November 2008 Brazil Institute s p e c i a l r e p o r t Part i: “Literature in the Brazilian amazon” By Márcio Souza

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

When one thinks of the Amazon, art is rarely the first thing that comes to mind. But it was the Amazon—and specifically, the bustling, ethnically diverse port city of Manaus—that gave Brazil one of its most famous contemporary poets, Thiago de Mello, and a world-renowned orchestra conduc- tor, Claudio Santoro. Manaus is also the birthplace of Milton Hatoum and Márcio Souza, novelists whose creative work have brought renewed attention to Amazonian cultural production. While portrayed in the media either as terra incognita or a zone of violent conflict between the forces of economic development and environmental preservation, the Amazon has created vibrant literary worlds that remain largely unknown outside Brazil. To dispel these misconceptions and highlight the richness of Amazonian culture, the Brazil Institute and the Brazilian Embassy in Washington organized a discussion on September 16, 2008, with one the most celebrated Amazonian authors, Márcio Souza. Born and raised in Manaus, he is the author of picaresque, satirical novels like The Emperor of the Amazon and Mad Maria. Souza was joined by Lúcia Sá, a visiting professor of Literature at the University of Manchester, England and author of Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture, and Regina Igel, professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature at the University of Maryland. This two-part special report—published as two separate issues—includes the origi- nal writings on Amazonian literature of Márcio Souza and Lúcia Sá. In this issue, “Literature in the Brazilian Amazon,” Souza highlights the uniqueness of the history and culture of the Amazon and its contribution to Brazilian art. Sá’s issue, “From the Amazon to São Paulo: Macunaíma and the Native Trickster,” can be downloaded from our “publications” section at our website www.wilsoncenter.org/brazil. Márcio Souza, Author of The Emperor of the Amazon and Mad Maria at the Woodrow Wilson Center Brazil Institute s p e c i a l r e p o r t

Th e r e w a s a t i m e w h e n the Amazon did not Grão-Pará enjoyed a well-developed urban belong to Brazil. The Portuguese established culture. It had a beautiful capital with wide two colonies in South America. One was the streets and well-designed buildings of neoclas- land discovered by Pedro Alvares Cabral in sical architecture—a novelty in Portuguese and 1500. It was called Brazil and administered Spanish America. Social life in Belém was quite by Governor-Generals and Viceroys based in modest—still, tropical nights brightened with Rio de Janeiro. The other colony, known as music and song from private houses and the Grão-Pará, Greater-Para, was discovered by the street bands in crowded squares. This was also the Spaniard Vicente Yañes Pinzon, in 1499, soon period of poet Tenreiro Aranha, the first native after Columbus’ third trip to America. Its ter- writer from the Portuguese-speaking Amazon. ritory, occupied by the Portuguese in 1630, is Tenreiro Aranha also wrote and staged many composed of the vast Amazon basin. Its capital plays. In fact, theater was one of the passions of was Belém and it was administered by military the people of Belém, and it was in that city that and civilian governors, who reported to Lisbon. some of Gabriel Malagrida`s daring plays were The inhabitants of the colony of the South staged. Malagrida was a Jesuit priest, a naturalist called themselves Brazilians; those of the North and a Spaniard mystic. He has the hapless honor were the “Portuguese Americans.” of being the last heretic to be burned at the stake The two colonies developed separately until by the Inquisition. 1823, when the Brazilian Empire, which had The northern leadership (of Grão-Pará) declared independence from Portugal the previ- aspired to dominate the post-colonial political ous year, sought to annex the northern colony. arena, seeking to constitute a new country, a Of the Portuguese colonies, Grão-Pará was the republic. This was not what happened. Grão- only one that exported manufactured goods instead Pará was annexed to Brazil by force, because of raw materials or agro-industrial commodities. In the path of dialogue and negotiation would the late XVIII century, both Grão-Pará and Brazil have demanded that both sides have a mature had a strong merchant class, dedicated to imports project of nationhood and a vision of continen- and exports. These were gentlemen of great for- tal politics, things that neither the Portuguese- tunes and considerable autonomy from Lisbon. Americans nor the Brazilians had. Between While Brazil deliberately adopted an economy of 1823 and 1840, what we in fact witnessed was a big landowners producing sugar, cattle and gold, series of acts of deliberate arrogance by Rio de based on slave labor, Grão-Pará used paid labor and Janeiro and growing resentment and fury com- intensified investments in the naval industry and ing from Belém. After losing successive groups in the secondary processing of agricultural prod- of leaders through political and military inter- ucts, especially tobacco and Brazil nuts, with small vention, Grão-Pará was tragically defeated by farms in the hands of many settlers. There were the Brazilian Empire. Instead of becoming a slaves, but only for domestic work. The export and new country, Brazil reduced Grão-Pará to an local consumption of rubber fed a rising industry economic periphery. The defeat of Grão-Pará that produced important products, such as shoes and its ­destruction, I believe, can be seen in the and galoshes, waterproof rubber tarps, springs and same light as if the South had won the Civil War surgical instruments. in the United States. Seventeen years of civil war

