebody if you compare at rice I've got one foot behind me in case I need to run away right haha you're like on the defense right a little bit a debunk okay what is a stereotype you'd like to debunk about your culture okay about my culture I'm I'm speaking as a college professor because that's that's been a huge influence in my life I think that politics is politics and I know that people have got to get elected I respect that um I think that we're in a context in a world that is uh what I would call no holds barred so anything that gets people upset at the other side and or somehow benefits you people will say or do it and that's that's politics and that the media is is part of that but I think that a message that students have gotten whether it's from the media whether it's from concerned parents that are very just looking out for their their kids uh welfare is that if you go to college we're there to to brainwash you you'll hear the word indoctrinate a lot now and I've never indoctrinated anybody in anything right um the fear is that we're going to make you a communist which is not anyone's goal haha even if that person is communist I don't think that they have that much control over the student I think the student knows who they are um that's not my goal or that we're going to like you'll you'll hear spurious things that the teacher is going to make you gay or trans like people everybody's talking about trans people there's a lot of of transphobia in in the world um I can't make you be anything that you don't wanna be I can respect you I can let you express yourself I can let you be whoever you want to in my my classroom uh but I think that uh these are two examples of education being politicized because everything is politicized I uh I always tell my students that there was a time when a chicken sandwich was it was not a political issue there were no conservative or Liberal tennis shoes there were just shoes right we live in a world of symbols right and that's the the genius of uh of so many political uh thinkers in these uh whether they're politicians or in there if they're in think tanks or whatever is they found a way to make every symbol possible political and I make my living off of symbols right of conveying words to students conveying language culture uh literature yes so I the arts all of these things so I think that there is a myth that I'm trying to make students uh conform to some kind of uh political party or ideology I want there to be better informed liberals and conservatives and people who think up other parties and other uh ways of being in a community that we haven't even thought of yet and I want to encourage students to explore their independent thought about these issues and that doesn't mean copying and pasting what I think that means coming up with their own idea and that is scary sometimes because copying and pasting the right answer has all too often been what students think school is for and it's much bigger than that it's about becoming who you wanna be you don't wanna fall in conformity it should be an anti conformist enterprise yes that's a great message thanks for playing along this was our truth there and debunk segment now let's go back to the conversation so diaspora means people who've left their homeland either by force or voluntarily and keep ties to their culture when these authors write about migration the authors that you study do they see it more as a loss a new beginning or something in between I would say that the experience of the the African diaspora is different from people who migrate for for economic reasons in one key fact is the fact that enslaved Africans were taken as captives so even if you leave Central America in today's context because you feel unsafe in El Salvador because there are gangs on some level uh you are making the choice to leave versus the the history of the African continent of of sub saharan Africa which was radically altered by uh by European enslavers so the the Portuguese and then very soon after the um the Portuguese were uh were kind of the the people that supplied the rest of uh the Iberian empires uh including Spain and Cuba does not get a pass on this they had a they they abolished slavery only shortly before Brazil did but the fact that entire societies were changed by African enslavement so you've got the Europeans on the coast who are buying captives and so you would have hunters African hunters uh in the hinterlands going to find more and more people to sell to these guys on uh on the coast this is in no way to blame uh slavery on uh African peoples but it's to show how the arrival of this very small population of of uh white people of European people who figured out how to manipulate local politics uh LED to the world that we live in uh today they figured out they could manipulate warring tribes and whoever is losing the battle is shipped out that changed the way that the African diaspora is remembered by those who for decades uh in in most cases centuries have not been enslaved uh so there are are still people uh in Brazil whose great grandmothers were enslaved as children because of the the late abolition so I think that a different a key difference between the African diaspora and say the Cuban diaspora the Cuban diaspora for many years for the the you had the golden generation like the first people that left are the people that don't benefit from communism so