São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production

Conclusion

151 Conclusion As a city fast approaching twenty million inhabitants, there are many different São Paulos, and it is unlikely that anyone today could write a comprehensive analysis of the city and its cultural production. The day is long gone of viewing cultural production as: very much circumscribed regarding class interests and themes; written from a masculinist (and heteronormative) point of view; based on a homogeneous value system that, while perhaps never specifically Catholic in a sectarian way, most assuredly assumes a “Western” commitment that excludes as much indigenous culture as it does non-Christian cultures such as the Jewish or the Japanese. Two threads that can be called something like a social alignment dominate the chapters that make up this book. Against the backdrop of a culture that is the consequence of the impressive growth of a São Paulo intransigently committed to the project of political and economic modernization (major traces of which can be seen in the photography of Claude LéviStrauss ), I have chosen, in the first place, to emphasize culture that promotes proletarian interests, without writing necessarily from a populist or Marxian perspective. One major reason for this is quite clear: São Paulo is a laboratory of immigrant culture and, while not all immigrants belonged to the proletariat, the vast majority did, and they populated the factories and workplaces and peopled the streets. Patrícia Galvão’s transition from bourgeois privilege to the Communist Party and her writing on the lives of textile works (among others who move through Parque industrial) is complemented by the interest in the street of an upper-class immigrant like Hildegard Rosenthal and the interest in marginal human types of a working -class immigrant like Madalena Schwartz. Concomitantly, Mazzaropi’s films focus on the question of internal proletarian immigrants within the São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production 152 province of São Paulo, depicting the enormous contrast between rural lives and those of the modern megalopolis. Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá give an immediate feel of the complexity of urban life in their graphic fiction, where, by the end of the twentieth century, rural and citified, native-born and immigrants, marginal and privileged have melded into a continuous cityscape. Eduardo Emílio Fenianos traversed the streets of the city in a far more ambitious way than Rosenthal ever could have, while filmmakers like Luís Sérgio Person, Wilson Barros, and Beto Brant followed in the founding footsteps of the directors of the 1929 film São Paulo, sinfonia da metrópole, Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolf Rex Lustig, who were well aware that the most important stories of the city were to be told in the streets and based on the lives of everyday people. The second thread that runs through this book is that of gender. While the material does not permit me enough of an opportunity to pursue questions of queer lives, they do peek through in Galvão’s writing (the very fact that Parque industrial defies the masculinist view of the world, aside from elements of lesbianism that also appear) and in the photography of transvestites that was a major interest of Schwartz’s. Director Wilson Barros’s “angels of the night” have much that is queer about them, although I pass up the opportunity to investigate queer elements in Paulicéia desvariada, given the fact that Mário de Andrade’s homosexuality is now an open fact. Of greater interest to me has been the matter of feminist cultural production in São Paulo, and how the emergence of such a perspective is a significant component of a modernism that challenges the patriarchal culture of the city’s traditions prior to the early part of the twentieth century. Patrícia Galvão is absolutely crucial here, and recent interest in her writing is recognition of her great iconic importance. Galvão arguably had a feminist consciousness to one degree or another, unlike immigrant women such as Rosenthal or Schwartz, although their cultural interests (very much Jewish in the latter’s case, while only circumstantial in the former’s) led them away from the patriarchal in ways that have important connections with feminist principles. And if Niemeyer’s Copan project is a monument to the masculinist city (the city of the Noah of the title of her collection of stories set in that building), Regina Rheda engages very much in a feminist deconstruction of sexist assumptions of lived...