Carolina Pfister

Spot it Got it: Vying for Legitimacy in my Americas

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H Carrilo was a celebrated Cuban-American author, but we learned after his death that he was not Cuban-American at all. Though he had meticulously embodied a Cuban immigrant identity, he was born and raised in Michigan and had no Cuban heritage. This revelation would be a surprise to many, including his husband.

H Carrilo once told a friend he had kept a crate of mangoes at his house over the summer. When they ripen, he told her, I get a comforting scent of home. The specificity of his performance struck me as deeply poetic.

During a childhood summer at my aunt's farm my cousins and I picked up the rotting, fallen fruit in her orchard, as ammunition for mango wars. Aparecida, the maid, would later hose off a sticky line of children. A ripe mango can evoke worlds.

I came to the U.S. in my twenties and in two decades I’ve gained a hyphen—or maybe I haven’t. No official letter ever arrived, no institutional knock came to say it was time. I believe I’ve mostly adopted the hyphen to organize my Brazilian-American thoughts; but I don’t just think of hyphenated or immigrant things.

H Carrillo never explained why he fabricated his Cuban-American identity so we can only infer. Perhaps the solemnity of exile offered a more literary history, but to pretend roots is to simulate a groundedness that dissonance had already unsettled. It’s an act of survival, perhaps, but also one of erasure.

Perhaps H Carrilo took comfort in the ambivalence of being a Black Cuban-American writer instead of the sharp focus on the Black American. In an article about the author, journalist C. T. Max wonders if, “For someone who kept straining to leave behind his old identity, what better subject was there than Cuba—a country whose population had been divided by a mass exodus?” (1)

*

In the early 20th century Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral was comfortably raised in a São Paulo coffee plantation. My aunt’s orchard sat in such a place. Tarsila had studied and made art in Brazil and Paris, dissecting the memories of this farm. She would paint for her husband a famous work called Abaporu. Named after the Brazilian indigenous Tupi language for the man who eats people, Tarsila described the painting as a monstrous, solitary figure, before a cactus exploding in absurd flower.

Inspired by her painting, the husband, Oswald de Andrade, a poet comfortably raised in cosmopolitan São Paulo, would release the famous Manifesto Antropófago. This Anthropophagic Manifesto pointed to Brazil's history of cannibalizing other cultures as its greatest strength.
In a yet emergent national identity, exoticizing Brazil for the European gaze was an ongoing tension between anti-european sentiment and euro-descendant fascination. Both Tarsila and Oswald would play into foreign curiosity of Brazil in their work. Tarsila’s farm memories were repurposed as personal mythology and national identity-making, and Oswald’s Manifesto claimed a Brazilian identity as an act of cultural devouring. 

When I write about Brazil, I too deconstruct my home for the Northern gaze. To belong in Brazil is to be an irreverent mix. I am already practiced in belonging as spectacle. 

*

In the late nineties, I crisscrossed the U.S. by bus and train with a friend who was interviewing comic book artists. I’d been lured into the world of indie comics through Love and Rockets, with its Chicana punk protagonists and its unapologetic hybridity. As a young, urban, and worldly Brazilian, I recognized something of myself there—the estrangement of being foreign in your own culture.

Philosopher Guy Debord argued that ideas improve, and that plagiarism is necessary. Anthropophagy, Debord’s plagiarism, sampling, collage—whatever the name—cultural survival often demands creative reassembly. Today, North and South Americans alike metabolize references beyond nations. We belong in fragments.

In a world of collapsing borders I see H Carrillo’s lonely act not as aberration but as an early practitioner of what’s becoming common: identities that are not stable or inherited, but curated.

*

In the beginning my white American Husband would say I was Brazilian to him. Later, in that way that couples can be a little mean to each other as the years stack, he once told me, You’re white too. I let that one be until I began to understand United Statesian whiteness. So, No, I responded one day, I’m not the white that is white here.

Being Latin American has provided a story about this distance, which might as well be my own crate of mangoes. I see kinship in this distance I’ve devised with Carrilo’s story of belonging. But in representation alone what is lost are the messy and storied truths behind the curated surface. Carrillo’s representation was a kind of self-exile—unlike my distance from my family back home. He was seen, but never quite known.

At times, this low stake inquiry of mine has felt like excavating a little moat:

To hyphenate? Excavate 

Who is legitimate? Excavate

Who even cares?! Excavate.

A moat needs tending however or else it can become a mosquito breeding ground. With nine million cases of dengue this last year—the highest number in the world—Brazil knows this well: standing water breeds disease, stagnation is no good.

As someone still excavating a theory of self—if such a thing ever truly ends—I write to fit together parts unseen. It is a way of cohering disparate selves into one body: Bring it all up, turn it inside out, repeat. The sweet nostalgia of a crate of mangoes is not a visible thing, you must tell of it.

*

With a tropical island as his proposed motherland, H Carrilo built a reputation around his novel Loosing my Espanish. The main character’s native language is displaced by a new one, just as my long switch to English displaced the poetry of my native tongue.

When I came to the U.S. for graduate school, over twenty years ago, it was pre social media age, and my lack of accent and general urbanity had often meant I wasn't being the right kind of Brazilian. Some Americans made sure to tell me so.