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reduced Grão-Pará to ruin and social regression. were as important to Iberian culture as collec- After the conflict, 40 percent of its inhabitants tion and research in the jungle were to the con- were dead or missing. Politicians of the Brazilian quest economy. Empire and the northern leadership could not Written in a distinctive style, these narratives find common ground, and for that reason no introduced, for the first time, the Amazon to the dialogue was possible. Thus, Grão-Pará was gone Western World, describing enormous, never-be- with the wind. fore seen rivers and the rainforest that envelopes them. It was a vision of the enchanted, of those THE FIRST CHRONICLERS who had never dreamed of finding such won- If Brazil, in the eyes of the world, is seen as a ders. The colonial literature of chronicles and country of emotions and irrationalities, it can- narrative accounts became the standard model not be forgotten that we inherited from the for writing about the Amazon—and remains, Portuguese the ability to plan and organize with surprisingly alive today. The more contempo- great attention to detail. The Portuguese always rary versions of this literary style have adopted set specific goals. They went step by step in the the same Salvationist rhetoric and work as an New World, conquering almost all of South oppressive force over modern Amazonian soci- America. You are not going to find a Portuguese ety. Their observations generally refuse to look searching for the Fountain of Youth, or getting at Amazonian realities while unrestrainedly their legs wet to take possession of the Pacific praising nature’s exuberance, although this exu- Ocean, like the Spaniards. berance has taken on a utilitarian character. This By the time Grão-Pará was dissolved into the is the ideological underpinning of an attempt to Amazon and became an economic frontier, the force the Amazon to embrace various decep- Portuguese colonization had already established tive acts of solidarity that aspire to preserve the a new civilization in the tropics, able to develop “primitive” in its present state, forever. a national culture of Portuguese expression in In 1819, the poem Muhuraida, written thirty a sub-continent of many languages: French, years before by Henrique João Wilkens, was pub- English, Spanish, Dutch and a hundred of Native lished by Imprensa Regia, in Lisbon. Muhuraida is American idioms. Of course, Brazil can be proud the region’s first poetic attempt in the Portuguese to have conquered Grão-Pará, but the natives of language and is an extremely important historical the modern-day Amazon preserved their cultural document. It is written by a man who had direct and artistic conquests, and their experience with contact with Native Americans, inhabitants of modernity. There is still Amazonian cuisine, lit- the great river. Wilkens was Second Deputy and erature, architecture, and theater, as well as art and occupied the post of Military Commander at Vila music. It is about this literature that we will talk. de Ega in 1787. The first Europeans to write about the Amazon While a lyrical poem of glory and conviction, were chroniclers like Gaspar de Carvajal, Cristobal with all the characteristics of internal decay of an de Acuña and João Daniel, all Catholic missionar- epic poem, Muhuraida is a mediocre work. Fruit ies. During the early stages of European explora- perhaps of a heart ravished by the idleness of the tion of the New World, the explorers’ personal barracks and by the devotion typical of military and in loco narrative accounts of their journeys men with artistic leanings. In any case, the work