you've got rich people that leave the uh the island so they could continue their businesses here and most of those people were white then you got the children who came over with with Pedro Pan uh so these are people that have a lot of privilege and I and there's no reason to hold that against them but their experience was very different from uh the slavery experience um and so that's remembered with a lot of pain uh one of the emotions that I I write about in my my uh forthcoming book is called uh Bonsu Bonsu right i think in english should be bansu right the pronunciation uh which is uh what poet konseil saint-varisto uh calls the unique depression or melancholy that uh black people feel because of this history of slavery and racism it's debatable what the the parameters are for that I mean is is this just part of the human experience that's been uh shaped by this his this history uh is it um something that is true a an emotion that is unique to a an ethnicity these are things that I'm I'm still uh hashing out in my in my book but that is something that is uh related to the the his the unique experience of black peoples in the the Americas uh is this notion of a a diaspora that is uh rooted in slavery in my estimation because in my estimation uh before historically before uh slavery through all of these different nations tribes groups languages religions together uh and created this community or this identity which was black there was no black community in Africa it would be like saying there was a white community in in Europe no there was uh before there was France and Germany there were uh all these different principalities right people organized themselves in uh in different ways for me um the the diaspora begins with uh enslavement other people will take a more Afrocentric uh rude and they'll say well I don't want to be defined by slavery my my people were the Ashantis that were never in that fought off slavery for as long as as possible or my people were uh this pre slavery African society uh and that's that's their right to to relate to history in that way um but for me in enslavement the middle passage is something that is definitive for the African diaspora so um that is related to in Brazil because you've got a lot of writers that feel like they're creating something out of nothing or out of near nothing because they went through a traditional school maybe even a traditional uh college literature program and everybody was uh that they read was white or if uh they were mixed race people uh they would be people that um who their blackness was very very downplayed the the most famous writer in Brazil is a man named uh Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and throughout most of the 20th century people just presumed he was white because he was a writer hmm he spoke fluent French in addition to Portuguese and he Learned uh several other languages uh and so people were just taught to associate brilliance with being white recently uh in the last 25 years or so uh he's been it's been rediscovered that he was called mulatto in his context um that's a hurtful word now most people who are mixed race will will prefer um Pardu brown but in his case that's that's what uh what he was called and so uh that's an example of why black authors in general but black women in particular will look back on what's called literature and say there's nobody here that looks like me or that has an experience like mine conceição Evaristo has a another term called escrevivência it's a mixture of the word uh vivencia experience and escribir or es eh escrito uh which is to write writing my experience which is different from what we call the cannon from literature right the big names in in literature uh and so when women are told that people like them don't write then they have to create a relationship with the past and they have to create a relationship with writing that is different from a white author of of more privilege and so they will relate to their their ancestors uh as a diaspora population in a way that is in many ways unique it's gonna draw on uh family in many cases as opposed to necessarily dialoguing with a famous writer although some of them will rewrite a lot of famous books it's going to be uh stories that they they heard of migrating inside Brazil uh you've got uh the northeast of Brazil which is uh largely black along the coast and sadly the whole region has suffered a lot of poverty uh in the hinterlands it's gonna be drought right you've got what they call the sertao like a dryer region and sometimes it'll uh be good to raise crops in sometimes it'll be good to uh to raise cattle in and then the drought comes and you have to feed yourself and so the solution historically has been to go to the southeast uh that's where Rio is and that's where SAO Paulo is and so you got SAO Paulo which is one of these megalopolises that's uh that it's one of it's one of the largest cities in the world and so you have all of these people who are treated like bumpkins hmm right because they they grew up in the country they didn't grow up with with modern conveniences um and that's that was more prominent throughout the 20th century um but a lot of of Afro Brazilians had that experience of internal uh migration uh as well of uh sometimes be migrating to white spaces where they'll you'll you'll see especially in school you'll hear about people saying I was the