Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women's Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration

10. ‘‘When You Speak of Changes’’, Emma

∞≠ ‘‘when you speak of changes’’ Emma Three days after my high school graduation, in 2007, Dad and I boarded a plane for Brazil. The trip felt familiar: Hartford to Atlanta, Atlanta to São Paulo, São Paulo to Porto Alegre. It was the same trip we had taken with my mom and sisters in 2001, when my family lived in Porto Alegre for a year, and in 2004, when Dad and I first did research on our own. As we drove the highways and dirt roads to Ibiraiaras in June of 2007, I realized that things felt both shakier and more secure this time. Dad and I had worked together for three years, teaching classes, running workshops, and writing profiles. A collaboration that felt kind of crazy when we first drove into Ibiraiaras had become an exciting part of our lives. But we knew that things wouldn’t be quite the same this time. I was older and had more to say, the women’s lives had surely changed, and we brought with us a curriculum we had taught about the women’s movement in the United States and profiles we had written of Gessi, Ivone, and Vania, which we planned to show them. As a twelve-year-old, I had watched these women plan demonstrations and lead others in song, and I pictured their younger selves starting a movement when they weren’t much older than me. They hadn’t waited for their parents’ permission, or for some template or person to show them how to make a movement come alive. In many ways, they cleared the path as they created it, constantly dreaming up new ways of fighting for women’s rights despite all that stood in their way. I wanted to know how they did it, so as soon as my family returned from our year in Brazil, I started asking when we could go back. Dad, whose research fellowship had covered our expenses for the year, joked that I should come up with my own project. He didn’t really mean it, but during my first year of high school, when I took him seriously and suggested that we do a project together, he listened—perhaps because he had heard Gessi’s, Ivone’s, and Vania’s stories about fathers who didn’t listen to them. Those stories shaped me too. Looking back, I think I dared to imagine making a curriculum about the women’s movement because the women I met in Brazil showed me that it’s okay to act on my ideas before there are models or people to show me the way. Their activism, in its varied forms, let me see a way to a new kind of project, and a 124 chapter ten Ivone Bonês. Photograph by Jeffrey W. Rubin. new kind of collaboration, that in a very small way let me join them in their gamble on change. When Dad and I first decided to make a curriculum about the women’s movement, we didn’t know if it would work. Schools in the United States don’t normally use examples of Brazilian social movements to teach students about citizenship and democracy. But my first lessons in what it means to be a citizen, to be aware of issues facing your community and engaged in addressing them, had come from Brazilian women who transformed their communities with fewer resources and less education than I had when we met. Dad and I liked the idea of teaching other students about a movement that had so moved us. So we bought a video camera and booked plane tickets, then spent a month interviewing leaders of the women’s movement, attending movement meetings, and spending afternoons in women’s homes. The curriculum began to take shape my junior year of high school, when my principal agreed to let me teach a class to middle school students. I decided to teach about two other Brazilian social movements alongside the women’s movement: the mst and Afro Reggae, a group that uses dance and drumming to keep kids off the streets in the poorest shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. I taught the class as an elective. Week by week, watching my students’ reactions ‘‘when you speak of changes’’ 125 and bouncing ideas off my dad, I put together a series of lesson plans. I used clips from interviews, played...