Last week’s deadly shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. has spurred debate about the place of the Confederate flag 150 years after the Civil War. While some believe that the flag is a symbol of the heritage of the American South, many — including several key lawmakers — see it as a testament to the country’s racist past that should have no place at state institutions in the present.
“I am proud of the Confederate flag because it is a piece of history that I am directly connected to,” João Leopoldo Padovese said, but his history — and understanding of the flag’s symbolism — is different than those who defend the flag in the United States. In fact — his own ancestors were slaves.
Padovese is a descendent of slaves that many Confederates brought with them to Brazil, where they migrated in droves after losing the Civil War. About 10,000 Confederates made the trip after the Brazilian Emperor offered them cheap land in the hopes of gaining expertise on growing cotton. Many of them settled in a small community called Americana outside of Santa Barbara D’Oeste in the state of São Paulo.
During an annual festival there commemorating their southern heritage, the Stars and Bars are on full display and many of the 2,500 or so who attended last April came dressed in hoop skirts or the uniforms of Confederate soldiers. There was plenty of square dancing and lots of fried chicken.
“Imagine if I were to show up dressed like this in the middle of New York,” Padovese who went to the festival in Confederate grays told Reuters. “I would get beaten! But not here. For us in Brazil, it has no political meaning at all.
Mimi Dwyer, who wrote about the Festa Confederada for VICE, described the festivities:
Almost everyone had come to the festa dressed as an American — in jeans and boots, Johnny Cash T-shirts and camouflage. Visitors haggled at a booth stocked with Southern paraphernalia: aprons, quilts, commemorative glasses, a used copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. An amplified voice called the crowds to pull their chairs up to the main stage — an enormous concrete slab with a flag painted across it and the words XXVI FESTA CONFEDERADA emblazoned at its top.
She wrote that while many of the Confederados, or descendants of Confederates, have intermarried within the local population, the town of Americano held fast to its heritage.
“Led by an Alabaman colonel, its settlers introduced cotton and turned the town into an industrial textile powerhouse,” she wrote. “For generations their children spoke English with a drawl. Today the city of 200,000 boasts Latin America’s largest cowboy-rodeo arena. The festa brings it great pride.”
For many Confederados, that pride has little to do with their ancestors’ battle to uphold slavery. In fact, some are completely unaware of the connection between the former Confederacy and slavery.
Dwyer recounts asking a young blond woman in a full hoop skirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag if she was aware of the connection between slavery and the American South.
“I’ve never heard that before,” Beatrice Stopa, a reporter for Glamour Brazil, told her.
“I know they came. I don’t really know the reason [why my ancestors left the U.S.]. Is it because of racism?” She smiled, and Dwyer noted that she looked embarrassed.
While Stopa may be oblivious to the basics of Confederate history, some seemed to have taken efforts to address the past through the same slogan many use to defend flying the Confederate flag in the States: Heritage Not Hate.
Many in Brazil, which is a very racially “mixed” see the Confederado’s connection to the past as unique — even if that past is a dark one.
Dwyer noted:
For the Confederados, the legacy of the South is all innocence, no reckoning. Their Confederacy is a collection of sounds and words and images: a Johnny Cash song, a western, a flag. White Southern bitterness has melted into kitsch — or else denial, oblivion. These are the blindnesses that render slavery invisible today.
Many in Brazil don’t really engage with ongoing racial tension in the U.S., either. According to Asher Levine, a São Paulo-based Reuters reporter who reported on the Feste Confederada, few Brazilians are talking about the “race-based” implications of the shooting in Charleston last week.
“It has come up in the news,” he told PRI’s The World host Marco Werman. “[But] I wouldn’t say that I’ve heard much commentary that is race-based. What I hear a lot of is people — which you get every time there’s a mass shooting in the United States — saying, ‘You think Brazil is dangerous but we don’t have this happening.’”
The legacy of slavery — and the ongoing impact of racial strife — seem really far away for most people in Brazil.