only black kid in my class and so that's an internal diaspora an internal uh migration that some people have experienced conceiving various tools from Minas which is uh at the center of the country she was very poor she grew up in a favela uh she moved to Rio and eventually uh earned a PhD in comparative literature uh she's a uh a recently celebrated um example of uh of a a great writer and people who've overcome all kinds of uh of barriers but she's very quick to to point out why did it take you so long to recognize me wow and it and I think every every artist who thinks that they've done something important she's done important things yeah uh may say well I was I knew I was great before everybody else did it's not that she's she's pointing out why is it that I'm almost eighty and I'm being recognized as an author why did it take me so long to get through school to get through to start sending out my manuscripts to finally get a publisher to reach to jump through all of these hoops if I were a white author especially a white author with money I would have done this decades before and so she's using this platform as a very thought provoking thought provoking uh space to uh make us think critically about race and and literature she literally ran for the Academia Brasilia de Letras to be selected by this group of great authors in Brazil it's modeled on on French uh examples of the great minds right and in order to be to be tapped to join this select group you have to be a great author but you also have to be accepted by the other great authors and she was rejected and especially the the black community was in an uproar cause this is like turning down Toni Morrison I mean she's got the this this mural in in uh in Rio and and he was Janet there's this giant mural on the on the side of a building uh because people know her work they love it and it's it's sophisticated why wasn't she picked and so that's an example of being a diasporic uh writer a lot of the struggles that black writers go through to this day do and I'm not very familiar with the process of that of being accepted in that circle and how that works is there on top of that any sort of luck that might make it where okay like there's an open space now because that person dropped down uh or what what would you say about that they're members for life so oh OK so sadly OK so that's not enough sadly if someone dies then a space opens up OK um but right now a similar uh debate is going on with the author I wrote my first book about her name is Ana Maria Guil Salvesh and she wrote uh it it feels sometimes like Ana Maria is trying to say everything that black women couldn't say before her all in one novel the novel is almost 1,000 pages long and it's uh the uh 19th century and it's an enslaved woman named Louisa Mahin or Mahin I think it'd be in in Portuguese pronunciation and she is historical in the sense that a person who really lived Luis Gama he was a a famous abolitionist think of a a Frederick Douglas right um he was a an abolitionist lawyer um and he wrote his biography um in a letter to a guy named Luis Mendonsa and he uh he mentions in 7 lines of text that his mother was a slave rebel and that she uh had participated and a revolt and in the novel that revolt is a historical revolt in which a bunch of uh Muslim Africans in Bahia in the place where at the time most people were enslaved Africans to this day most people are black the goal seemed to be to overthrow the government and to establish a Caliphate to make it like a Middle Eastern country in the middle of Catholic empire in the middle of the Americas to tell the story of such a fascinating woman she takes 1,000 pages uh to tell the story of her life before she was enslaved so you learn about the um the African continent have a representation of the Middle Passage you have a representation of uh what it was like to be a mother who is enslaved who loses her child because historically uh uh Louis was sold into uh slavery by his own father and was shipped out and found his way to são Paulo right and the story of the novel is uh Luisa his mother traveling Brazil in search of her lost son sadly she gives up hope on finding him there and returns to the African continent so because of this great novel Ana Maria Goncalves has been considered for a spot in the Academia Brasileira de Letras we still don't know if she'll be selected but uh that the the shadow of what happened with Conseil son uh continues to to be there and to be a uh to be a to be a wound for many people because that's the message is that if you're black you can't be a great author and that's simply not true and you mentioned I need to ask you mentioned an author that I do not know Frederick Douglass I think is who you mentioned so what's the similarity or so Frederick Douglass is probably the uh the the most read abolitionist writer of the of the 19th century today he is a person who gives him he gives a narrative of the life it's is is his book in which he talks about what life was like on a plantation as an enslaved man and eventually he escaped to the abolitionist north the abolitionist already were gathering materials on life was like for enslaved people because they wanted to prove to the government to the world that this was an intolerable institution the most popular way of looking at slavery amongst white populations in the 19th century was called tolerationism tolerationism