The protest gathered followers of all religions practiced in Brazil. In the view of Ideli Salvatti, Minister at the Human Rights Secretariat of the Presidency, the walk was a symbol of “the culture of peace, respect, and mutual acceptance.” She believes that religious tolerance should be enforced in schools and supported throughout the country.

“Apart from the National Committee for Religious Diversity, which has been in operation since the beginning of the year, it is important that all Brazilian states have their own committees, because several situations involve the structure of state governments,” he noted.

Helio Loureiro, member of Rio’s Spiritualist Council, mentioned that “the union of several religions promotes respect.” He regretted to admit there are still cases of religious intolerance, like that of a boy who said he was a victim of bullying for believing in spiritualism.

Candomblé spiritual leader Ivanir dos Santos, said that Brazil has always been intolerant towards African-Brazilian religions. He claims he has been the victim of two death threats because of his beliefs.

He went on to mention examples of discrimination in public schools, like the Jewish young man who was disrespected for refusing to say a prayer, and the boy who was not let in his school wearing traditional Candomblé necklaces.

In the view of Jaime Salomão, president of the Israeli Federation of Rio de Janeiro, religious intolerance has increased worldwide due to fanaticism in some religions.

“We’re witnessing lack of tolerance in and out of Brazil. That’s why we must stick together; through dialogue and integration we can make progress,” he declared.

Maranhão

Amid the atmosphere of insecurity brought about by a series of attacks against buses and private vehicles in the metropolitan region of the state capital São Luís, Maranhão Governor Roseana Sarney appealed to the Ministry of Justice for help in an attempt to strengthen the work of the National Public Security Force in the city.

The request is pending approval at the ministry. If granted, a new contingent should be sent to the state, where the National Force has already been working at the Pedrinhas Prison Complex, notorious for the number of violent riots staged by its inmates. Fatalities during such incidents have totaled 14 in 2014 alone.

Last weekend, five buses and a microbus were set ablaze in the metropolitan region of São Luís. The disturbance continued on Monday (22), when three other buses and eight cars were torched in São Luís.

In a statement, the Secretariat for Public Security of Maranhão announced that investigations are still being carried out over the attacks and that “all measures have been taken in order to ensure the security of the population.”

The command which possibly initiated the attacks is suspected to have come from Pedrinhas, Maranhão’s largest penitentiary.

ABr

As with most titillating stories these days, her activities were captured on youthful cellphone cameras and displayed on YouTube. As is typical with the viral nature of these sagas, not to mention that lawyers are now involved, I can’t tell for sure exactly what Geisy did or didn’t do. Other than her dress, it’s come down to a battle between her lawyers and her university.

Outside of Brazil, little would have been made of Geisy’s behavior had her university not elected to expel her just before the final exams of her freshman year. According to the university, much soul-searching was done on their part before such a grave decision was made. The search included hours of interviews with fellow students and teachers, as well as Geisy herself.

Geisy pleaded with university elders to be allowed to return to take her exams and thus get credit for completing one year of her tourism program. She promised she would then withdraw from Bandeirante University and take her pink fashion statement elsewhere. The university said they feared for her safety and in fact police had to be called in to escort her from the campus on the day of the “event,” October 22.

As a tourism student, Ms. Arruda is no doubt familiar with the customs of the US, which is probably the most litigious country on the planet. Following her expulsion, Geisy held a press conference, accompanied by seven lawyers, where she claimed if a security guard or professor had informed her of her inappropriate clothing, she would have immediately gone home and changed.

She denied the school’s accusations that it was not only her dress that caused a near riot but her “behavior and attitude.” She also denied another reason given for her expulsion – that this was not the first time she’d flaunted the dress code and been warned about it.

I was proud to see Brazil’s Education Ministry as well as the Minister of Women’s Policy voice their support for Ms. Arruda, or at least demand an explanation from the university for her expulsion. Brazil is not exactly famous for its women’s liberation.

