The Melting Pot

I'm thinking about “America's melting pot” and wondering if the phrase wasn't a marketing gimmick cooked up by Texas oilmen who needed low-wage roughnecks to work the rigs. If the US is a melting pot, a blended stew of eager immigrants, Brazil is the thick residue at the bottom of the pot after everything has been cooked.

While every country in the western hemisphere has been populated by immigrants,Brazil is uniquely unified. There is a healthy mix of races, but the conglomerate of 200 million all speak Portuguese like one big tribe. The immigration waves that populated Latin America's largest nation ceased a hundred years ago. The Polish and Italian and Japanese immigrants have assimilated and intermarried. Even in large cities like Curitiba, it's rare to hear a foreign language spoken. If you're tired of stories about the Chinese buying land in France and changing the names of farms that have been in the same family for generations, come to Brazil – it's immigrant free!

Having lived my whole life in the US, I'd always taken immigration for granted. Half the residents of New York City were born outside the US. In Brazil, what's an immigrant to do when no matter how hard I try, I can't find the melting pot? The kitchen is closed and the cook is taking a nap. Immigrants jumped into the Brazilian stew at the dawn of the 20th century, but no one has seen them since. Today they are so well assimilated there's no need for a pot.

With a little research, I learned that immigrants around the world are more likely to come from middle-class countries and migrate to rich ones. I'd assumed that with the middle class advancing globally, immigration would decline. Instead, it's the reverse. As the developing world expands its economic base and the middle class grows, immigration has increased. Thus, the population of the US continues to increase despite its low birthrate. Even some rich countries like Japan have few immigrants, and the population of Japan is on the decline. Is anyone dying to enter Brazil? I think not.

Slaves from Africa have integrated into the population of Brazil over the past century or so. Brazil never had miscegenation laws, which is why Brazilians sport a rainbow of skin colors, like Cubans, from redheads with freckles to black and everything in-between –  brown, mocha, chocolate, cinnamon –  it's a racial Baskin-Robbins. Caramel coloring through interracial coupling has occurred since the Eurotrash explorers discovered the country in 1500.

Like all grand ideas, the melting pot has premium worldwide marketing. Just think “global economy.” Laugh if you like about the advertising business, but many inventions would never have reached the market without a pitch man like the left-handed screwdriver. Sometimes the best ad doesn't require mad men or even words. The thong bikini, for example, has a universe of PR behind it. What lad hasn't bragged to his friends, “I'm going on vacation to Brazil. Have you seen their swimsuits?”

The melting pot presupposes conformity in the adopted country or at least a pretense of intent. Should you have any doubts about the smashing success of conformity here, during WWII in Brazil then President Getúlio Vargas banned foreign languages. (A decade later he committed suicide while still in office, perhaps hinting that conformity has its limits.)

Given the entire 20th century to assimilate, time has rounded the edges of immigrant culture and created a patriotic nation Americans would envy. The second and third generation of Japanese living here can no longer speak Japanese. It's like the US in the 1950s, the post World War II euphoria that sprouted tract housing and identical fashions spread across a continent of middle-class suburbias.

How did the immigrants assimilate so well here? Is it something in the water? I think not; no one drinks the water.

What the first Brazilian immigrants found, besides minimal clothing, was an abundance of fresh water, more than any other country on the planet, plus arable land. For these pre-Industrial Revolution folks, it was paradise. They basked in the bounty and enjoyed a pot bubbling with beans and spirits. Native animism mixed with African rituals and religions. Communicating with specters crossed with Christianity. When the stew had evaporated, what remained was a rich sauce, a culture with a simultaneous appreciation of religion and leisure. Don't ask me how this came about, but thong bikinis don't evolve from Puritans.

Suffice it to say, immigration has been a tremendous triumph. Today the country is a homogenous brew, a seductive dessert. Brazil is like a cake – can you taste the milk and eggs in a cake? No, but you know they're there because without them you don't have a cake.

Conformity via mono-culturalism makes learning the ropes easier for us rare newcomers. There's only one rope. Habits and customs are more critical than laws. There is conformity in cuisine, hair styles, clothing, etc. Gossip provides the rules of engagement. I am only allowed to use white curtains in my apartment building. It's in the condo bylaws.

Assimilation has been so successful new immigrants stopped showing up a hundred years ago. The European flavor of the early 20th century immigrants has been absorbed into the stew, and besides making the guidelines easier to discern, homogeneity has its aesthetic moments. From the street, I like the 12 floors of all-white curtains.

