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The Cautionary Tale of Carolina Maria de Jesus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Robert M. Levine
Robert M. Levine*
Affiliation:
University of Miami, Coral Gables
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Carolina Maria de Jess was a fiercely proud black Brazilian woman who lived in a So Paulo favela with her three illegitimate children (each with a different father). She had learned to read and write by continuing to study on her own after only two years of primary school. In 1958 fragments of her diary came to the attention of an enterprising journalist, Audlio Dantas, who helped her get it published. For a brief period, Carolina Maria de Jess became an international celebrity as the author of the best-selling book in Brazilian publishing history. For many reasons, however, Carolina fell from favor: the rise of a military dictatorship in 1964, which led to an accompanying reaction against social criticism, and especially the ways in which she handled her fame and related to the press and the literary elite. Within a few years, she was forced to move back into the favela and scavenge for a living. A brief flurry of publicity in 1969 about her fallen condition prompted a slight improvement in her circumstances, but she was soon forgotten again. Carolina died in 1977, on the verge of indigence. Her complete life story has never been told, and most Brazilians today are unaware that a black favelada in the 1960s became the symbol (to foreigners, at least) of the struggle to rise above poverty. Most Brazilians neither read her books nor consider them noteworthy. Evidently, the author of what The New York Times called a rarely matched essay on the meaning and the feeling of hunger, degradation, and want touched no nerve in the Brazilian sensibility.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , 1994 , pp. 55 - 83
Copyright
Copyright 1994 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

This essay derives from an ongoing oral history research project in collaboration with students and faculty in the oral history program of the Departamento de Histria at the Universidade de So Paulo. I wish to acknowledge the enthusiastic participation of Juliano Spyer in So Paulo and Cristina Mehrtens in Coral Gables as well as the collaboration of Jos Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy. Useful comments on drafts of the manuscript were made by Daphne Patai, Martha Huggins, Darlene Sadlier, and Sandra Fernandes Erickson. An earlier version appeared as an occasional paper in the series produced by the Helen Kellogg Center at the University of Notre Dame.

References

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