is having what today we would call the common sense of saying if if you hit someone with a whip it hurts right if you punish them by by beating them obviously this is bad so people knew slavery was bad but it was considered a necessary evil there was even debate when America was founded if if they should have uh have slavery or not because it obviously flies in the face of a democratic country yeah but people tolerated it as a necessary evil and the best uh parallel I can can establish for students today is look at how much blood has been shed over oil we know that that oil and things made of it lead to terrible things nowadays but no one I know has come up with a great substitute to do away with it so it just goes on and on uh slavery is is obviously a different situation but it was viewed in a parallel manner well uh what people did in the south to try to shift the debate is to do something very similar to what they did in Brazil which is to say the the captive we would say today but the slave is part of the family he's well treated he's fed why would we break our machines why would we mistreat the slaves that feed us and get us money well obviously they were mistreating them and the abolitionists of the north and the abolitionists of England wanted to show that to the rest of the world and so they used the media just like politicians use the media today and different groups do as well and so they have a uh Frederick Douglass who was the perfect source the perfect voice of a man who lived under slavery he tells his story under slavery of how terrible things were and he went on a speaking tour he was a celebrity of telling the anyone who would be willing to listen to us primarily in the in the north that this institution is wrong and it has to end and so I'm sure that his work had a huge impact in the United States he's he's one of the most recognizable figures of the slave narrative and he was even made ambassador to Haiti because um the United States has had this historical relationship with Haiti as a black republic this notion of a black republic even Abraham Lincoln considered sending the black population there after the the Civil War because it was there it had so much in common uh with our country so Frederick Douglass is an internationally known um abolitionist uh thinker and Louis Gama is as well Louis Gama was self taught he uh joined the police police academy to to gain an education became a lawyer and he liberated many enslaved people in são Paulo which in the 19th century in Brazil is is a huge impact thanks for all that background and context sure looking at literature from Brazil Colombia and Puerto Rico what differences stand out to you and how writers talk about races class or even gender uh huh I think that they they're all peninsular they they all have a peninsular background because they were all peninsular colonies what does that mean what do you mean peninsular mean like Iberian is the better word um that we we talk about uh like in uh France will talk about the hexagon right so we we talk about shapes right so I'll I'll talk to a non specialist about the hexagon and he's like you mean France hahaha it's it's the same thing with with Spain we'll talk about the Peninsular we're talking about Spain if we're talking about it talking in Spanish and Portugal of course is part of the Iberian Peninsula so these are people that are deeply influenced by Portugal and Spain uh so they have that in common they they're all Catholic uh nations that all have uh sizable uh evangelical Christians that's been a huge impact from the United States in the last 30 to 40 years um making a lot of inroads there Brazil is almost half evangelical Christian of some stripe which is really important in a in the largest Catholic country in the world but I think that they all have in common the shared history of what they believed or believed or what they were told was a slavery that was not as bad as in the United States and they were told that because they are are mixed race and mixed cultures that they live in harmony and that there's no tension there one reason is because when nations decided to create a uh an identity for themselves they had to say what was unique about them and in the Americas the unique thing was all of these these cultures that were in contact right so you'll hear the word mestizo mestizo because it just means mixed right so beyond biology of okay my dad looks this way mom looks this way or vice versa it's a reference to cultural context of okay we eat food with uh uh ingredients from two different continents right we listen to music with an African drum or uh or with a Spanish guitar all of them share uh this background as uh Catholic nations as Iberian nations in two cases Spanish speaking nations so uh or Spanish speaking spaces depending on how you want to talk about Puerto Rico it's always a unique place to talk about so I would say that that Colombia is uh in my experience the place that's most deeply Catholic and so that conservatism in that country is deeply associated with the Catholic Church specifically I think it has to do with being a a place where the Inquisition was based like they had a palace of the Inquisition there but it's a deeply Catholic nation it's a very conservative place but you still get uh very radical thinkers like Manuel Zapata Olivella Manuel Zapata Olivella is important to the African diaspora