Thread: Brazilians love `America,' scrubbed for TV

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Brazilians love `America,' scrubbed for TV
A soap opera built around a woman illegally in the States is wildly popular, but some fear it paints too glamorous--and tempting--a portrait

By Colin McMahon
Tribune foreign correspondent

July 24, 2005

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Even by the standards of Brazil, where soap operas change the way people talk, dress and act, the nightly television show "America" is an exceptional cultural force. Not content merely to tackle true love, this soap opera entices Brazilians to pursue the American dream as well.

A complex weave of narratives about Brazilians rich, poor and in-between, "America" builds around a central character named Sol who has entered the United States illegally via Mexico. Sol's life--love and otherwise--is often difficult. But a current of hope, money and glamor runs through it, appealing to Brazilians who see few opportunities at home.

"For a person already considering going to the United States, the soap opera motivates them to do it," said Viviane Diniz, 29, who considers herself a mild fan. "But I don't think the show is very realistic. Life there looks better on television than it really is."

"America" also captures Brazil's love-hate view of the United States. Characters are chic and the locations lavish in the Miami scenes, all filmed on an elaborate soundstage at TV Globo's Projac production center in Rio de Janeiro. But some Brazilians struggle financially in Miami, and all feel the sting of discrimination.

The telenovela also takes the occasional dig at American society.

"What's this?" a flabbergasted and ill Sol wondered last week after being handed the bill for a hospital visit. "You have to pay to see a doctor?"

Like many soap operas, "America" revels in its ripped-from-the-headlines feel. In one subplot of the soap, which is set not only in Miami but also in Rio and a fictional town in provincial Brazil, a boy is being pursued on the Internet by a pedophile.

Trek's dangers also real

Sol's dangerous journey through Mexico also is topical. The number of Brazilians detained by the U.S. Border Patrol after crossing the southern border has quadrupled since 2002.

Why Brazilians are leaving has changed little: jobs and opportunities. Brazil's economy is recovering nicely from its most recent crisis in 2001-02. But unemployment remains in double digits, and Brazil's boom-and-bust economic history unsettles even professional workers eager to build financial security.

The how of Brazilian immigration has changed. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, most undocumented Brazilians flew to the United States as tourists and then overstayed their visas.

But the tightening of visa rules has forced many Brazilians to hire human traffickers to get them through Mexico. This fiscal year, if trends hold, more than 30,000 Brazilians will be arrested along America's southern border, according to Border Patrol statistics. Only Mexico produces more such detainees.

Even if caught, most Brazilians are quickly released. The Border Patrol gives them a court date for a deportation hearing that most have little intention of attending. Then they get on a bus to Boston, Atlanta, Miami or other major cities with growing Brazilian communities.

Critics deride as futile this "catch and release" program, which applies to non-Mexicans who cannot be repatriated immediately. But with too little space to hold all detainees, the Border Patrol says it has no choice but to give a court date to those who appear to pose no immediate criminal or national security threat.

"America" may not fully portray the trials and dangers of this process. But nor does the show romanticize the journey north.

In last week's episodes, a young woman named Rosario was stuck in Mexico with no money and no transportation, at the mercy of a human trafficker who demanded she go not to her mother in Miami as promised but to New York to work off her debt. Viewers see Rosario being crammed into a tiny hiding space in a vehicle.

Fears image is misleading

Some fans of "America" worry that it presents a misleading, and far too tempting, image of immigrant life in the U.S. There is something a little too happy-go-lucky for the working-class Brazilians who share life in a humble boarding house there.

Christina Gouveia, 41, who works for the government designing Rio's traffic system, said the risks of leaving Brazil for an illegal life in the U.S. are overshadowed by the money that Sol makes dancing in a nightclub, money to buy nice clothes and send back to her family in Brazil.

"People who don't know the real situation can be tempted to go to America, but it's dangerous," said Gouveia, who lived illegally in San Francisco for a short time and worked at a pizzeria. "It is not so easy as they show in the soap opera.

"In real life, everyone in the U.S. misses their family, and they miss their country and the life here," Gouveia said. "It is just work, work, work all day there, from Monday to Monday, 24 hours a day."

The show's producers deny that they glorify life in the United States and say their program has encouraged debate about illegal immigration to America.

And in fairness, "America" is a television show. More to the point, it's a soap opera, peopled with impossibly attractive actors of dubious talent wearing impeccable outfits and brandishing long, smoldering, portentous looks. There is a reason that more than half of all Brazilians tune in to watch "America," according to the latest ratings, and that reason is not verisimilitude.

The real story is out there too, tucked into the end of the news broadcasts or buried in the back pages of the daily papers.