Lo and behold, thanks to YouTube, Geisy’s seven lawyers, and the Education Ministry, Geisy’s pink voice was heard round the world, and the university has backed down and agreed to reinstate her. I would call that a major victory for mini-skirts. Twiggy would be proud. Recently, several Brazilian celebrities showed their support for Arruda by using the color pink on the frame of their Twitter photos, as well as writing messages of support.

As an American male, I’m personally in support of Ms. Arruda and pleased to see she will be returning to school. On the other hand, she may want to reconsider her next outfit, for her personal safety if nothing else. I have to imagine she would be nervous about returning to campus, and no matter what she wears, she’s going to be recognized and in need of friends, if not her own security team. I would also suspect her school intends to hold her to her verbal agreement to withdraw next month at the end of the school year, and they will breathe a sigh of relief when she does.

Several questions come to mind over this incident, and I wish I had answers for them. First, if Ms. Arruda is Brazilian and grew up in Brazil, which I presume she did, she must have known her attire was not appropriate. Where I live, in Curitiba, women and girls do not wear skirts or dresses to college or high school or even to work at their companies.

Pants are the customary dress code for women. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if Geisy’s university had no officially printed dress code, as many schools, even in the US, don’t. But if anyone thinks young females are not aware of what other girls are wearing, they don’t live on this planet.

I also wonder if it’s true that Geisy had exhibited this lack of fashion sense in the past. If so, perhaps it was her intention to attract attention, and she’ll soon be looking at job offers or queries for a reality TV show.

It’s also fascinating to note, as was mentioned in the Associated Press coverage of the story, that there is a contradiction in the Brazilian dress code mandates, e.g. thong bikinis, which are rare in the US but popular in Brazil, are the norm for the Brazilian beach, but in college, it’s jeans and a T-shirt.

Here’s another example: Although mini-skirts are considered inappropriate in Brazil for the office or school, they are quite commonly worn in the evening at parties, restaurants, and clubs. Additionally, although skirts and dresses are not often worn by professional women at work, it’s not considered inappropriate for a woman to wear a transparent blouse in the office and to display cleavage, certainly a lot more exposure than I’ve seen in the American workplace.

Certainly every country has its unwritten societal rules of behavior and who knows where they come from. Suffice it to say, Brazil can’t be the only country where there are contradictions.

Not only is it interesting to observe the contradictions, it’s also worth noting the rigidity of these rules. From my personal observations, the conformity to fashion codes is more rigid in Brazil than in the US. In Curitiba, for example, not only is long hair on men out of fashion, but so is facial hair. With a metropolitan population of nearly three million, I have not seen men with beards or moustaches anywhere. Similarly, long hair on women is in fashion, and I never see women under 60 with short hair.

Another element I find interesting in Geisy’s story is the peer pressure angle. When I was a teenager, I remember my parents and teachers telling me that if someone didn’t like me, I should ignore him. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me,” the saying went. However, the reality is peer pressure is impossible to ignore; it can be life altering.

Teens who are shunned by their peers may grow up to be suicidal or even homicidal. In this regard, I have to come down on Geisy’s side. I think she was brave to stand up to the boys who were calling her a whore for violating fashion rules. And the macho/sexist element is only part of the story: According to a source listed in a news story on this website, the first signals of distress on October 22 came not from male sexual harassment but from other female students.

A still deeper element that has yet to be discussed is the possibility that Ms. Arruda had other things on her mind besides studying or attracting attention. It is common knowledge among Brazilians that many college coeds work for escort services in their spare time. Women who work for escort services are by definition young, and college women are often in need of money to pay for their education. It’s a perfect match.

High-class prostitution is common all over the world, but I’d venture to say it’s less stigmatized in Brazil than most other places. Again, why that is, I have no idea. However, if you ask any Brazilian college student who these girls are, they will point them out. They’re the girls who drive expensive cars to school instead of taking the bus, and wear $300 pairs of jeans and nice jewelry.