Even though I had known English, I hadn’t known it, known it. Eventually I would lose the melancholy of Portuguese and gain the plasticity of English, and I would learn that English is fun—America likes fun! 

Now, I especially like to swear in English. 

Fuck, for example, is a perfect word.

Language is a kind of double consciousness: dreaming in a language that shaped my bones while speaking another shaped by my choices.

One day, some years ago, when my son was angry at me, he imitated my hands as they flailed through the air. He knew this would hurt. As my gestures tempoed with my thoughts, my animated hands seemed to me as trapped wild birds. 

When they were younger, the children would often ask me to not speak Portuguese in public. 

Deal with it, I’d respond, I’m Brazilian. And so are you.

(Or are you?)

Language is a way to understand how we’re related to the land we’re in. The rhythm of a conversation, how your tongue informs your body’s relation to another. Or how your arms will reach out to express, and touch—or not touch—as I learned in the U.S. 

I once met an American woman who had grown up with one Brazilian parent and had not learned Portuguese at home. Since we had not shared residence in this lingual place, she struck me as one-sided. My children can’t yet understand that language is like a secret door you get to walk through. One day, I hope, their hands will have a dance of their own. 

*

In Losing My Espanish, H. Carrillo’s protagonist, a teacher on the verge of being fired, weaves memory, myth, and history for his students—in Spanglish. In his life, Carrillo’s fabricated history involved having immigrated to the U.S. as a young child and forgetting Spanish over time.

I know well the slippery slope of reconstructing your homeland from shreds of memory and a long backward glance—claiming a half-learned history and a sense of place as a knowing. Turns out my Brazilian-American perspective might be exactly that: neither here nor there. Smack in between. Me, Carolina, inherently hybrid; Carrillo, deliberately so. Both navigating the slipperiness of in-between-ness with different kinds of reckoning.

Of course, Latin American is too broad a category to pinpoint heritage, but it’s been the closest denominator I can inhabit. Latin American countries continue to straddle the contention between the euro-descendant, African-descendant, and native populations. Argentina just went ahead and chose to call itself European, and a national identity eventually emerged for Brazil as a non-spanish speaking South American contradiction. With a largely mixed population, Brazil was going to be all of it at once. Modernists such as Tarsila and Oswald were to be both Brazilian and foreign. How well I know this place.

The Tupi people had been one of the largest groups of indigenous Brazilians before the violence of colonization. I had not known they were the original inhabitants where my aunt’s farm is located; school had taught me no such thing.

My great-grandmother was Tupi-descendant. We know very little about her as assimilation was the goal. One of the Anthropophagic Manifesto’s most iconic lines was written in English:

Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question. 

Both of my Americas carry a similar and tragic conflict—the historical exclusion of indigenous genocide and the enslavement of millions of Africans. What it means to be Brazilian, or United Statesian, is an ongoing fracturing. But since in Brazil we identify as Brazilians, in the U.S.—a culture that culminated in hyphenated Americans—this fracturing has felt all the more visible. 

It’s boring, Boyfriend tells me, all this talk about this country.

I often agree, and then end up right here anyway, with my hyphenated and immigrant thoughts. 

H Carrillo’s widower defended his late husband, “Since there’s no such thing biologically as race, it has to be a cultural construct, and if it’s cultural then it’s performance.”(2) H Carrilo’s made-up Cuban identity was central to his writing; Brazilian—maybe Brazilian-American—is still central to mine. 

Tarsila and Oswald claimed their right to remake culture from within. They chose to cannibalize heritage. That is, after all, the violence at the heart of culture. 

The place I am from complicates any folkloric expectation of itself; a monstrous solitary figure, in front of a cactus exploding in absurd flower. 

Tupi or not tupi—I'll eat you up.

*

H Carrillo was writing a new novel before he died, investigating what it was to be Cuban. He wondered if one had to be born in a place to be from a place, if you had to speak the language—or if the connection could be more intangible. I would have liked to read this novel of his.

A few years after my cross-country trip I came back to the U.S. and was hired as an art educator in a very segregated neighborhood of the midwest. I’d never seen such hard lines as these, and I noticed the youth would warm up to me as soon as they understood I was from Brazil. 

So you’re not caucasian, they’d tell me. I hadn’t known this term till then. 

No, I answered, I’m not.

Having lived in the U.S. now for longer than I lived in Brazil, who I am in this place might be a question to one day lay down; there will be new Brazilian-American thinkers to grapple with this, and Boyfriend will be very pleased when I move on.

In the meantime, I’ll keep on digging if it suits me—immigration demands reconstruction after all, and my moat feels safe. Perhaps the question was never whether I’m Brazilian enough—but how much of me wants to be from here, or there.

I suspect there was great freedom for H Carillo to cohere from scratch, to claim the rotting sweetness of that crate of mangoes. I’ve stored my mangoes in language: the silkiness of Portuguese on my tongue, a sweetness that won’t quite translate. My sex-in-the-mouth fruit, as Boyfriend likes to call it, when I come home mango drunk at the start of spring.  

Endnotes:

1.  The New Yorker, The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far, D. T. Max, March 13, 2023

2. The New Yorker, The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far, D. T. Max, March 13, 2023