Street Dance of Police and Vendors

Today I witnessed again a local street drama that is played out over and over again, perhaps even on a schedule...who knows? It is the rousting of the street vendors by the police. There are nuances to this process that I still don´t understand.

Of course my sympathies lie with the street vendors. Yes, even the ones selling pirated movies and music. My limited experience with their products is that they are bad quality versions, and I think they are mostly are sold to people who could never afford the real thing anyway. I don´t see them taking much money away from Sony or Viacom or Whoever. But, anyway, they make up a small portion of the vendors overall. In a country with such extreme income inequality, and with little or nothing in the way of social safety nets, all of these vendors are entrepreneurs who probably are a hair´s breadth away from sleeping on a piece of cardboard in the street. We should be celebrating their existential spirit, it seems to me.

In the past, when I´ve witnessed these productions, the police have always been so inept that I assumed the whole thing was a farce, which was enacted just so a report could be made to someone a few rungs higher up on the ladder. In a country where I can´t think of anything good to say about them, the police in these instances seemed almost sympathetic to the people they were harassing. They are usually so clumsy in their approach that the vendors all have time to fold up their perfectly portable little stands and flee. It is literally nothing to see 4 or 5 cops walking slowly down a street as the vendors they are nearing bag it and take it off running. The police never change the pace of their walk and, in fact, there were probably other police on the street, in the midst of the vendors all the time who are bystanders to this whole charade.

What I saw today was a bit different. The area involved consists of several square blocks, and the police seemed more aggressive than usual. I saw 5 or 6 police dumping one vendor´s inventory of soft drinks from his cooler into the police´s garbage bags. From a distance and on an elevated street, I saw police on foot a couple of blocks away actually chasing some fleeing vendors. Today people in the street stopped to watch. Someone screamed as we watched the foot race pass through an open intersection.

As I said, I don´t understand all the nuances of this procedure. A few things seem apparent though. For one, the cops never operate in groups of less that 4 to 6 when they are making these sweeps. It takes a half dozen of them even to empty a cooler of soft drinks into a garbage bag. I hope this is because they know the popular sympathy is with the vendors and not with them. And, even more, I hope they have good reason for this assumption. I see a lot of passivity to authority, and I´d like to think there is some history to make the police a little fearful of the people in these situations. (Mind you, I am taking a very passive attitude, no matter what implied criticisms I might make of the passive Brasileiros; I´ve no interest in seeing the inside of a police station.) I have seen it before, and I saw it again today, where there were two police officers alone in a street of vendors as they were packing up and leaving. Neither of the cops said a word or took any action.

It is probably bad karma for me to have said all of those bad things about the police. Tomorrow I have to take my documents to the Federal Police and make an application for the Brasilean identity number...the CPF number. I actually did this a few months ago, and it went nowhere, I am assuming because I only had a tourist visa at the time, and I probably shouldn´t have even been allowed to make the application. Now that I have the permanent visa, I am actually required to make an application within 30 days of my arrival here.

Apropos of my CPF application, the following is from Robert M. Levine´s The History of Brazil.

"Another Brazilean cultural characteristic is the jeito, a ´knack´ or ´fix,´ the way in which citizens cope with the often-unyielding formal legal system. Some use personal connections--relatives or other members of their panelinhas (networks)--to see that a rule is bent or not applied. Others, mostly less well-placed in the power structure, hire professional expediters (despachantes) to cut through red tape to obtain permits, passports, official documents and the like. The unwitting foreigner who does not understand the jeito system may spend hours or days waiting in line, mired in a bureaucracy that seems to have been created simply to provide sinecures.

Often, moreover, the Brazilean ´way´requires tips or small gifts, whether or not a despachante has been used. Doing business in Brazil often requires these payments, although this rule is unwritten. When the United States Consulate prior to President Bill Clinton´s visit in October 1997 issued a pamphlet describing the country´s business climate as ´generally corrupt,´Brazileans yelled in protest and the Americans apologized--although both sides knew that the description was not incorrect, at least from the American perspective."