They are hardly inconspicuous. I have no evidence to suggest that this after-school activity applies to Ms. Arruda, and I don’t mean to suggest that it does. And even if it did, that is not cause for her expulsion or even moral condemnation. But if nothing else, perhaps it explains her clothing, whereby she had a “date” after class.

Needless to say, Geisy, or her lawyers, have won the first round in a battle that may not be over yet. She has already been offered full scholarships to attend two other colleges, and who knows what she’ll wear on her first day of class there. Perhaps the schools welcome the additional publicity, and she’ll become a feminist celebrity.

I would also add if Bandeirante University or the Education Ministry of Brazil thinks the fashion wars are over, they need only to look at France’s battles with Muslim girls wearing chadors to school. Or how will Brazil react when it is faced with the challenges occurring in US schools? For example, there is the 15-year-old American boy who wants to wear a skirt to school. He has already told his parents and friends that he’s gay but admits privately he’s never had sex.

I certainly don’t fault Geisy’s university for expelling her, as her presence raised, and now with her reinstatement, will continue to raise security issues. Nor do I fault Geisy for daring to break the fashion taboos. She may have been ignorant and foolish, but she certainly had courage, Madonna kind of courage.

However, I still want to know what Geisy was thinking on October 22, assuming this was the only time she jumped the rigid wall of acceptability. Had she been in regular attendance for an entire school year and not noticed that all the other girls only wore jeans?

Geisy would have been even more courageous, in my opinion, although probably dishonest, if at her press conference she claimed her pink transgression was a test for the university, a provocation to rigid unwritten fashion codes that often don’t make sense, a wake-up call to women all over Brazil who were locked out of the feminist revolution that swept the US in the 1970s when Brazil was under a military government. American feminists may enjoy dressing in pants, but they enjoy even more breaking the rules of oppression.

I will be interested to see where Ms. Arruda turns up next year for her second year of college. Perhaps she should consider the US, where mini-skirts are acceptable college attire, and at the same time, if she were so inclined, she could start another fashion revolution with a beach thong.

Michael Rubin is an American living in Curitiba, Brazil. He can be contacted at rubin.brazil@gmail.com.

In the commissioner’s view, Brazil is a model of support to refugees and thus has "moral authority" to lead this campaign.

He pointed out that governments and societies need to be made aware that refugees are not criminals or terrorists.

"I made a special appeal to president Lula for him to play a very active role in the campaign against intolerance," Guterres affirmed after a meeting with Lula in the Planalto Palace.

He went on to observe that refugees are not terrorists, but, rather, victims of terrorism. "It is necessary to fight against intolerance, irrationality, xenophobia, and racism."

He commended the job Brazil has done to integrate the nations of South America and the assistance program for refugees who live in the country, especially those from Colombia and Ecuador.

ABr

It’s been my privilege to listen recently to several North American colleagues, themselves immigrants from Latin America, present papers here in Brazil regarding immigration from South America to the United States. What has struck me on these occasions has been their unconscious, almost natural, use of the word “gringo” to describe the native born, predominantly “white” population of the United States.

“One cannot inhabit another country with impunity. One cannot live embedded in another society, another economy – another world, in short – without suffering change…”
         Abdelmalek Sayad

They have set these gringos in opposition to themselves (and, I presume, “we”), “latinos”. This use of “gringo” has fascinated me for the word as it’s popularly used in Brazil is most definitely not the opposite of “latino”.

I should know as, aside from studying gringos in Brazil, both as immigrants and tourists, I am one. Different from my North American latino colleagues, however, I have learned an important thing. They, too, are gringos.

“Gringo”, as I shall show here, means “that which is not of us, but is among us”, an apt description for any foreigner in a world where life is increasingly lived across national boundaries and where acculturation, even into the second and third generations, seems more of an ideal than a reality.

The word’s transformation into a semi-racialized marker of ethnic difference, while understandable in political terms, should be seriously re-examined.

In the stampede to use the term as a Barthian boundary stone, my North American colleagues are apparently unaware of its original meaning, depriving immigration studies of a concept that potentially offers an alternative to the increasinly obsolete term “immigrant”.