Before you Americans get on your high horse about the value of diversity, let's consider the joys of uniformity. Homogeneity is the most democratic approach toward egalitarianism, for example, the informal approach to family names. If I were a doctor, my patients would address me as Dr. Michael, never bothering with my last name. From a racial standpoint, it's not always possible to identify who is Black because there are so many shades of Brown. Brazil makes a mockery of racial identity by color distinction.

Arriving as a new immigrant to Brazil, I feel like a guy who shows up for a costume party and discovers he got the dates mixed up. However, rather than admit my mistake or blame fake news, my idiotic response has been to claim I have the right date and everyone is actually in costume. Why else would men wear jeans with sports jackets for work and women wear dental floss at the beach (fio dental is the Portuguese phrase for thong)? When everyone looks and acts the same, expats stand out. Can you feel the stress in my voice? Conformity is not for beginners.

There's conformity in food, car brands, even in greetings. Everyone says hello the same way: Tudo bem (everything's okay). If someone accidentally strays and says Bom dia (Good morning) while you are saying Tudo bem, he will add Tudo bem. Giving a thumbs up is a common greeting if you're too far away to say hello. However, if one man waves to another from across the street, and the second man gives a thumbs up, the first will be sure to add his thumb up to keep the communication on equal footing.

Bom dia is used by everyone before 2 pm. If you stop for a brief conversation with a neighbor, they are certain to say Good Morning again when they depart. It's never a mistake to say too much, so it's appropriate to signal the end of a conversation no matter how brief.

Saying good morning or good night both to start and end a conversation reminds me of the formality of aristocrats in 19th century Europe: “May I present Lord Snagglepuss” and then everyone bows. I wondered if Americans were the only culture that lacked formality when I watched a British movie recently. Still today defendants and lawyers bow to the judge when he enters the courtroom, like tennis players turning to the royal box at Wimbledon.

There's conformity in hair styles and nail polish. Women dress alike and dye blonde highlights. Going completely blonde from brunette or black is considered fake, but the motivation is in that direction.

A few years ago a coed was dismissed from her college for wearing mini-skirts to class. Her classmates posted videos of her in the halls creating a wave of disturbance in her wake. It's not that mini-skirts aren't popular, just not in school or for the office. They are after-dark attire, bars and parties, and can be as short as the American 1970s. She was given several warnings but continued her mini-crusade. She was finally expelled by the school for refusing to conform. The news went viral, and she was offered a spot in Brazil Playboy. The hens gossiped this was her plan all along.

In closed cultures like Japan and Brazil with few foreign residents, conformity, policed by gossip, reigns in everything from the length of women's hair to the division of labor. Women prepare the meals and do the laundry and food shopping. If a guest wants a glass of water, she waits in the living room to be served by the mother, daughter, or maid. She wouldn't be invited into the kitchen to choose a beverage.

When I arrived in 2007, even in a city of two million, I never saw a woman under sixty with short hair or a woman driving a motorcycle. Nor did I glimpse any man with facial hair. As a child, my wife Carla was so shocked by facial hair she refused to sit on Santa's lap, afraid of his beard. Interestingly, following the mass political protests in 2013, barbering and motorcycle habits have loosened up.

Women conform to the latest fashion trends, which they scrutinize every day on the  soap operas. They watch the soaps religiously. The most popular ones return as reruns a few years later. The evening soap opera on the one nationwide network starts at 9 pm following the dinner-hour evening news at 8 pm. In typical Brazilian style, TV shows don't start exactly on the hour. The evening news ends between 9 and 9:15, give or take. The soap runs for an hour, six days a week, except on Wednesdays when it's only 30 minutes to allow for the weekly soccer games.

In 2009, overnight, tens of millions of women began wearing Indian-style clothing and bracelets thanks to a soap opera set in India. The following year, a soap opera led women to tuck their blouses into the front of their pants but leave them untucked in the back. Later, I saw tucked women's blouses on a Netflix sitcom.

There's uniformity in parking. Drivers park in reverse, backing into parking slots at the supermarket or mall. It looks like they're preparing for a quick getaway from a shoplifting spree. Carla claims it's to navigate out if you are blocked in by other cars, which happens frequently. All motorcycles know the unwritten rule – street parking is done perpendicular to the cars with the front wheel facing outward.

Motorcyclists also conform to disregarding traffic lights, and if they're stuck at a light behind several cars, they sidle between the lanes clipping sideview mirrors along the way until they reach the light. All the cars have passenger sideview mirrors, affording the bikers double the number of targets. Even while traffic is moving, there is no reason for them not to ride the white line and zip between the cars. They are involved in an enormous number of accidents and often don't have insurance.