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From left to right, Regina Igel, Márcio Souza, Lúcia Sá and Paulo Sotero has this stylistic corruption. In the great Iberian it were a reflection of reality. That is, only if the epics, most of all in Camões, the Portuguese mer- great deed was found to be true, or materialized cantile system became part of the Renaissance due to the forces of power or national culture expansionist philosophy through analogy. The or, in more extreme cases, by order of the King. epic poem was about evangelization and dis- Muhuraida is one of these reflections of reality, semination of Christianity, an endeavor that the describing the defeat of the Mura, fierce warriors Spanish and the Portuguese were determined who never accepted white domination over their to bring to the newly discovered worlds. This lands and succeeded in resisting until the nine- ideological construction was so powerful that teenth century. the epic poem not only took possession of, but also surpassed Christian poetic reserve. The epic “I sing the extraordinarily fortunate success That bathes cheeks in tears of happiness embraced pagan elements of Greek and Roman After having seen in century past culture, adapted and preserved by medieval mon- Only lamentation on discouraged faces. asteries. Maritime adventure and evangelization, I sing the success, that celebrates in glory Poseidon and Divine Providence, Argonauts and All that which Divine Providence has done, In the unforeseen and praiseworthy places, Admirals, God and gods, science and myth, great That confirms the inscrutable destinies.” personalities and great destinies were interwo- ven so that the deeds of Iberian discoverers Thus João Wilkens begins his genocidal hymn. would appear of absolute importance as other He wipes the tears off of colonialism’s benevo- great deeds of humanity. lent countenance and arms himself with a cal- When João Wilkens wrote his poem, the colo- culated aesthetic. It is the opening of a cantata nial empire had already set its roots in the new on Catholicism and cruelty; Wilkens depicts the world. Literary expression was only respected if mechanisms that moved the conquest during the

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long years of its invasion and reconnaissance phase. Americans had a mythical conception of the In the end, “after seeing in century past, only lam- world, the Portuguese a violent theology. entation on discouraged faces,” the Portuguese affirmation is to ask for the song of the “extraor- ENTER THE SCIENTIST AND EXPLORERS dinarily fortunate success.” Still, Wilkens manifests In a way, colonial discourse in the Amazon began the need to assert colonial predestination. to change after Henrique João Wilkens, when a new breed of scientists and explorers offered their “In the unforeseen and praiseworthy places numerous contributions. Still, the discourse did not that confirm the inscrutable destines; the success, which celebrates in glory lose its long-lasting presumed superiority. It is in all that which Divine Providence has done.” this time period that Europeans realized they had invented a new world. Within the changing dis- Amazonian poetry began by preparing for the course, ideas detached themselves from the sphere future with an autocratic realism; a future created of the narrative, moving away from the old theology to conform to the Portuguese past. This interre- of the Counter Reformation. Literary and scien- lation between colonial theory and practice is as tific expressions became secular and irreverent. The essential to soldier João Wilkens’ poetry as it is to confused narratives were no longer simply com- the conquest as a whole. The mutual relationship mentaries on the existence of the Amazon. They is not at all surprising, and produces an histori- were a more determined reflection on the colli- cal and ideological interpretation of the region. sion between culture and nature. In the dark place Hence, we see the soldier-poet sing: where this collision had taken place, the confusion slowly began to disappear. The Conquest and the “In the dense ignorance of paganism Without notion of time, worship or permanent ritual, establishment of a permanent colony were about Seeming to have forgotten divinity to be completed. What remained were only play- They live deprived and indifferent; ful fables, a mythology whose powers of enchant- Abusing that selfsame freedom ment grew with this new rationality of spectacle Granted them by the Almighty For frivolous motives tinting the earth and illusion. Myths on the region appeared every- Blood-red by unjust human war.” where, but now they were recognized as myths; it was time for the appraisal and study of science. It It is worthwhile to observe the statements was the time for a new poetry. contained in each word of the poem, in as many On September 4, 1769, Bento de Figueiredo details as there are great moments of mercan- Tenreiro Aranha was born in Barcelos, the capi- tile spirit. João Wilkens’ poem is one of the great tal of Rio Negro Captaincy—he was the first moments of the consolidation phase of colonial- native Amazonian writer and poet of Portuguese ism. We begin to understand the conquest in language. His father, Raimundo de Figueiredo its totality through his work, as well as through Tenreiro, was a small farmer like many in Rio historical sketches, decrees, narrative accounts Negro, harvesting the banks of the river for cot- and colonial laws. Mercantilism is imbued in ton, coffee and rubber. Early in his life, Tenreiro the poem, beginning with the level of language, Aranha become an orphan and went to live with a which constitutes its essence. Muhuraida is much friend of the family. His godfather, vicar and arch- more than an historical daydream. The Native priest Dom Jose Monteiro Noronha, sent the boy