in general because he wrote a novel called Chango and Gran Putas or in English colonizing the African diaspora and I see that smile because you're like that's not what you said hahaha OK yeah I recognize the word in there right so in Chagual Gran Putas um it a literal translation would be closer to Chango the greatest Devil or the biggest devil right cause in Putas yes it's a bad word because it means ladies of the night among other translations right um is uh is you're good with words you know that it is a uh a a way of talking about like in English we say old scratch right it'd be an old word for the devil right well Chango is the the devil in the sense that he's been resisting the colonizer at every level including religion right I talked before about how Africans had their own religions before they were enslaved and so in this novel you have African spirits that are controlling they're pulling the strings of history right and they are supporting the African diaspora from slavery through national liberation through um emancipation in the in the United States all the way up to Angela Davis cause the novel came out in 1983 so Angela Davis uh was recent history like her her imprisonment and subsequent release was recent history of course Angela Davis is alive and well and still giving lectures right here in Birmingham so that novel is is black history as he understood it and as a constant struggle for liberty that builds on African culture and African influences to create freedom now Manuel Zapata Olivella is an extremely rare case because he was a he was born in 1920 and he lived near Cartagena de Indias right he lived he's from a town called lorica and that's a Cartagena de Indias is kind of like if you cut and pasted San Juan in Colombia I've been to Cartagena there you go actually yeah right well just for the listener OK it's not it's not Bogota Bogota is cut and paste New York up in the Andes right it feels Caribbean they talk Caribbean they love to dance uh the the music they they a lot of people like a little bit of rum every now and then and so it it feels like you're in the in the Caribbean uh but in this space uh black man who eventually would be a black man with an Afro because that was part of his activism to be trained as a medical doctor right he went to the university and it's the same story he went he was taught at home by his his father and he went to the university in in Bogota and he was the only he was one of two black people in his entire class right so he's a an exceptional person that in his success kind of proves the rule that there were immense barriers of class and race to an education at the time and he overcame a lot and he even rebelled against his own father in that his father wanted to participate in what they call black uplift no one else is gonna help us so we've got to help ourselves to rise through uh education professional success to overcome uh the barriers it results in very model people it sometimes leaves out a place for rebellion and his rebellion was it's like Motorcycle Diaries where you see like Che Guevara just riding a motorcycle throughout Latin America he does that it basically wanders through Central America wanders through Mexico and continues to wander in some in some form of fashion through the rest of his life throughout the United States Latin America Africa he later married a Spanish woman and so he is a very very unique person who was in the club de Negros uh he was deeply influenced by Langston Hughes from the United States the great writer so you've got an intellectual cadre of black activists that were very passionate but very reduced in their their impact in Colombia partially because you've got places it's a very fragmented country it feels like five or six different countries kind of stuck together right in terms of the way people look the way they talk and the the land that they live in the environments that they live in so on the Pacific Coast you've got a large black population where the infrastructure is gonna feel more like Haiti in a lot of places keep dull you'll have people that don't have plumbing or electricity in their houses and that's not uncommon and so to reach that population Manuel Zapata Olivella does what he can do as an individual and as an individual working in intellectual spaces black activism and black history and education doesn't really pick up steam until the turn of of the 21st century at the end of the 1980s you got a new constitution in Colombia you have a law called a Law 70 which says that black rights are also protected by the Constitution where there's an illegal incentive to identify as black right because if you are if you say I am black and I get turned down for a job for being black or someone accosted me for being black then the government can intervene right sure that has an impact on education so you have what's called ethno education ethnicity education like ethno education which is what we would call black history black studies uh that is being very slowly very in a very imbalanced manner being spread out through schooling uh to these more marginalized uh areas and it's having a broader impact than Zapata could have had alone or even as as an intellectual and intellectual circles so Colombia has been a leader in the last 20 years in the United Nations interventions in Latin America to promote the study and understanding of black culture and black