With its conformity to ancient customs, Brazil looks as old as India. Come to think of it, Brazil is not so different from India – everyone is praying, no one is in a hurry, and they drive like maniacs. Class structure is more openly visible than in North America. Like in India, there is no sense of privacy. Brazilians are always subject to public scrutiny. People lower their voices when they gossip about a neighbor.      

Thanks to uniformity, Brazil is the size of the continental US but everyone knows everyone. Not surprisingly, Brazilians are xenophobic. Even an illiterate Brazilian can spot a foreign accent a mile away; thus “foreigner” covers not only other countries but other states. Brazilians can look at a photo of half a dozen men and women and announce, “Those two aren't Brazilian.” I saw a list of 30 or 40 slang Portuguese phrases used only in Paraná, the state where I live.

Because Brazilians speak Portuguese, they don't consider themselves part of Latin America, especially as they have an aversion to Argentina, their largest Spanish-speaking neighbor, thanks to some soccer insult a hundred years ago. “We won't be part of any group that contains Argentina.” Meanwhile, thousands of Argentines own beach houses in Brazil. (Apparently they don't share the same patriotic zeal for hating Brazilians.)

The suspicion of foreigners extends to the economy as well with world-class trade barriers and Byzantine tax regulations making it nearly impossible for foreign companies to get a foothold. Politicians see nothing wrong with protecting their own manufacturers and never justify why duties are so high on anything not produced in Brazil. With half a dozen different taxes added on to everything from cars to computers to jeans, an imported product suffers a 100 percent hike in the retail market. Brazilians may be xenophobic, but they'll gladly take trips to the US with huge shopping lists, buying clothes and electronics at half the Brazilian price. I met a couple who had gone to Miami to buy clothing and furniture for their soon-to-arrive first child. They ended up purchasing so much they needed a container on a cargo ship to get it home.

Brazil's uniform culture is like a delicate hammock of criss-crossing, interwoven knots. Everything swings beautifully until one knot loosens and some fool like me breaks the code of conduct. Here's a knot loosener:  Don't touch food with your fingers, whether it's pizza, hot dogs, or hamburgers. Pizza is eaten with a knife and fork, and McDonald's hamburgers are held with a napkin or paper wrapper. Whatever you do, don't order a salad because even the cooks don't touch the food with their fingers so salad has lettuce in its original head size. It's a challenge to find a piece of lettuce in the entire country that will fit in your mouth.

Intoxicating smells from bakeries on every block advertise fresh bread. People have their favorite bakeries and know what time of day the bread is baked, which is at least twice or three times. People can taste the difference from one bakery to another the same way they judge between coffee or rice brands. Brazilians need fresh bread every day and eat it without butter as a continental breakfast and light dinner. However, it's never served for lunch even in a restaurant. If you ask for a basket of bread, the restaurant will charge you.           

Sadly, uniformity isn't the same as equality. Brazil isn't Cuba. Racism and class consciousness are on the menu. In a country once ruled by emperors and coronels, maintaining a clear demarcation between the peasants and the ruling class is the norm, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, whose clothing keeps him out of the upper class dining room.

Apartment buildings like mine have a separate service elevator for laborers and maids even though it's right next to the residents' elevator.

I was thinking of becoming an anarchist and breaking the chains of oppressive conformity in Brazil until I read some of their literature and discovered in Switzerland, for example, they have a law against mowing your lawn on Sundays. Brazil doesn't need a law to stop mowing the lawn on Sunday. That's beer and soccer day.

Nevertheless, there's so much rigidity in Brazil that new cars are only available in white, black, or silver. Different colors cost extra. When I asked a car salesman why, he said  manufacturers had tried over the years to market various colors but nobody bought them.

Thanks to its 80 percent Caucasian population, Curitiba is one of the more formal cities in the country. Informal conversations take on a formal structure; parents call their children “son” or “daughter” in public and at home. When a group of people sit down to eat, it takes several minutes to decide who sits where because formal rules of familial relations must be respected.

Restaurants won't survive unless they offer the standard lunch – a thin slice of leathery beef, french fries, salad that is no bigger than hamburger garnish, plus the ubiquitous rice and beans. Brazilians are terrified of vegetables; there's a name for a grilled cheese sandwich, and a different name for grilled cheese with tomato. In one of those expat mysteries that keep us searching for more, Brazilians don't eat lemons, only limes. Without a market for lemons, farmers don't grow them. My wife says she can't taste the difference between a lime and a lemon. For discriminating drinkers, lemons are now being imported from Italy and cost a dollar while limes go for 20 cents.

The country's mono-cultural conformity ensures not only culinary uniformity but animal formality as well. In my apartment building, dogs are not allowed in the lobby; residents must use the service elevator and exit through the underground garage with their dogs.