Wish me luck. Heitor will be leading me by the hand in this process. I´m hoping he has a firm grasp of jeito.

Tchau.

Xmas Firecrackers

So much for "Silent Night." Starting about midday on 24 December, my São Paulo neighborhood was treated to almost an almost constant onslaught of firecrackers. I thought the revolution had arrived. I can only imagine what New Year´s Eve and January 1 will be like. Probably I should just be grateful it´s firecrackers and not bullets. Actually firecrackers are common around here all the time. I´m listening to a string of firecrackers going off even now, as I type this.

In the central valley of California, part of the Mexican-American heritage involved the firing of guns into the air at midnight to welcome the New Year. Every year, when I lived in Tulare, there would be reminders on the news programs and in the papers about the risks of this practice and people were urged not to do it but, of course, a lot of people ignored these cautionary warnings. And frequently there would be injuries. One year, I remember, a person in Visalia was shot in his/her living room by a celebratory bullet. A friend of mine who knew someone on the Stockton police department said that everyone in that department parked his/her squad car under an overpass a few minutes before midnight, and stayed there until all the bullets had fallen back to earth. Don´t know if that´s true or not, but it sounds smart.

Metaphorically at least, it was a quiet, uneventful and barely-noticed christmas for me here. Perhaps not speaking the language very well isolates me from more than I realize, but it does seem to be a lower-key holiday here. Certainly it is a big event and the large retailers and malls hype it just as in the US, but it feels a bit less omnipresent somehow. I was trying to explain to someone recently my relationship with christmas. She assumed it was a holiday that I actively disliked and reacted against, and I said that, while that may have been rather true at one time, now I am mostly oblivious to it. I explained that christmas is like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. I know they all exist and mean something to somebody, but they don´t any of them have anything to do with me or my life, nor me with them.

But, to those of you who actively revel in the holiday, I hope you all had an enjoyable time.

And a happy 2009 to us all!

I´m Still Here

For those who log on here once in a while to see if I´m still alive, I apologize for the long absence. I was in the U.S. from mid November until mid December. The trip turned out to be twice a long as my original intentions, but at least I came back clutching the permanent visa that I filed for in early July. Despite any frustrations I may have felt and expressed, it has been pointed out by all of my Brasilean friends who have had the experience that what the U.S. does to visa applicants (even just for a tourist visa) is far more bureaucratic and disrespectful. After listening to some of their stories, I haven´t any doubt they are correct.

I could, of course, have written here while I was in the U.S. , but it is always a little inconvenient not having one´s own computer, and it always seemed like there was something else to do. But the main reason since early in December is the distress I have been feeling since I found out that the woman who was supposed to be taking care of my cats was actually letting them roam around outside without any identification. Not only letting, but forcing, them to. Let´s name her: Carolyn Devine. Carolyn doesn´t even live in the house anymore and her adult son says he doesn´t scoop cat shit so the cats have to go outside. I lived with Sydney for 14 years and Spanky for 7. What Carolyn Devine and her dysfunctional family did to them in the course of 4 months is virtually criminal as far as I´m concerned. I got lucky and Sydney walked across the street while I was there, so I managed to rescue him and take him to a safe house where he will be appreciated for the amazing creature that he is. I was not able to get Spanky. Let´s name the son too: Doofus. Doofus told me Spanky got away on the day they moved back into the current house (which they had been forced out of temporarily due to a fire) which, according to what Carolyn told me back in July, should have been in August or September. Carolyn told me in an email that he had been gone for two weeks (mid-November) when a contractor was there. The conflicting lies from this family are almost non-ending, so it is impossible to know the truth.

Part of me wants to publish the whole history of Carolyn´s perfidy even if nobody really wants to read it, because it needs to be told and I´m not sure I can "get over it" until I do. Another part of me knows I should "just" try to put it behind me. I´ll listen to anyone´s opinion who wants to share it.

I will try to be more reliable about keeping current here, and also to try to figure out how to post pictures...which I don´t have, but I might get motivated to take.

Tchau