São Paulo: a city of memories, displacements and prejudice

Somos São Paulo [We Are São Paulo]. 6 bilhões de Outros from GoodPlanet on Vimeo.

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Paraguay/Brazil: this pot is melting

I guess 7 out of 10 Brazilians believe they are able to speak to our neighboring hermanos of Latin America. TV, movies, books and music have made a handful of verbs, accents and words of Spanish popular to us, and so “sorte” [luck] easily becomes “suerte”, “eu quero” [i want] is conversed to “yo quiero” and so on and so forth, crafting what is known as portunhol or portuñol.

"tríplice fronteira" - openstreetmap

With that in mind and living just across the border with Paraguay, Brazilian writer Douglas Diegues advocates for the literary status of this linguistic craft. There are poems written in portunhol (e.g. the video above), literary festivals, books… The initiative praises the cultural vitality of the borders of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, mixing Portuguese, Spanish, Guarani and words taken from other local indigenous languages. The blog Portunhol selvagem, run by Diegues, serves as common ground on the Web. The excerpt below is taken from an article published on the magazine Horizonte Geográfico:

Mejor curtir las kataratas del yguazu, las noches cumbianteras de City del Leste, la paz de las calles mais arborizadas de Puerto Yguazu. Circulan por aki quase todas las monedas del mundo. Hay cambistas on line 24 horas por las calles. El excesso de outdoors, letreros, pankartas, propagandas flotantes, lembram las calles de Hong Kong vista en alguna pelikula china pirateada en Paraguay. [...]