American Dream, Jeitinho Brasileiro: On the Crossroads of Cultural Identities in Brazilian-American Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Brazilian cartoonist Henfil lived in the United States between 1973 and 1975. In 1983 he published Diário De Um Cucaracha (Diary of a Cucaracha), which was a collection of some of the letters that he had written to his friends during these years. While telling his personal experiences in his Diário , Henfil reveals his impressions of his host society, and often uses them to establish a comparison with his native Brazil. His reflections, filled with political and economic commentary, range from simple factual descriptions to serious cultural analysis. In both cases, the US becomes a mirror from which Brazil is either praised or criticized, and Brazil provides the perspective for his examination of North American culture. In A Travessia Americana (The American Crossing), Carlos Eduardo Novaes says that ‘Our country is always the reference. Whether we want it or not, we all travel with Brazil in our suitcases’ (17). Henfil's letters are evidence that Novaes is right. He traveled throughout the US and Canada with his friend Paulo Perdigão for thirty-eight days in 1983. A Travessia Americana is a report of their experiences during that trip. Novaes‘s book, therefore, is a travel narrative. Like Henfil's Diário , Novaes's crônicas analyze US society with a lot of humor and a pinch of irony. Every now and then Novaes also turns his gaze to Brazil, although not as emphatically as Henfil does. Both works are registers of an intercultural encounter that would be intensified after the 1980s, when Brazilian immigration to the US would take on much larger proportions. According to Christopher Mitchell, Brazilian immigration to the US started ‘almost abruptly in the mid-1980s’ and Teresa Sales agrees. New York City, for example, home to many Brazilians nowadays, had few Brazilians at that time. As Henfil reports in his Diário , at the end of 1973: There are few Brazilians. There must be many on 46th Street, where there are some stores where they speak Brazilian Portuguese that are meant only to assist Brazilians. But the Brazilians that come here leave after they go shopping. There are few (Brazilians) residing here. And they don't form a ghetto. (120) Bernadete Beserra points out that until the end of the 1980s, when the Brazilian press started exploring the topic, ‘Brazilian emigration was an unusual and almost unthinkable occurrence’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".