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to Belém to study in the Saint Anthony convent, in Óbidos, Pará. One in 1853, Inglês de Souza, and later to the Mercedários to prepare to go to and the other in 1857, José Veríssimo. The first, Coimbra. Fate did not want Tenreiro Aranha to Herculano Marcos Inglês de Souza, was born fulfill his ambitions to become a lawyer. He was into a rich family and studied law in Recife, 19 years old when he became destitute. Educated Pernambuco. Inglês de Souza, however, never for- by priests, he was a bookworm who loved the got his roots and his family’s cocoa plantations. In Greeks and Latin classics. Peaceful but ambitious 1888 he published the masterpiece, O Missionário, in character, his destitution forced him to become introducing Brazil to naturalism, with a special a civil servant. In Tenreiro Aranha’s first job, he flavor of warm weather and sensuality, far from directed an Indian village. For the rest of his life, the cold liturgy of the European school. he longed to visit Portugal and the University of The other, José Veríssimo, went to school in Coimbra—a trip that never happened. He knew Manaus and Rio de Janeiro, where he studied that, as a native without a graduate degree, he engineering. His masterpiece, Historia da Literatura would never achieve the high posts of colonial Brasileira, was published in 1916. In this work of administration of Grão-Pará. Tenreiro Aranha literary criticism he favored objectivity over shal- married his childhood sweetheart, Rosalina low nationalism, literary values instead of impres- Espinoza, and lived a very simple life, writing sad sionism. Both authors immersed themselves in poems and sparkling poetic plays. As a native of a new approach to creative literature. Inglês de the Amazon, he was the first authentic Amazonian Souza had a wonderful ear and his novels and artist because he saw his land with the eyes of short stories deal with the truthfulness of a writer a non-Portuguese man, yet he also lived in this whose characters had to endure in a place of world as a Portuguese. This duality would be the mystery and human contingency. José Verissimo landmark of his art. Tenreiro Aranha was an artist examined, in his literary criticism, sympathetically as a result of martyrdom and a life of frustrations. but not without skepticism, the role of Brazilian Without a literary tradition he suffered the curse literature in a nation under construction. In his of all pioneers, and he took refuge in the classical writings we find a pattern of thought and feeling realm of the Greeks and Latin poets. that has literary quality as its motif. The rubber age that goes from 1890 to 1920 “Dos homens me rodeia a iniqüidade, promoted the development of a unique culture. A calúnia me oprime, e ao fim tremendo, Me assusta uma espantosa eternidade.” It included outdated Portuguese traditions and a collection of new influences imported as if they “From mankind surround me iniquity, were consumer goods. The result was a series of Lies oppressed me, and in the dreadful end, Haunts me a frightful eternity.” odd juxtapositions. Patriarchy reigned over the family and servants in the era of Madame Bovary; The poems of Tenreiro Aranha are alive and sexual hypocrisy was commonplace at the time well, loved by reader’s of the Amazon. This is easy of the Hell Fire Club; a judicial body at the ser- to prove with the many editions of his poetry and vice of the landowners existed alongside British plays. unionism; and a lack of refinement that even When the wounds of the destruction of Grão- well-tailored garments couldn’t hide. These jux- Pará started to heal, two great writers were born tapositions prevailed while Marcel Proust wrote

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on precise etiquette. This patchwork quilt was the Amazon valley after the disaster struggled to culture of the rubber barons, who escaped their survive. Close to two million people suffered contradictions in an attempt to rearrange them- throughout the Amazon. Rubber tapers were selves into a model, rational society. freed, but did not have the resources to return Both Belém and Manaus had an active cul- to the Northeast. In Manaus, the lack of avail- tural life between 1890 and 1914. The two cities able credit pushed many in the middle class invested in the construction of sumptuous opera into the level of common laborers, where high houses that held annual theater and opera sea- unemployment forced many into poverty. The sons. The Manaus Opera House alone, cost the abandoned mansions began to crumble and public treasury four hundred thousand sterling the streets filled with holes. The collapse of the pounds (an exorbitant amount in those days). entire urban services infrastructure was accel- The Rubber Boom also produced poets Jonas da erated by the rural to urban exodus. Manaus, Silva, Paulino de Brito and Raimundo Monteiro, once the “Paris of the tropics,” was then a sort and non-fiction writers like Domingos Antonio of ridiculous Port-au-Prince, living in a mad- Raiol, who authored the first historical study dening loneliness. about the end of Grão-Pará, Motins Políticos. In “Apóstolo e Santo Moderno,” Djalma Motins Políticos is of unquestionable importance Batista, a scientist, paints a picture of the situa- to political studies, in the same way the out- tion in Manaus during the thirties: standing works of Ferreira Pena, Lauro Sodré and Sant’Ana Nery are to regional research. The “The young men had nothing to look for- ward to and the old men only stared, tearful, economic powers made an attempt to raise edu- at bankruptcy. Amazon was being drowned cational levels during the Rubber Boom, creat- by the weight of historical determinism. Even ing the very first Brazilian university in 1918, the educated men, desperate in their struggle the Escola Universitária Livre de Manaus. They against being devoured by society, isolated themselves, muted. Only a few remained faith- also searched for self-expression using the most ful to their intellectual pursuits. (…) An entire modern and expensive artform of the time: film. intellectual generation went into oblivion.” A pioneer in the field, Silvino Santos produced images of the region captured forever in movies Tenreiro Aranha tried to retain as much of his such as “No País das Amazonas” and “No Rastro homeland as possible. The authors of the Rubber do Eldorado.” Boom, lured by European culture tried to escape from the Amazon, but the new generation that CULTURAL DECLINE AND RENAISSANCE came out of years of poverty remembered the les- The Amazon alternated between a state of soli- sons of the first poet. From this generation the tary abandon and rare manifestations of national Amazon offers to Brazil two major artists, Thiago charity. During these difficult years the region de Mello, a poet, and Claudio Santoro, a com- suffered a frightening reduction in its population poser and conductor. Both natives of the state of and its liquid assets fell to practically zero. The Amazonas who experienced cultural alienation. rural masses regressed to a subsistence economy Thiago de Mello and Claudio Santoro are part and an elementary barter system. The devasta- of a cultural renaissance in the late forties, after tion was complete. Those who remained in the World War II. They are known as the 45-genera-