Earlier this month, a 14-year-old Brazilian girl was found dead in the Rio Grande outside Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, on the U.S. border. She was the second Brazilian to die that week in the river, joining a woman from Espirito Santo who drowned trying to cross.

The Espirito Santo woman's death did not make the newspapers, much less prime time.

http://www.leadingthecharge.com/stories ... 63759.html

Soap opera lures Brazilians to United States
Staff and agencies
25 August, 2005



By Andrew Hay 53 minutes ago

BRASILIA, Brazil - Brazilians are illegally entering the United States in record numbers in hopes of finding jobs and better lives -- just like characters in a wildly popular Brazilian soap opera "America."

The number of undocumented Brazilians caught on U.S. soil is set to rise over four fold this year from 2004 -- a much bigger increase than for illegal immigrants from other Latin American countries, according to U.S. officials.

As authorities search for factors spurring the exodus, they have begun to look at the passion of Brazil‘s poor for "America," a soap opera that debuted in early March and shows illegal immigrants risking their lives to enter the United States to find jobs and romance amid the hardship.

"Any publicity raises the idea in people‘s minds they can make it," said one U.S. diplomat who did not want to be identified.

Like half of all Brazilian TV viewers, Tarcila Madureira Silva tuned in each night to the Globo network soap opera. She watched heroine Sol make it as a dancer in Miami and send money home to help her family, in between passionate scenes with her American lover.

Silva, 20, had already watched her neighbors build homes with money they earned from illegal work in the United States.

"I decided to seek a better life for my family," says Silva, who in July left behind her mother and two young brothers in the farming town of Gonzaga, Minas Gerais to make the 5,000 mile journey to the U.S.-Mexican border.

Like one in four illegal immigrants, she was picked up by U.S. authorities shortly after crossing. Though many get out on bail and get away, Silva was deported.

"The soap opera is true; here in Brazil poor people have no chance," said Silva, as her mother fretted over how they will buy food and pay the $65 monthly rent for their crumbling, mud-brick home.

Brazilians in the past few months have become the second-largest group of illegal immigrants detained in the United States after Mexicans -- overtaking Hondurans -- as up to a third of residents in some poor Brazilian towns seek work abroad. Teen-agers as young as 15 are making the trip.

Driving poor Brazilians are dreams they can find hope, money and glamour they lack at home.

Brazil‘s economy is growing but unemployment is still near 10 percent. Nearly half the population lives in poverty and fights for a limited number of jobs that pay a minimum monthly wage of $128 that is difficult to live on.

As U.S. officials tried to explain this year‘s surge in numbers they first noticed a three-year-high in Brazil‘s local currency made it cheaper to pay the $9,000 fee traffickers charge to smuggle migrants across the Mexican border.

Also, talk that Mexico will impose tighter immigration controls may have prompted more Brazilians to make the trip, a U.S. Embassy official said.

Since 2001, the United States has tightened immigration controls, raising the number of Brazilians crossing illegally.

But when the number of Brazilians caught on the border between April and May rose to over 7,000 -- nearly the same as during the whole of 2004 -- U.S. officials began to look for other factors and came across the soap.

U.S. Embassy officials in Brazil have been glued to "America" ever since.

The show has tripled the number of Brazilians heading for the border, said Leonardo Monteiro, a lower house deputy and member of a Congressional inquiry into emigration.

Migrant rights group say it has had a huge influence.

"It shows most people in great difficulties, but the fact one or two do well creates the image people can make it," said Luis Bassegio, head of the Brazilian Catholic Church‘s migrant relief service.

GRITTY UNDERBELLY

Critics like Monteiro say "America" glorifies illegal immigration by showing Brazilians living in a cozy fantasy world rather than the country‘s gritty, illegal underbelly.

The soap‘s producers say it shows reality, albeit in the glossy, lavishly produced form of a melodrama.

"The soap shows Brazilians that go in search of dreams of a better life and end up as excluded and segregated immigrants in a foreign land," said Gloria Perez, the author of "America."

"America" portrays Brazilians suffering discrimination, exploitation and racial segregation -- everything they face at home in big cities.

The difference is that in the soap, as in real life, they get jobs as maids and construction workers that pay in a couple of days what they get during a month in Brazil.

The 1.3 million Brazilians in the United States -- half of them illegal -- send around $2 billion back home each year. Those that return home with money inspire thousands more to follow in their footsteps.

Stories of Brazilians found drowned in the Rio Grande or dead in the desert don‘t even make it to newspapers.

Wearing a thick gold chain and a T-shirt reading "Massachusetts Home Sweet Home," Fabiano da Silva sits outside the restaurant he opened in the farming town of Guanhaes, Minas Gerais, with his U.S. nest egg.

He worked illegally in the United States for four years as a gardener and in restaurants. "I‘d do it all again," da Silva tells his friends, as they listen to his American tales.