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9 Surdos Venceremos: The Rise of the Brazilian Deaf Community Norine Berenz This account of the Brazilian Deaf community and its language is necessarily localized in time and space and does not pretend to do justice to the richness and variety of the community or the language. A look at a map shows that Brazil is a vast landmass, extending over three climatic zones from north to south and, at its broadest, stretching from the Atlantic almost to the Pacific. Here, diversity is the norm, not the exception. Most of the country’s citizens live along the Atlantic littoral; the great reaches of the sparsely populated interior are more tenuously connected to the nation and its interests. The north is tropical jungle, with a population that is typically of Indian and European descent to varying degrees. The northeast is hot but dry, with a population that is mostly of African and European descent. The south is more temperate in climate, with a population more European in ancestry, its numbers swollen by those fleeing World War II and its aftermath, although in more recent decades, migration from the less industrialized, less prosperous north and northeast has gone some distance to changing the “face” of the region.1 The other, and earlier, non-European addition to the region’s population is largely centered in São Paulo, the country’s major industrial and commercial city. São Paulo boasts a population of Japanese descent, established in the early 1900s following the Russo-Japanese war, and now claims to be the largest urban concentration of Japanese people outside Tokyo (here more accurately, “Japanese Brazilians,” given that they are Brazilian by birth as well as by cultural adaptation). THE ROLE OF RIO If São Paulo is Brazil’s economic muscle, then Rio de Janeiro, the capital from colonial times to the 1950s, is its cultural heart.2 People from elsewhere challenge the hegemony of the cariocas (Rio residents born and bred) for a place on the narrow strip of land between the sea and the mountains. Deaf people, too, come 173 174 Norine Berenz to Rio from all over the country, forming perhaps the most vibrant and certainly the most visionary segment of the national Deaf community. Although I visited deaf people in Recife in the northeast, in Belo Horizonte in the central region, and in São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre in the south, Rio’s Deaf community provides the bulk of the data on which this chapter is based.3 A number of factors significantly affect the relationship between local Deaf communities and a truly national Deaf community. Unlike the United States, Brazil has no real equivalent of the National Association of the Deaf with its centuryold tradition of broad-based advocacy that regularly brings together deaf people and familiarizes all participants with the regional particularities of language and socio-historico-political situation. Brazil has a long-established Deaf national sports association, but its mission and constituency are narrower than that of typical Deaf advocacy-based organizations. Moreover, Brazil never had a network of residential schools where large numbers of deaf children could have enjoyed early and intensive (if perhaps officially prohibited) exposure to sign language and Deaf culture let alone a Gallaudet University with a student population drawn from nearly all regional communities. Unlike many European countries, Brazil’s territorial vastness makes travel dif- ficult and expensive, beyond the reach of ordinary deaf people. These limits on social interaction among members of the various local Deaf communities in countries such as Brazil may mean that an effective national Deaf community is more a hope than a reality. In Brazil, an effective national Deaf community is nascent; its development depends on the fostering of a Deaf social identity anchored in a championing of the sign language. If there is a site, however, where the seed of an effective national Deaf community could grow, it is Rio de Janeiro. SETTING, TOPIC, AND ETHNOGRAPHER The locality most important to the story I am about to tell is Rio, and the time most important is the first half of the 1990s. I had the good fortune to witness a major shift in the notion of what an ideal deaf person should be—from a conception of the model deaf person as one fluent in Portuguese to one who is a fluent and skillful signer. If we can extend the d/Deaf-distinction (in which deaf refers to hearing loss and...

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