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tion, together with poets like Elson Farias, Jorge America during that period. They were artists Tufik and Luiz Bacellar, all members of Clube with a cause, they believed in a better Brazilian da Madrugada. Thiago de Mello’s masterpiece is society, free of misery. They also negotiated the Estatutos do Homem, which has been translated uneven and fateful transaction between art and into many languages. In Estatutos do Homem, the politics, between hope and transformation— contemporary language of poetry tends to be between their own survival and the turmoil of political and stylized, carrying the author back changes that were happening in the Amazon. to his land—the green earth of his small village, I could go on all day talking about authors of Barreirinha. At the same time, warming up to the Amazon, about poets like Aldísio Filgueiras concerns for morals in a time of darkness, as in and Astrid Cabral, novelists like Dalcidio the sixties in Latin America. Jurandir, Haroldo Maranhão and Milton Hatoum. Filgueiras dwells with the urban life A couraça das palavras in a big city; he is the poet of Manaus, with Protege nosso silêncio an inflammatory verse full of irony. His master- E esconde aquilo que somos. piece, Malaria e Outras Canções Malignas, shows a Que importa falarmos tanto? Apenas repetiremos. gifted poet struggling with modernity. The bulwark of words Protect our silence “Ah! A poesia aqui And hide ourselves. meu filho Why should we talk? é uma doença tropical!” We only utter repetition. “Ah! Poetry here my son is a tropical disease!” Thiago de Mello and his contemporary, Claudio Santoro, were exiled from the 1960s until the late 1980s. Santoro left a work of Astrid Cabral, together with Violeta Branca powerful music; he is perhaps the most impor- Menescal e Mady Benzecry, form a generation tant Brazilian composer in the second half of of poets that show us part of what it is like to the 20th century. He was exiled to Moscow be a woman in the Amazon. They don’t write and West Germany, where major orchestras feminine poems or feminists poetic declarations. recorded many of his symphonies. One of his They have the conscience of women, who carry last works he composed was a cantata based on the painful feminine conviction to surpass with Thiago’s Estatutos do Homem, staged by Ballet humor the dense fog of small tragedies and little Stagium, from São Paulo. The world premiere gestures of every day life. Astrid sings: of his only opera, Alma, was performed in the Manaus Opera House in 1998—a production “Dentro de mim há cachorros for the II Amazonas Opera Festival. When you que uivam em horas de raiva contra as jaulas da cortesia.” read Thiago de Mello, or follow Santoro’s sym- phonies, you understand why they could not “There are hounds inside me howling in hours of fury live in Brazil. A military dictatorship controlled against the cages of courtesy.” the country, as was the case in most of Latin