rights Puerto Rico has a different story because of its connections with the United States so Puerto Rico you have people who are reacting directly to the Harlem Renaissance right we're talking 1920s uh you've got uh the Schomburg Library in uh New York the famous collection of uh books by and about black people okay uh Arturo Schomburg was Puerto Rican and Afro Puerto Rican um who was part of the Harlem Renaissance you've got the 1960s and 1970s you've got the Young Lords which were Puerto Ricans who were activists that had some of them had afros like they were styling themselves after the Black Power movement uh you got Martha Moreno Vega who's an author and an activist and a scholar on art that has done a lot for visual art largely because of the influence of growing up in Harlem surrounded by yes Puerto Ricans but also African Americans so there's been cross pollination in the United States and you've got precursors in Puerto Rico on the island so there's this kind of island versus United States divide like if you're Puerto Rican and live in the United States you see the world differently than on the island but in the last 15 years in Puerto Rico because of the United Nations support uh because of the melon uh the Melon Foundation support financial support you see uh great conferences happening like the Cumbrae Afro you see your first black studies program Afro Descendencia y racialidad they call it they had they they wanted to put their own spin on it so they came up with their own name and so you can you can study African American studies in Puerto Rico you've got all these great activist groups that have done so much to preserve and expand black culture there Puerto Rico has seen itself as a non black country for many reasons uh one of which is its black population is smaller than Cuba's because it was not the gigantic sugar plantation and tobacco plantation that Cuba was but they did have a black population and they they uh many people would uh think that okay the black people are just these people in this little area that have been uh it's called Luisa uh which is yes a great source of uh folklore there's been a lot of denial of people's family past because historically if you said oh and I'm I'm I'm mixed and I'm much lighter than so and so right I'm higher up the chain than someone else then that history still carries a lot of weight but in but because of the relationship with the United States there have been more black thinkers and earlier black thinkers Brazil it's kind of a midpoint between the two in some ways Brazil has always talked about uh black people in their midst because they couldn't ignore ignore them it's the largest black population outside of Africa but the things that they've said around them uh have changed so in the 1960s uh and even before that you've got a group called the Teatro Experimental do Negro 10 uh it's an experimental theater group LED by a a man named Abel Jes do Nascimento Abdias right and this guy is sometimes you you may wonder well what would Martin Luther King have done had he lived right thankfully Abdias did live through uh through many trials uh but he started a theater group for for black people uh and he eventually went into politics and he became a senator and so you have a a great leader of the 1960s that is informed yes by the Cuban revolution and he he calmed down after that after uh you you read his early stuff and it's like yeah you like Marx a lot man that doesn't necessarily get you elected senator so as he evolved he kind of uh took okay we'll step away from Marx but we're gonna step a little closer to Afrocentric thought which I think was more in line with his goal from the get go which is to promote African culture and African rights uh Afro Brazilian uh culture and rights and so you've got him as a precursor but you've got another important publication in the 1980s called Cadernos Negros which published a lot of the the authors that I write about and so you've got black culture being very visible Carnival has been very visible the syncretic religions in Brazil like Candomble are very very visible what has been lacking has been political activism and political organization and you see that much more uh after the the first victory of Lula I know that there are gonna be Brazilians that listen to this and say but he's corrupt and he did this and he did that and I like the other guy I'm not saying that Lula is perfect but it was politically advantageous to him to promote black culture to allow black culture to be visible in government supported things so in 2003 you have a law that comes out that says all public schools need to teach black history and black culture again much like in Colombia you have a great law on paper the implementation has been uneven depending on the opinion of the school uh but it has created backlash in some cases where people will talk about Brazil paralelo parallel Brazil and I'm thinking parallel reality you may want to work on your branding guys where it's like no we won't talk about black people it's all gonna be conquistadors and that kind of thing so that's that's happening now but in in Brazil you've got a much stronger Protection for black rights and for diversity in general because of the mistakes that the Workers Party has made which is Lula's party there's been a lot of backlash to that party and there there's been a conservative backlash which in