Gringo As a Contextual Term

When I say I study gringos, the word generally causes raised eyebrows and poorly suppressed giggles among friends and colleagues at the National Museum here in Rio de Janeiro. I can’t say I blame them.

There’s something about the very word that brings the ridiculous immediately to mind. Visions spring up of overweight, sunburned rednecks stuffed into polyester golf shirts and Hawaiian-print shorts, black nylon socks sagging over their patent leather loafers as they click snapshot after snapshot of Guanabara Bay from the peak of Corcovado. The visceral impact of such an image is mirth-provoking, to say the least.

My use of “gringo” might be politically incorrect in these times of heightened ethnic sensitivity, but I believe that it’s an adequate choice which best describes the people I observe during my fieldwork as an anthropologist here in Rio de Janeiro.

Most of my informants are quite aware that Brazilians do not generally use “gringo” as an insult. Because of this, they cheerfully apply “gringo” to themselves and other foreigners, especially other anglophones, and they generally do not take offense when Brazilians apply it to them.

The term is bandied about between Brazilians and foreigners with a surprising degree of naturalness, in fact. But if “gringo” is not necessarily an insult in Brazil, what, exactly, is it?

First and foremost, the word is a marker for difference, especially foreign difference. As such, it can be and is applied to foreigners in general, regardless of physiognomy, ethnic heritage, or national background.

I suspect this comes as a bit of a surprise to any latinos who might be reading this, but in Brazil, “gringo” is even applied to foreigners hailing from other parts of Latin America.

The Rio daily newspaper O Povo recently ran a front page item detailing an attempted mugging of an American by three Ecuadorians in Tom Jobim airport. The headline? “Gringo rouba gringo” (“Gringos steal from gringo”).

“Gringo” is not openly deprecatory. Though it can be used as an insult, aggressive intent is not clear in the unmodified use of the word. If one really wants a gringo to know that they are not welcome, a negative adjective like “damned” or “shitty” needs to be attached.

Steve, a 25 year-old Californian who had been living in Rio de Janeiro for little more than a year at the time I interviewed him, described his understanding of “gringo” in the following manner:

“Any foreigner’s a gringo here… At first I was shocked by the term, ’cause in Mexico, it’s a total insult. Here, it’s like a nickname, you know? ‘Hey, go talk to the gringo over there…’

“A Mexican’s a gringo here and so is an Argentine. It doesn’t matter. At first I was taken aback, though… ‘Shit! Man, it’s just like Mexico. They’re gonna kick my ass…’ But that wasn’t the case. [laughs]”

Like many gringos I’ve met, Steve originally classified the term “gringo” as a racial or ethnic insult, specifically used by Mexicans against white Americans and potentially associated with violence.

He changed his definition, however, through contact with the term as it’s used in Rio, where he sees it as merely a nickname for any foreigner, including Mexicans and Argentines.

This aside, however, it seems that even in Brazil the term is especially applicable to certain nationalities and physiognomies: all foreigners are gringos but some gringos are more gringo than others.

Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and Northern Europeans seem especially to attract the use of the word, particularly if they have lighter skin, eyes and hair.

Consider the experiences of three of my informants, for example. They’ve all been called “gringa” at one time or another but how often this occurs seems to have a great deal to do with their physical appearance.

Carla, though a native-born U.S. citizen, is rarely called a gringa because of her straight black hair, morena skin color and noticeably Native American features.

Amber, though a pale Englishwoman is petite and has dark, straight hair and brown eyes. She, too, is rarely called a gringa unless someone hears her speak and picks up on her accent.

However, Amy, a tall American woman with blond hair and pale blue eyes is often catcalled “gringa” by strangers in the street. Amy attracts so much attention in fact, that Amber expresses a certain reluctance to be seen in public with her, even though the two women are friends:

“I find it interesting how people don’t accept Amy here. She’s constantly sexually harassed by men for being blonde and blue eyed, yet she still feels that this is her home. That surprises me….

