Dominga Menezes was solely 12 years previous when she danced for a dictator.
It was 25 July 1974, and São Leopoldo, a medium-sized metropolis in Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, was celebrating each the anniversary of its founding and 150 years of German immigration to Brazil.
Then chief of Brazil’s army dictatorship, Gen Ernesto Geisel was himself of German descent, and was visitor of honour on the ceremony subsequent to the Sinos River, the place the primary German immigrants had arrived in 1824.
100 and twenty ladies danced onstage, every sporting a leotard with one of many three colors of the state flag.
“The whitest ladies have been sporting inexperienced; the Black ladies, pink; and the light-brown-skinned have been in yellow,” stated Menezes, now 62. “It was a lot later that I realised the academics had put me in yellow as a result of I’m of Indigenous descent.”
She doesn’t know why every race was related to every color. However she remembers that, at school, the scholars with extra “German” bodily traits – honest pores and skin, blue eyes and blonde hair – have been those praised by the academics.
“Yearly at college, in July, there was quite a lot of speak about German immigration. However they by no means raised the query of who else was right here: the Indigenous individuals and the Black individuals,” stated Menezes.
This yr, as São Leopoldo celebrates its 2 hundredth anniversary and the bicentenary of German immigration, issues have been imagined to have gone in another way: range was a central theme of a string of occasions deliberate by town corridor.
However these plans have been thrown into disarray by the unprecedented flooding that devastated Rio Grande do Sul.
Though São Leopoldo was not worn out by the catastrophe – as was the case with others, akin to Eldorado do Sul – elements of it spent nearly a month underneath the muddy water.
9 individuals died, and 100,000 of its 217,000 residents needed to go away their houses.
When water lastly receded in late Might, town was left to face the aftermath.
“The largest downside now could be psychological. Households have misplaced the college as a reference level, the well being clinic, and their church. They’ve misplaced all the things,” stated town mayor, Ary Vanazzi, 64.
His home spent greater than 20 days submerged; all the things inside it was misplaced.
At Visconde de São Leopoldo Historic Museum, about 10% of the ten,000 artefacts in its assortment, all of them associated to German immigration, went underwater.
Essentially the most affected piece was a 120-year-old Schiedmayer grand piano. The keys are coated in mould, what’s left of the strings are rusted, and items of what was once the soundboard are warped.
Museum employees are hoping to reopen in time for 25 July, when the bicentenary is well known, stated historian Rodrigo Luiz dos Santos, 39. “Even when it’s with a smaller exhibition … From the attitude of tradition, of town’s reminiscence, we expect it’s vital to have this second,” he stated.
Talking on the G7 summit in Italy, Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated that he invited representatives of the German authorities to attend a bicentennial “celebration get together” in São Leopoldo.
However, based on the mayor, there will probably be solely a symbolic celebration.
“There’s no temper for something like that … We’ll have a good time it differently, maybe with extra solidarity,” stated Vanazzi.
Contained in the museum, a unclean brown line 1.5 metre from the ground reveals the excessive water mark, and dos Santos urged that one of many partitions could be left with out repainting as a reminder of the floods.
“The identical river that introduced the immigrants was the one which 200 years later took over town,” he stated.
About 40 Germans have been within the first wave of immigrants who got here to the area in 1824.
Different individuals from the then German Confederation had beforehand reached Brazil, however from that second German migration grew to become steady, later spreading to different areas of the state.
Its cultural impression can nonetheless be felt in regional tradition, for instance in its most conventional cake, the cuca, a model of the German streuselkuchen.
German migration was inspired by newly unbiased Brazil, which needed to increase its occupation of the territory. However the promotion of European immigration was additionally linked to the thought of “whitening the Brazilian inhabitants”, stated dos Santos.
“There isn’t any road in São Leopoldo named after a Black or Indigenous particular person,” stated Dominga Menezes, who nonetheless lives in São Leopoldo and, now a journalist, just lately printed a guide about how the give attention to German migration has silenced Black and Indigenous tales within the area.
She and her husband, fellow journalist Gilson Camargo, 61, describe numerous conflicts between the Germans and the Indigenous communities who inhabited the area and have been virtually worn out.
Additionally they spotlight one thing that’s nonetheless controversial in some elements of the state: the truth that lots of the immigrants have been slave house owners.
The guide was launched within the metropolis’s public library solely per week after the floods.
“Regardless of all of the unhappiness, I believe we have to be taught a lesson from this,” stated Menezes, who drew a parallel between town’s reckoning with its previous and its response to the latest catastrophe.
“When the floods began, individuals stated it wasn’t the time to seek out who was accountable – however that was a method of not going through as much as the issues.
“Folks should know what occurred was an environmental tragedy, nevertheless it was additionally brought on by people … We can’t deny historical past as soon as once more,” stated Menezes.
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