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I will finish this brief walk through Amazonian all of them with their own civil organizations, literature crossing the border to the other side of under the coordination of the Federation of the frontier, out of the boundaries of the western Indians Organizations . civilization, to meet the Native American culture. The young generation, who went to school There, we will find out wonderful stories, poetry in Manaus, returned with degrees in Law, and ancient traditions. Sociology, Anthropology, and Medicine. Many In the early twenty century a few authors have become teachers and writers. Primary found those hidden treasures, such as Ermano school children only study the language of their Stradelli, Brandão de Amorim, Raul Bopp and mothers until they turn 8 years old and then Mário de Andrade. Each one delivered some begin Portuguese classes (as mandated by the ore of this mysterious gold, but I should men- official Brazilian syllabus). All grammar school tion the name of Tolomen Ken Jiri, known as textbooks now are printed in native languages, Luis Lana. He is a Dessana and the first Native and the new authors have their own publishing American to write a book, published in Brazil, house in São Gabriel da Cachoeira in the state in 500 years. This was 1979. The book, Antes o of Amazonas. Every book deals with old vanish- Mundo Não Existia, captures an account of the ing traditions, causing tidal waves in contempo- creation of the universe according to the Dessana, rary cultural anthropology. It has opened a new an Arawak people living in upper-rio Negro. horizon in Brazilian literature, unknown to the Written in Dessana and Portuguese, the young literary critics of the mainstream media. author (he was 21 at the time of the writing), For many centuries the people of the Amazon describes a very complex chain of events that were encouraged to forget, without a struggle, leads to the creation of the universe, the Earth their original nature—at least formally—selling and mankind. Far from the one God hypothesis their labor, swallowing whole the social rela- of Judeo-Christian cosmogony, Dessana cos- tions imposed by their colonizers. Pressed to the mogony could go side by side with the modern deplorable phenomenon of acculturation, they Big Bang theory. recognize themselves only during such moments Luis Lana was born in São João do Rio Tikiê, of rapture. They were supposed to be utterly in 1961. He went to the school of the salesians lost and alienated by a shock whose meaning missionaries, like every Native American boy has been withheld. Through art, through lit- of upper-Rio Negro. To write the book, Lana erature, the Amazon people trace many inter- had to deal with the missionaries’ censorship; woven historical experiences of cultural clash his typewriter was confiscated because Indians and cross-pollination. Of course, the presence of were not allowed to have one. In the end, he European culture is an irreversible fact, so is the wrote by night in school notebooks. On the thousands-of-years-old presence of the original left page he wrote in Dessana, on the right in Native American cultures. This is why I think Portuguese. it’s easy to probe the meaning of Amazon litera- Thanks to Luis Lana’s daring example, Amazon ture: so New World it is, so American, because literature has now a group of authors of different as a product of a cultural shock it surpassed the tribes. There are more than 30 different tribes in differences and helped form a new national upper-Rio Negro, speaking different languages, identity, the Brazilian identity. •

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Created in June 2006 as part of the Wilson Center’s Latin WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS American Program, the Brazil Institiute strives to foster Lee H. Hamilton, President and Director informed dialogue on key issues important to Brazilians and to the Brazilian-U.S. relationship. We work to promote detailed BOARD OF TRUSTEES analysis of Brazil’s public policy and advance Washington’s Joseph B. Gildenhorn, Chair understanding of contemporary Brazilian developments, David A. Metzner, Vice Chair mindful of the long history that binds the two most populous Public Members: James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress; Al- democracies in the Americas. len Weinstein, Archivist of the United States; Bruce Cole, Chair, The Institute honors this history and attempts to further National Endowment for the Humanities; Michael O. Leavitt, bilateral cooperation by promoting informed dialogue between Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; these two diverse and vibrant multiracial societies. Our activi- Condoleezza Rice, Secretary, U.S. Department of State; Cristián ties include: convening policy forums to stimulate nonparti- Samper, Acting Secretary, Smithsonian Institution; Margaret san reflection and debate on critical issues related to Brazil; Spellings, Secretary, U.S. Department of Education. Designated promoting, sponsoring, and disseminating research; partici- Appointee of the President from Within the Federal Govern- pating in the broader effort to inform Americans about Brazil ment: Tami L. Longaberger. through lectures and interviews given by its director; appoint- ing leading Brazilian and Brazilianist academics, journalists, Private Citizen Members: Robin Cook, Bruce S. Gelb, Sander and policy makers as Wilson Center Public Policy Scholars; Gerber, Charles L. Glazer, Susan Hutchison, Ignacio E. Sanchez and maintaining a comprehensive website devoted to news, analysis, research, and reference materials on Brazil. For more information about the Brazil Institute and a dedi- cated Brazil news and analysis aggregator, please visit: Paulo Sotero, Director, Brazil Institute www.wilsoncenter.org/brazil — www.wilsoncenter.org/brazilportal Alan Wright, Program Assistant, Brazil Institute Tel: 202.691.4087 / Fax: 202.691.4076

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