If you have been following my blog or have read one or two posts, then hopefully you have noticed that I have been trying really hard to avoid becoming yet another tourist in this dynamic city. Typical questions from friends and family back home can be anything from “Do you go every day to the beach?” and “Have you visited many favelas?” to “Is every Brazilian really sexy?” or “Is it true that no one really works and people just relax all day?” What I experience every day at PUC-Rio (take a look at some of the pictures in this entry) is drastically different from these questions.

PUC-Rio constantly has new cultural activities on campus. This picture shows two students and many design and architecture books.

I must admit that if I had come to Brazil a year and a half ago I would most likely fallen into the trap of experiencing Rio de Janeiro from this perspective. And that is of course no surprise. The touristic and exotic discourse surrounding Rio de Janeiro has been shaped for decades. The mix of beaches, forests, mountains, and industrial areas make of this city a mystical experiment in the eyes of many.

Now that I look back, I can more easily understand why as a Guatemalan I grew up constantly having these images in mind. To some extent I think Rio the Janeiro becomes the object that could fulfill, in an ideological and exotic way, what many people think we lack back in Guatemala. I do not support this idea, but I write it here for you to have an idea why I have been so focused on not buying into it. Keeping this in mind, I have continued to wonder how to then avoid becoming yet another tourist.

Well, if you have read some of my posts you know I have tried to understand what each part of the city means for those who live here. Luckily studying abroad in Rio de Janeiro has given me the time to understand how different socio-economic and cultural groups experience this city differently. My host family certainly has a particular perspective on favelas, the government, Rio’s public services, the city’s wealthiest areas, and so on. Such perspective does contrast with the way many of those who I have met in my host university think. In the beginning I assumed that studying in a private university would restrict me to meet only a certain wealthy sector of Rio’s student population. As you may have guessed already, I was completely wrong.

I wrote this short entry because in the next two or three posts I will share with you some of my trips to Rio’s southern zone. My host family lives in one of these neighborhoods and after gathering different perspectives, stories, complaints, and expectations from many people in the past two months I feel somehow ready to let myself explore much more. Reaching a point in which I can fully appreciate how Rio is experienced differently by the countless groups and identities living here is of course impossible. Yet I have tried my best to build an understanding of the city that will allow me to leave my study abroad program knowing that I truly challenged and changed my past ideas of Rio de Janeiro.

We all have different goals for our study abroad programs. I will feel incredibly satisfied if I can get close to achieving one of mine. Come back for the next posts to get to know some of Rio’s neighborhoods!

A very interesting debate on the democratization of culture. I thought I would stop by to take the picture and eventually stayed until the debate finished.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 29th, 2013 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Diego in Brazil, Fall 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.