some cases is just gonna be racist you've got neo Nazis in Brazil you've got fascists in Brazil you've got people that are undeniably racist but you've got other more conservative people that say something went wrong under Lula let's try somebody else and so that's going to affect black people because you'll have somebody saying that maybe we should shoot more criminals and the criminals turn out to all be black right or we need to do more things to help people buy guns which in many cases will lead to a lot more Black Death Bolsonaro is famous for being asked well what would you do if your son dated a black woman uh Bolsonaro is white uh what what would your what would your son do if uh what would you do if your son dated a black woman he says I raised him better than that I I'm not gonna put everybody in a box people voted for Bolsonaro for multiple reasons but that's gonna affect uh how black rights are are are perceived and how it affects black lives and it makes black rights partisan right there could be a conservative Black Caucus there are individual black people that uh supported the the Bolsonaro government but I think that both the advances and the backlash to the party that was partially responsible for those advances are definitely informing uh Brazilian politics today in a way that uh is not identical in Colombia and in Puerto Rico they're not immune to our own conservative and Liberal discourses and I am sure that there are many Puerto Rican people that say I don't think that race should be a factor in people's opportunities in life and so therefore we should not take actions to protect oh okay black rights what I always tell my students because I'm not there to indoctrinate them yeah yeah is that elections have consequences and so if Donald Trump is president and his presence even when he was not in office has demonstrably changed our our politics in the United States there gonna be ramifications because Bolsonaro said hey I'm I'm just tropical Trump and so when I use my style of you know being the the guy who says things that others are too afraid to say when I reject this other party that I'm doing so as a an imitator of Donald Trump then you see that okay you drop a stone in the water but there are ripples and so that's affecting Puerto Rico and that's affecting Brazil right now I think this ties very well into you mentioned a little earlier your new book that you're working on can you elaborate and share a little bit about what it is about and also when it's coming out currently it's it's called affect and diaspora in Brazil uh I believe it will come out in in 2026 and it is an approach to Afro Brazilian women's lyric poetry uh through what we call affect theory when we say theory in literature classes we tend to mean philosophy right somewhere between literature uh between philosophy and sociology and I picked lyric poetry because black women from the 19th century have in almost every case written lyric poetry so that's gonna be Maria Fehimina ducege uh which is a woman who was an abolitionist and who wrote novels but very few people have written about her poetry all the way up to uh what they call Sarau Sarau's are like a soiree it's a it's where you would uh it's a poetry reading in a celebratory uh environment it's very popular in the favelas now and among blacks amongst black populations because it's very influenced in many cases by not only by activists but by hip hop rap is poetry and it might it may not be the the kind of poetry that that one expected but it's poetry you've got that movement of the set owls and you've also got slam Slam poetry what is slam slam poetry is popular poetry it's an imagine an open mic night you stand up and you either read a poem or more more classically you recite a poem of your own authorship it's a kind of a competition to see whose poem is the best you have judges just like the hold up a sign with you get a 10 or you get an 11 that kind of thing and it's a competition to see whose poem really hit home with the audience again it emerged in Chicago so it's going to have a lot of overlap with hip hop culture it's not synonymous with it okay but it's it's it's poetry for the mass of the masses for the masses right it's something that anybody can get involved with it's very popular in high schools it's very popular in high schools in Brazil and it's very popular in favelas like amongst you know disadvantaged uh students about marginalized students because it's it's like the music they listen to Brazil has its own brand of rap called funky it's a space where there there's been a blossoming of uh of black authors uh in the last 10 years so if you look at the the 19th and 20th century I'm studying five authors because women had limited access to publishing in the last 10 years I haven't counted them but I've 30 can you not self publish you can self publish it's harder it is harder Cadernos Negros the the famous uh publication that started uh in 79 is when it started uh is to this day self published it goes through a peer review process but uh it's it's this notion of creating something from nothing uh you can self publish but the book market in Brazil has historically been elitist so books are expensive and they have very limited runs so it's like 1,000 a year and then poof the book disappears uh the internet has helped a lot that's been another uh huge impact YouTube TikTok uh people are are getting