9781422278802

CUSTOMS AND CULTURES OF THE WORLD

MY TEENAGE LIFE IN

BRAZIL

CUSTOMS AND CULTURES OF THE WORLD

My Teenage Life in AUSTRALIA My Teenage Life in BRAZIL My Teenage Life in CHINA My Teenage Life in EGYPT My Teenage Life in GREECE

My Teenage Life in INDIA My Teenage Life in JAPAN My Teenage Life in MEXICO My Teenage Life in NEPAL My Teenage Life in RUSSIA My Teenage Life in SOUTH AFRICA Our Teenage Life in the NAVAJO NATION

CUSTOMS AND CULTURES OF THE WORLD

MY TEENAGE LIFE IN

By Jim Whiting with Lucca Passos Series Foreword by Kum-Kum Bhavnani BRAZIL

MASON CREST

Mason Crest 450 Parkway Drive, Suite D Broomall, PA 19008 www.masoncrest.com

© 2018 by Mason Crest, an imprint of National Highlights, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

First printing 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Series ISBN: 978-1-4222-3899-8 ISBN: 978-1-4222-3901-8 ebook ISBN: 978-1-4222-7880-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Whiting, Jim, 1943- author. | Passos, Lucca, author.

Title: My teenage life in Brazil / by Jim Whiting with Lucca Passos ; series foreword by Kum-Kum Bhavnani. Description: Broomall, PA : Mason Crest, 2018. | Series: Customs and cultures of the world | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017003257| ISBN 9781422239018 (hardback) | ISBN 9781422278802 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Brazil--Social life and customs--Juvenile literature. | Teenagers--Brazil--Social life and customs--Juvenile literature. Classification: LCC F2508.5 .W48 2018 | DDC 305.2350981--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003257

Developed and Produced by Shoreline Publishing Group. Editor: James Buckley, Jr. Design: Tom Carling, Carling Design Inc. Production: Sandy Gordon www.shorelinepublishing.com

Front cover: Dreamstime.com/Chris Schmid

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B R A Z I L

C ontents

Series Foreword by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, UCSB..................... 6

Brazilian Customs.............................. 32 Lucca’S Free Time..............................40 Brazil’s Economy and Politics............ 42 Lucca’s Country............................... 50 The Future of Brazil............................ 52

Meet Lucca!........................................... 8 Brazil: An Introduction....................... 10 Lucca’S School Life...........................18 Time to Eat!.........................................20 Brazilian Culture ................................ 22 Lucca’S Town......................................30

Text-Dependent Questions..................................................... 60 Research Projects.................................................................. 61 Find Out More......................................................................... 62 Series Glossary of Key Terms................................................ 63 Index/Author........................................................................... 64

Key Icons to Look For

Words to Understand: These words with their easy-to-understand definitions will increase the reader’s understanding of the text, while building vocabulary skills.

Sidebars: This boxed material within the main text allows readers to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspectives by weaving together additional information to provide realistic and holistic perspectives. Educational Videos: Readers can view videos by scanning our QR codes, providing them with additional educational content to supplement the text. Examples include news coverage, moments in history, speeches, iconic sports moments, and much more! Text-Dependent Questions: These questions send the reader back to the text for more careful attention to the evidence presented here. Research Projects: Readers are pointed toward areas of further inquiry connected to each chapter. Suggestions are provided for projects that encourage deeper research and analysis. Series Glossary of Key Terms: This back-of-the-book glossary contains terminology used throughout this series. Words found here increase the reader’s ability to read and comprehend higher-level books and articles in this field.

