Notes on Latin America Things (First weeks in Rio de Janeiro)

Before coming to Rio de Janeiro, I had an image of Brazil as a place not quite like the rest of Latin America, but still a part of it. So as a person of Mexican and Ecuadorian ancestry who speaks zero Portuguese, I didn’t know what to expect from Brazil culturally. I didn’t know whether it’d remind me of my family’s culture, or feel completely foreign. I didn’t know whether it’d be the kind of country where I’d blend in and get into the groove of things quickly, or a place that would require a lot of learning and adapting and growth.  

So upon landing here two weeks ago, I’ve loved that every afternoon, walking around a neighborhood, I’ve noticed something here that gives me a relieving sense of Latin American familiarity. Since my first day in Rio, I began writing these things down in my journal as a list titled “Latin America Things”: the shoeshiners working on every plaza corner, the restaurants with the plastic tables and chairs along the sidewalk. On Saturday afternoons, my apartment always smells of garlic and onions and some kind of “caldo,” and futbol is always blaring from someone’s television.  Here, the children also stay out on the street even at midnight, the vendors still call you “querida” when you ask the price of something, the corporate advertisements also use English randomly in ways that don’t make much sense — like the lingerie ad I saw last week in the city centre that had a women wearing a bra, looking sensually at the camera, with a bold sign above her head that said “Love. Happy. Hope.”

Things mostly work around here, but it has that same unstructured, no-frills vibe that I have always loved while traveling in Latin America. The “time” things are supposed to “start” around here doesn’t seem to matter too much to anyone but me, the visitor, trying to figure out what time to show up. Sometimes the gas stove in my first Airbnb couldn’t light without a match; sometimes it could. Sometimes the shower water was hot; sometimes it never could make it past lukewarm. During the first outdoor dinner I had with the friend I’m visiting here, the air conditioner hanging above our heads leaked and poured water all over us, and the waiter just kinda shrugged, in that way that’s apologetic but also can’t quite guarantee it won’t happen again.

Even without knowing Portuguese or having any previous connection to this city, there’s a certain sense of ease I feel walking down the streets here, as if I can still understand this place somehow, that I can make already make at least some sense of it in my head and heart. At this point in my life, this sense of familiarity feels important. As a 30-something person constantly worried about where “home” actually is, it feels nice to feel at home here. And, as a first-generation American, it feels nice to remember that Latin America — even with all of my “gringa-ness” — still manages to make me feel warm and welcomed in a way that homes should feel like. 

And, to be clear, as much as I’m grateful for the comfort and familiarity of Rio de Janeiro, I also love its total novelty. Some days, Rio smells just like Mexico — like a mix of chorizo and my grandmother’s medicine store — but other days, it also smells like a mix of a Florida golf course and grilled meat and old rain. Sometimes, I try street food that resembles Colombian papas rellenas or Ecuadorian empanadas, and then the next day, I try Açaí and nothing has tasted quite like it before. Sometimes, I am wandering down a street that looks like the old part of Quito or a plaza in Guanajuato, and other times I turn the corner to a street lined with giant ficus trees with orchids sprouting from the trunks, or birds with bright yellow-feathered stomachs flying above my head, and Rio feels like nowhere else, like somewhere bizarre and beautiful that is no longer rainforest, but still not entirely a city. 

The older I get and the more I travel, the more (admittedly, annoyingly) I am prone to react to travel with comparisons (“Brazil is just like South Africa,” “These Portuguese songs sound just like the ones in Mexico”), and the more prone I am to nostalgia (“This plaza reminds me of that day I walked for hours in Madrid,” “These mountains keep bringing me back to those years in Cape Town”). And, at the same time, I am grateful that still, still, some travel experiences manage to genuinely surprise, render me incapable- and, no longer as interested — in trying to make a place make sense.