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Jochen Becker |
Belinda The handicraft techniques of sewing, crocheting, knotting, and patching such as nozinho, fuxico or crochet are not as indigenous as they may appear. The fru fru technique, for example, stems from Europe and was imported to Brazil by the Portuguese colonial troops - and now embellishes products of the Dutch "C&A" group. Existential plights made the women or their ancestors move to the large cities to take their lives in their own hands in the favelas. The division of the country into the rich metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and the barren country in the Nordeste has been reinforced over the centuries; even today talk is of slavery when agricultural workers have to be liberated from the suppression of the farmers. The combat of hunger became a government programme which President "Lula" regards as a yardstick for his administration. In his book "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño and the Making of the Third World", the urban sociologist Mike Davis describes the "political ecology" (Davis 2004: 25) of hunger as the blind spot of the Victorian era: "We are not dealing, in other words, with ‚lands of famine' becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment when its labour and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centred world economy. Millions dies, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures." (9) The last chapter on Brazil - where between 1876 and 1900 half a million to two million people, depending on the findings, died of hunger - examines the striking division between the "fabulous coffee boom in the São Paulo region" and the "equally spectacular economic retrogression of the Nordeste" (377) at the end of the 19th century, while the starting positions appeared balanced beforehand. The lack of a national, social contract made the country drift apart until today. Mike Davis calls to mind that the Brazilians themselves called their country "Belinda": rich Belgium in the south and poor India in the north. While the coffee industry in the south operated relatively independently, the sugar cane plantations in the Nordeste were dependent on the British capital market. Davis describes this as an "informal colony". The accelerated urbanization of the south was contrasted by de-urbanization in the north. The inhabitants of the north did not yet migrate to the south; disqualified as backwoodsmen, their path from the north to the cities of the south was cut off by the state and they were diverted to internment camps. Immigrants from Germany or Portugal were preferred instead. Davis calls the preferential treatment of European immigrants "positive eugenics": After the forced immigration of black slaves, the Creole republic was to be "de-Africanized" in this manner. The day labourers and descendants of slavery of the north were forced back and all they could do was retreat further into the hinterland or offer themselves as cheap labourers. Their misery was intensified by lacking railway connections, the drying up of rivers and the lack of a domestic market. Little had changed even by the end of the 1960s. But then the path to the favelas in the south was no longer blocked, and today cheap labour is welcome in the service sector. In a discussion round in Berlin, one of the seamstresses told us that her daughter had to stand in for her when she couldn't work for a while because she was ill. This also reveals a great difference to the cooperative of the cartoñeros from Buenos Aires who still carried with them the memory of better times, when the duty of care was more or less guaranteed at the workplace and not based on an ultimately non-committal agreement. It was repeatedly stressed that for "Nuevo Rumbo" the idea of social justice is programmatic. With "Coopa-Roca", on the other hand, we had to persistently raise questions in this regard. The women of "Coopa-Roca" respectfully show consideration for older seamstresses, but their slower work is paid at the same piece rate as that of the younger ones. A compensation showing solidarity between the generations is made within the family; but work is not only allocated by the fittest. In the "Coopa-Roca", the women rely on being given job orders. Hence, they have to wait until this is the case or earn their money elsewhere. Sales canvassing is carried out only by the head. The cartoñeros, on the other hand, act as pragmatic one-person "companies", canvassing the better quarters to earn their income. With their future machines for reprocessing, the cooperative will evolve into a medium-sized recycling firm. "Coopa-Roca" would also undergo this change if they attained the means to produce on their own. They would then supply the markets instead of offering themselves as preliminary workers. ___________________________ Literature ______________________________ Notes * I thank Alejandra López and Hermann Hiller for their numerous comments.
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