“I could not feel at home in a place where if I walk around people shout ‘gringa’ at me. Which is what happens to Amy all the time. I hate that energy, that vibe…. Sometimes I don’t enjoy being around Amy because of this, just because of all the negative energy she gets. It’s horrible.”

It would be an error, however, to reduce “gringoness” to a quasi-racialized term, as is apparently the current fashion among North Americans. More than most words, it’s use in Brazil is contextual and relational.

Whether or not it is applied to a given foreigner has more to do with that foreigner’s ability to reduce marks of alterity than his or her physical characteristics, per se.

Take my own case, for example. As a foreign-born, 5 foot, 9 inch tall, relatively heavyset guy with blue eyes and what, in Rio, passes for blond hair, one would think I’m a natural mark for the word.

However, how I dress and cut my hair has more to do with its immediate application than anything else. If I dress in casual but clean and well-maintained clothes, appropriate to the local middle class, with “normal”, close cropped hair, I’m hardly noticed in a Carioca crowd.

When I shave my hair in a mohawk, toss on a pair of cut-offs and a ratty U.W. Madison T-shirt, however, I’m instantly recognizable as a gringo. So much so, in fact, that strangers will come up to me and try to ask me things in English.

Nevertheless, an interesting phenomenon occurs on these occasions. Being that I’ve lived in Brazil for almost all of my adult life, my spoken Portuguese is almost as good as my English.

I have an accent, yes, but I can cover it up when I have to, especially for quick, casual phrases. So when I turn around with an emphatic “Qualé?” (the carioca equivalent of “wussamatta?”), my English speaking interrogators always drop back, saying “Ah. You’re Brazilian, then. I’m sorry, I thought you were a foreigner.”

In other words, the fact that I speak Portuguese well is enough to disqualify instantly any visual marks of “foreignness”, reframing them as indicators of Brazilian eccentricity.

It’s even enough to cover my accent, as least momentarily, though I’ve gone through entire conversations with people who think I’m a German descended Brazilian from Santa Catarina state.

In the game of “Who’s a gringo?” then, cultural markers, principally (though not exclusively) one’s knowledge of Portuguese, vastly outweigh physical attributes.

The Roots of “Gringo”

The etymology of “gringo” is complicated, but it seems that Brazilians use the word in something approximating its original sense. Throughout the Americas, there has sprung up a number of complicated, silly, or downright apocryphal stories of how the word came to be.

The least ridiculous of these can be found in Sobrados e Mocambos, a classic work of the Brazilian social sciences, whose author Gilberto Freyre favored the theory that “gringo” was originally a label for wandering gypsy slave traders. With the opening of the ports and the subsequent appearance of foreigners – principally British – among the rural mascates, the term naturally transferred itself to foreigners in general.

Most of the other theories I’ve heard, though repeatedly proffered by earnest students and colleagues, are on the level of “urban legends”: “just so” stories that are quite easily unraveled with the slightest amount of effort.

Chief among these is the old saw that “gringo” means “green go”. Basically, the story goes that brave native civilians (either Vietnamese or Mexican, depending on which version of the story is told) taunted invading American troops with cries of “Green go [home]!”

The story is obviously apocryphal for two reasons: 1) “gringo” was being used before the U.S. invaded Mexico (and long before they invaded Vietnam); and 2) U.S. Army uniform colors at the time of both invasions of Mexico were not green but blue, gray, or khaki.

There are other, equally erroneous stories of the word’s origins – that it comes from English sailors (or American cavalrymen) singing Robert Burns “Green grow the rushes”, or that it refers to “greenbacks.”

However, it seems that “gringo” has been around in the Iberian languages (and in Ibero-America) for quite a long time – since at least the 18th century, in fact. Its exclusive association with gypsies is also in doubt.

According to Father Charles E. Ronan, in the Spanish historian Terrenos y Pando’s Diccionario, compiled in the late 1700s, the term is described in the following fashion:

“Gringo in Malaga, [is] what they call foreigners who [have] a certain kind of accent which prevents their speaking Spanish with ease and spontaneity; in Madrid the case is the same, and for some reason, especially with respect to the Irish.”