B R A Z I L

S eries F oreword Culture: Parts =Whole C ulture makes us human. Many of us think of culture

Culture is also about how we live our lives. It is about our lived experiences of our societies and of all theworldswe inhabit. And in this series—CustomsandCulturesof the World—you will meet young people who will share their experiences of the cultures andworlds they inhabit. How does a teenager growing up in South Africa make sense of the history of apartheid, the 1994 democratic elections, and of what is happening now? That is as integral to ourworld’s culture as the ancient ruins in Greece, the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the Himalayas above Nepal, and the Amazon rain forests in Brazil. But these examples are not enough. Greece is also known for its financial uncertainties, Egypt is

assomethingthatbelongstoaperson, a group, or even a country. We talk about the food of a region as being part of its culture (tacos, pupusas, tamales, and burritos all are part of ourunderstandingof food fromMex- ico, andSouthandCentralAmerica). We might also talk about the clothes asbeing important toculture (saris in India, kimonos in Japan, hijabs or gallibayas in Egypt, or beaded shirts in theNavajoNation). Imaginetryingtosumup“American” cultureusingjustexampleslikethese! Yet culture does not just belong to a personorevenacountry. It isnot only about food and clothes or music and art, because those things by them- selves cannot tell the whole story.

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known for the uprisings in Tahrir Square, China is known for its rapid developmentof megacities,Australia is known for its amazing animals, andBrazil isknown for theOlympics and its football [soccer] team. And there are many more examples for eachnation, region, andperson, and some of these examples are featured in these books. The question is: How do you, growing up in a particular country, view your own culture? What do you think of as culture? What is your lived experience of it? Howdo you come to understand and engage with cultures that are not familiar to you? And, perhaps most importantly, why do you/wewant to do this?Andhowdoes reading about andexperiencingother cultureshelp you understand your own? It is perhaps a cliché to say culture forms the central core of our humanity and our dignity. If that’s true, how do young adults talk about your own cultures? How do you simultaneously understand how people apparently “different” fromyou live their lives, and engage

with their cultures? One way is to read the stories in this series. The “authors” are just like you, even though they live in different places and in different cultures. We com- municatedwith these youngwriters over the Internet, whichhas become the greatest gathering of cultures ever. The Internet is now central to the culture of almost everyone, with youngpeople leading thewayonhow to use it to expand the horizons of all of us. From those of us born in earlier generations, thank you for opening that cultural avenue! Let me finish by saying that culture allows us to open ourminds, think about worlds different from the ones we live in, and to imagine how people very different from us live their lives. This series of books is just the start of the process, but a crucial start. I hope you enjoy them. —Kum-Kum Bhavnani Professor of sociology and feminist and global studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an award-winning international filmmaker.

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B R A Z I L Meet Lucca!

I was born in São Paulo and moved to Salvador Bahia. I love to go skateboarding and

surfing so that’s one reason I picked Santa Barbara, California (below), for a year when I was an exchange student.

Editor’s note: Lucca was interviewed while he was spending a year in Santa Barbara, California, as an exchange student.

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SÃO PAULO!

The Reader

About Me!

I have two twin brothers, one year younger than me. One of my brothers is autistic. He is really good, but I miss him a lot [when I was in Santa Barbara]. My father is a businessman, and my mother works in a bank.

My mother’s family is from São Paulo and I go there often to visit them. I prefer Salvador now, I’m used to it and it’s a bit quieter than São Paulo.

I think I’d like to get into some sort of business, perhaps go to university in the US and go back to Brazil and start a business. Having an education from America will be very well respected when I go back home.

I spent my junior year in Santa Barbara, California, as an exchange student. I learned a lot there and really enjoyed my time in the US!

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B R A Z I L

Brazil : An Introduction

F or many years, people believed that the Nile River in Egypt and other parts of Africa was the world’s longest. However, in 2007, a team of Brazilian scientists said that the Amazon deserved that honor because they claimed they had discovered a new and longer starting point for the mighty river. At 4,250 miles (6,839 km) in length, they said it was about 90 miles (144 km) longer than the Nile, though that measurement has not yet been widely accepted. However, there is no question that the Amazon and its dozens of tributaries in Brazil and some of its neighbors—collectively known as the Amazon Basin—comprise the world’s largest river system. Almost everything about the Amazon Basin staggers the imagination:

Words to Understand amenities  features providing convenience, comfort, or pleasure inadvertently  by mistake, without intention indigenous  original; native to a place stigma  mark of disgrace, set of negative beliefs tributaries  rivers or streams flowing into a larger river

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• Its total volume is about 75 times greater than the Nile. • It accounts for one-fifth of the world’s total freshwater flow into the ocean. • It is home to at least 10 percent of all living species in the world. • It occupies about 40 percent of the total area of the continent of South America. • Half of the world’s remaining rainforest lies within the Amazon Basin. • During the rainy season the increased flow of water makes the Amazon River more than 30 miles (48.2 km)wide in some points. • One of the islands in theAmazonDelta—the areawhere the river spreads out as it flows into the Atlantic Ocean—is larger than Switzerland.

Because all of these superlatives, nothing says “Brazil” more than the Amazon Basin. More than 80 percent of it lies in Brazil, which is by far the largest country inSouthAmerica and the fifth-largest in the world. It could hold a dozen copies of Texas. Except for Chile and Ecuador, every South American country shares a border with Brazil. It is also one of just 12 countries with territory in both the NorthernandSouthernHemispheres, though most of it is in the Southern Hemisphere. That means that its sea- sons are the opposite of those in the Northern Hemisphere.

Brazil is home to the Amazon rain forest, the largest in the world.

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B R A Z I L

Other Regions There’s more to Brazil than the Amazon Basin. The Brazilian Plateau, which covers most of the eastern, central, and southern parts of the country, accounts for about half of Brazil’s total area. Much of it consists of woodlands and it frequently rises more than 2,000 feet (610 m). The southeast occupies only about 10 percent of the land area but contains more than 40 percent of Brazil’s populationand several of its largest cities. Brazil also boasts one of theworld’s largest uninterrupted shorelines, stretching more than 4,500 miles (7,242 km) along the Atlantic Ocean. It consists of coral reefs, lagoons, dunes, and above all some of the world’s most spectacular and best-known beaches. The Portuguese Arrive Beginning in the late 15th century, the Portuguese expanded their reach far beyond their home country, exploring the coast of Africa and venturing into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Shortly after Columbus discovered the New World, Pope Alexander VI negotiated the Treaty of Torsedillas. It divided these newfound lands between Portugal and Spain along a line running from north to south through the Atlantic Ocean. Spain received everything to the west of that line, Portugal everything to the east. So when explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral splashed ashore in northeastern Brazil in 1500, he claimed the land for Portugal because it lay east of the line. As a result, nearly everyone in Brazil speaks a version of Portuguese called Brazilian Portuguese. It is the only country in the Americas where Portuguese is the main language. Of course, indigenous people had already lived in Brazil for thou- sands of years. The newcomers began exploiting the country’s natural resources, especially sugar cane and brazilwood, whichwas used tomake

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Slavery in North America is well known, but Brazil and other South American countries also imported millions of slaves from Africa.

red dye and gave its name to the new colony. They used the natives for all of the hard work. Many died from the harsh treatment they received. The Portuguese also inadvertently brought diseases for which the natives had no natural immunity. The native population numbers plummeted. To replace the native peoples, the Portuguese began importing slaves from Africa. Eventually more than four million crossed the Atlantic. That’s at least 10 times the number of slaves brought to North America and nearly half the worldwide total.

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B R A Z I L

Brazilian soldiers celebrated upon the declaration of their country’s independence from Portugal in 1822.

Half a Century of Stability In the early 19th century, Emperor Napoleon of France invaded Portugal. ThePortuguese royal familyfled toBrazil and ruled fromthere. Eventually they returned home, leaving Prince Pedro in charge of the colony. To their surprise, Pedro declared Brazil’s independence on September 7, 1822. He became Emperor Pedro I of the Empire of Brazil. Pedro returned to Portugal nine years later. His son Pedro II became emperor and ruled for 49 years. Many historians believe he was the best

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