poetry out the way that they can and so in many ways they have uh have access to to publication of a different sort than they did in the past okay well that's a good thing that's a good absolutely that's how you realize well technology has a positive impact absolutely people's lives this next part is all about you the listeners it's time for from here to you this is where a question from the audience gets passed directly to you today's question for our guest comes from Sam what is your favorite Brazilian dish oh that one's that one's easy it's stroganoff but it's not like any of the stroganoff I've eaten I do not speak as a person who knows a lot about Russia I uh I am sure that I'll eat uh Russians stroganoff one day and say this is not what they told me it was um but uh what when I was coming up uh stroganoff was a noodle dish with some beef on it uh huh and it had a brown sauce stroganoff at least in my my wife's family and my family now is it has ketchup it has hearts of palm it has a cream a creamy sauce to it and it's served on rice on white rice uh and then uh for good measure you top it off with uh what they call piki niki shoestring potatoes okay is it the curly ones no no or uh it's uh take a step down the the the formality of these of these potatoes cheese string potatoes are imagine like a potato chip a tiny little strip of one and they come in a kind of a jug and the most popular brand is picnic brand oh yeah but in Brazil they pronounce it as piquiniqui piquiniqui yeah that's so cute yes so uh so you put your piquiniqui on your stroganoff uh and enjoy it with your rice it's a very tasty dish and it's one I associate with home so I would recommend it to anybody wow maybe we need your wife's recipe haha for that that's awesome before we finish I want to bring things back to readers and listeners who might want to learn more could we pre order your book and also about just authors in general that you would recommend to just get to learn a little bit more about the black authors in from Brazil or other Caribbean um authors that you you think have an impact and that should be more known my book is not out yet but uh huh but thank you for that interest uh if you would like to follow its its progress you can contact me at JT Maddox m a d d 0 x at uab dot edu but if you want to learn more about Afro Brazilian women's literature I would start out with a a book called Cadernos Negros Black Notebooks which is a translation it's a book um it's it's a book compiled of um poetry and uh and short stories from Cadernos Negros and translated into English uh Niyi Afolabi is the uh the organizer for that one and the translator so anything associated with Black notebooks is a good place to start I know the pronunciation is gonna gonna throw people off so I'm gonna go straight to an English pronunciation so abdias a B d I a s nascimento n a s C I m E N t O his works have been translated into English so I think translation there we need more translators to to get these uh poets worked out you can read most of Mashado's work even Susan Sontag the great literary critic what uh wrote about Machado de Assis so Machado or Machado you would say in Spanish de Assis a s s I s his great works have been uh been published um obviously he's male he's but he is a black author writing in the 19th century Carolina Maria Jezeus Child of the dark is uh very easy to uh to find uh edition of her diaries there's a scholar named uh Lavine or Lavine I don't know how he says his name uh but he released the full The Complete Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus d E and then just like Jesus but it comes out as Jesus which which most Americans don't yeah we're not we're not understanding this way yeah so I think that those are oh and of course Pulsiavi sainsiu it's a name Poncia p o N c I a v I c e N c o uh C I o is the translation of her uh most influential novel uh it's about a black family's uh life after the abolition just after the abolition of of slavery in Brazil so it's gonna have parallels with roots but it's a shorter read uh and she's a very engaging author there are gonna be some scenes that are difficult to uh to read but they're important to to recognize and so Poncia Vicensio uh is another uh great starting point and I'm sure that one day soon we'll have Sarah and Slam that's a slang right uh slam poets that are are publishing in English as well but I don't I don't think that most of them are there yet but you've got a strong basis with uh with these exemplary uh writers from Brazil that's great thanks for sharing that and all the recommendations we'll make sure to add them in the show notes so if anyone is interested they can learn more about these authors but also about your book coming up and just stay in the know um on that for when it comes in 2026 thank you Doctor Maddox for sharing your journey if you've enjoyed today's conversation make sure to give a follow to from where to here in the meantime keep exploring thanks everyone thank you thank you for tuning in to from where to here if you enjoyed this episode be sure to hit subscribe leave a review and share it with someone who loves discovering new cultures follow us on Instagram at from where to here pod for exclusive updates behind the scenes moments and a peek at upcoming guests until next time keep learning keep connecting and keep celebrating the beauty of languages and cultures adios