Apparently in use throughout Ibero-America by the beginning of the 19th century, the true etymological roots of “gringo” may perhaps be found in the Spanish “griego”, or Greek.

All that can be said, then, is that the term probably originally applied to funny-looking itinerant speakers of an exceptionally unintelligible language.

“Gringo” is thus used today in Brazil in a manner remarkably similar to the way it was used two centuries ago in the Iberian Peninsula. Though it’s not meant as an open insult it certainly is not a compliment.

It is a euphemism for “funny speaking/looking/acting outsider”; a way of signifying that which is not Brazilian and which has little hope of ever being so. In fact, the term comes awfully close to the original Greek barbaros, a foreign babbler.

The term’s current preferential association with Americans, Canadians and Northern Europeans is thus perhaps more historically connected to the fact that these groups speak non-Latin based languages (“…foreigners who have a certain kind of accent…”) than any physiognomic qualities per se.

In one important way, however, the use of “gringo” has changed since the 18th century. It now has a certain preferential association in Brazil with imperialism.

Again, though any foreigner is a gringo, “true” gringos – the kind that are traditionally cursed at in popular left-oriented publications such as (in Brazil) Caros Amigos, Pasquim or Revista Bundas – belong to nationalities which are generally seen as taking advantage of Brazil.

When Raul Seixas sang “Dar lugar pros gringo entrar/Esse imóvel está prá alugar…” (To give room for gringos to come in/This real estate is for renting), he was not talking about renting Brazil out to the Angolans or Paraguayans as a solution to the nation’s perennial economic crisis.

This imperialistic aspect of “gringo” is presented very clearly in the popular theories regarding the word’s origin that I’ve presented above. One theme that lurks in all of these stories is that “gringo” is a word invented in reaction to English (or American) military and/or economic imperialism in Latin America.

As we can see then, “gringo” is a contextual term that corresponds to a set of idealized physical, cultural and political characteristics making up a stereotype.

Furthermore, these characteristics have idealized counterparts that map to the configuration of a stereotypical “native Brazilian”. A partial listing of these characteristics follows below:

“Gringo” characteristics

 Not born in Brazil
 Parent(s) isn’t/aren’t Brazilian citizens
 Speaker of a non-Latin language
 Light skin, eyes and hair
 Citizen of an “imperialist” nation

“Brazilian” characteristics

 Born in Brazil
 Parent(s) is/are Brazilian citizens
 Portuguese speaker
 Dark skin, eyes and hair
 Brazilian citizen

To the degree that an individual’s actions and appearances correspond with more characteristics in one grouping than the other, he is more likely to have the label “gringo” or “Brazilian” attached to him by others.

Note that two out of five of the above characteristics are completely modifiable by human preferences and action: in other words, they are cultural, not biological indicators of difference.

Even two of the remaining three characteristics – parentage and physiognomy – can be modified, if not completely changed. In the first instance, one can “marry into” a native family. In the second, one can reduce alterity by adopting appropriate clothing, hair and body language styles.

The frequency with which one is “spotted out” as a gringo, then, is something over which individual action can be expected to exercise a large degree of influence. One either takes the necessary steps to reduce one’s differences from the ideologically defined national norm or one risks being defined as “other”.

However, to borrow a metaphor from Brazilian immigration studies doyen, Giralda Seyferth, one can cover one’s alterity up with merit badges only so far: eventually, one’s foreignness will become known.

Gringos and Immigrants

As many theorists of immigration have pointed out, the term “immigrant” itself is becoming obsolete due to recent developments in the global means of communication. Traditionally, “immigrant” contains overtones of permanency and relative powerlessness.

The immigrant commits, at least temporarily, to being a subject instead of a citizen in order to have the possibility of creating a new life in a new land. As such, it is expected that he will reduce his alterity, eventually becoming one of “us”.

