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RIO DE JANEIRO VS SÃO PAULO AND THE SOUL OF BRAZIL 🇧🇷
Multiple people from São Paulo made versions of this complaint to me - “foreigners equate the culture of Rio de Janeiro with the culture of the entirety of Brazil - this needs to stop this makes us look unserious.” São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are the two main cultural and economic hubs of Brazil - their rivalry is interesting because it gets at the kinds of visions competing to define Brazil’s future
“Carioca [term for people from Rio] culture is frivolous, it’s conceited, it’s vain, it’s people who try to scam you all the time, who turn up to meetings an hour late (provided they don’t just flake,) who can’t go two days without cheating on their partner”
“Brazilian culture isn’t just beach volleyball, mais que nada boppy bossa nova and shaking your ass or groping people at carnival, we have to pull ourselves out from this neverending masturbatory self-indulgence over faded glories from the 60s. Rio is a dump nowadays, let’s get a grip - we could be so much more than performing monkeys for the gringos”
Then you might get; “we Paulistas [term for people from São Paulo] are far more serious, we carry this country economically. Brazil as a state wouldn’t be able to function on the level it does without this city, it would otherwise be just another Latin American shithole. Not to mention our ‘high culture’ is better, we’re more literate, more articulate, more worldly”
Kind of buy this though also have to say sorry but there is a reason why foreigners think of Brazil as just Rio and the Amazon. Big boobed women on the beach is very attractive vision for a country. São Paulo is the biggest metropolis in Latin America but (the Carioca criticism goes) it’s so boring and nondescript the rest of the world barely even knows it exists
Response from Cariocas is something like;“how can a city that large be so uninteresting, São Paulo puts you to sleep. Nice bars and restaurants but that’s it. Not a place to build any sense of national identity from, there’s no energy there, the cultural vision is very boring and people are never really going to care about you, sorry”
“You go to clubs and take acid and you think you’re New York or Berlin but you’re not you’re a boring, downstream, second-rate concrete jungle. You’re not a beautiful city, not effortlessly cool like us. Also people there turn up late all the time they’re not as serious as they think they are don’t kid yourselves!”
Both make good points actually, very ‘Apollonian and Dionysian’! You have to assume more thirdworldification doesn’t just win out here though
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩@kunley_drukpa
REVIEWING RIO DE JANEIRO TODAY 🇧🇷 Rio is such an attractive city because it has an undeniable energy. A host of factors conspire to suck that energy away though (the poverty, the crime etc) - and while they half-succeed they have not quite yet fully succeeded Thread 🧵
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