The ability for even working-class individuals to maintain persistent and often renewed international ties with the homeland is now so well developed and diffused, however, that it’s difficult to believe that most immigrants will passively subject themselves or their children to a regime of assimilation.

Furthermore, it’s difficult to even know who is now an immigrant. Is a Brazilian who lives in New York for six years and then returns to his country of origin an immigrant? Is a Canadian who’s lived in Rio for thirty years with no intent to ever leave?

Reading some contemporary studies of immigration in the Americas one can easily reach the conclusion that every latino foreigner who’s ever crossed the U.S. border is an immigrant.

That large, enduring, anglo presences in Latin America are rarely described using the same term shows how polluted by power and politics our basic notions of human international dislocation are.

There is one further characteristic of the word “gringo” which merits attention because, while not immediately obvious, might make an interesting conceptual tool for immigration studies.

Though the gringo is not of us, he’s certainly among us. The term’s contemporary popular use makes no distinction between tourists, businessmen, travelers, or immigrants. Historically however, it has been associated with foreigners who have acquired a certain degree of consistent presence.

Recall that according to Terrenos y Pando, “gringo” refers to foreigners who have an accent “which prevents their speaking Spanish with ease and spontaneity”. This situation presumes that they at least speak Spanish to some degree.

Gilberto Freyre’s mascate theory postulates gringos that were savvy enough in their comprehension of native codes that they could wander around the backlands of 19th century Brazil as itinerant merchants – certainly not something our putative tourist atop Corcovado would feel comfortable doing even under today’s circumstances!

A gringo can thus also be seen as a foreigner engaged in a process of approximation with Brazil – a hesitant approach, appropriate to a “vagamundo” perhaps, but a definite drawing near. He wants or has to engage with Brazil, not merely observe.

There’s a bit of Levi-Strauss’ concept of the floating signifier in the nature of the gringo. He is not of us nor are the things he brings, but we may use them and eventually make them our own.

After a time, we may even forget that they were once ever gringo. In this sense, it is not so much the gringo that adapts himself to us (though this occurs) but we that adapt ourselves to his presence.

When I look at the vast majority of South American immigrants that I’ve met and known in North America, it is difficult not to see them as gringos like myself.

We are both engaged in processes of stretching lives and generations across continents, eager to learn new cultural tools, distrustful of those who say we must indiscriminately discard the old. As such, we are “other” – irreconcilably at odds with projects which demand we choose “this” or “that” nationality, exclusively.

Unlike other immigrants who have come before us, however, the new developments in the means of communication put this possibility within our reach, at least imperfectly. My Brazilian ex-wife and I manage to see our parents and relations at least once a year, despite the fact that we are both economically far from middle class, making salaries of less than US$ 1000 a month.

Neither her Syrian ancestors in Brazil, nor my Dutch-German forebears in the United States could avail themselves of that sort of opportunity. And our son speaks both Portuguese and English…

As the quote from Sayaad at the beginning of this article suggests, transnational dislocation still retains much of its power as a profoundly transformative experience. We would be wrong to think, however, that people are transforming their identities by moving from one national category to another.

People are not so much immigrating and assimilating as they are stretching themselves across localities. The experience of living outside of the nation of their birth adds to people’s identities: it does not replace the old with the new.

Though “globalization” is generally presented as an economic and/or cultural process it is also a phenomenon carried out via the dramas of everyday individual life, including marriage, kinship and affinity. This has, of course, always been the case throughout human history.

New developments in the means of communications, however, have created a situation in which transnational dislocation is losing force as a marginal and marginalizing experience.

The radical contact with “otherness” that such experiences have traditionally represented has been diminished, yet at the same time, “assimilation” and “migration” are more sharply separated than ever before.

More than ever, a stranger in a strange land can (and in some cases, is even forced to) maintain his alterity. In such a world, to be a gringo is an increasingly normal state of affairs.

Thaddeus Blanchette is an immigrant to Brazil who has been living in and studying the country most of his adult life. He can be reached at poboxthad@yahoo.com.br.