Translator: David DeRuwe
“Living in two different worlds is such a strange thing.
That’s how I started the text
that unintentionally, changed the course of my life.
My name is Thiago Torres.
I’m 20 years old.
I was born in 2000 in the favela Jardim Vista Alegre, Brasilândia,
in the extreme north of São Paulo,
and I grew up in the favela Jardim Elisa Maria, also in Brasilândia,
and now I live in Quebrada, in Guarulhos.
It was when I decided to let off some steam on Facebook
about the reality shock
experienced by someone from a São Paulo favela
who studies in a major Brazilian university,
that I became known as the “Chavoso of USP.”
USP, University of São Paulo, had always been far from my reality,
and today, after studying there for three years,
having gone through many harrowing experiences,
and also having acquired a lot of knowledge,
I can understand much better why this is -
why higher education and education as a whole are so far away from us.
The truth, bro, is that the favelas of São Paulo
are segregated places intended for Black and poor people.
When I say that the city center and the favelas are two different worlds,
I’m not exaggerating much.
If we take, for example,
the HDI, Human Development Index, from different regions of São Paulo,
we’ll see that in Moema, for example, and upscale central neighborhood,
it’s 0.961,
an HDI that’s higher than Norway, Switzerland, or Denmark.
If we take the HDI of Marsilac, for example, in the extreme south,
it’s 0.701,
lower than many poor countries of the world,
including Suriname, Libya, and Lebanon.
And none of this is by chance.
In reality, only the downtown and the expanded center of São Paulo
were really planned out.
The favela areas, mainly on the city’s peripheries,
like Brasilândia itself or Guaianases or Grajaú,
were principally occupied by poor northeast Brazilian migrants,
mostly Black men and women,
who came to São Paulo in search of a better life.
In reality, it’s been these people who have carried this city,
have transformed it into the biggest metropolis in Latin America
and have kept it functioning right up until today,
but they don’t have access to the things they themselves built and produced, right?
It was these people who constructed USP, the University of São Paulo.
It was they who erected all the buildings on Avenida Paulista -
Teatro Municipal and Sala São Paulo.
But these people don’t go to these places.
They don’t have access to what they themselves built.
They only leave the favelas to go to work in the city center,
to maintain and keep these places functioning -
but they never make use of them.
They leave from the favelas,
take two hours of worn-out, expensive public transport,
and arrive downtown, just to work.
And that’s why I think my entrance in USP was so significant,
not only for me, but for my family,
for my class in society, and for my ancestry,
because I represented a break in the cycle.
I, the son of northeast Brazilian migrants -
my mom’s from Pernambuco, my dad’s from Piauí -
started to go to downtown São Paulo, not just to work, but to study,
to intellectualize myself, to acquire knowledge,
and to study alongside the children of the São Paulo elite,
alongside the children of politicians, government ministers, judges,
and there I was, without any shame, the son of a cleaning woman.
It’s just that I don’t think my individual achievements are enough.
Of course, I’m very happy to be studying at USP,
but I can’t feel totally satisfied because each time I go inside,
I find very few people who look like me studying there.
Meanwhile, where I live, most people look like me, right?
And it’s crazy to leave your house,
look around your neighborhood and see this situation, you know?
Then you take the bus and the subway for two hours
to arrive at another place, bro, and it’s another reality.
When I go out in my home neighborhood, it’s the opposite of what this looks like.
I see bars filled with tired workers.
I see young people my age with backpacks on their backs,
making deliveries for app companies that exploit them.
I see young people my age and who look like me
recklessly using drugs, and also selling them.
Young people my age who look like me,
innocent young people being beaten by the police.
I really like to quote “Racionais,”
who, in their song “Fim de semana no parque,”
sing verses that go like this:
“Here I don’t see any multi-sport club
For kids to attend, no incentive
Investment in leisure is very scarce
The community center is a failure
If you want to destroy yourself you’re in the right place
There’s alcohol and cocaine always close by.”
Or maybe, there are no opportunities.
Yes, many people want places of leisure, culture, and education
to develop their skills and abilities,
but they don’t find opportunities for that.
And, not by chance, most people who live this way are Black.
When I arrive in Butantã where USP is, the scene is totally different, right?
There I see luxurious buildings, automobiles, and beautiful houses,
and most of the people involved in this scene are white.
These people living in this reality have every opportunity in their hands.
They were born with a planned-out future,
with a successful trajectory already sketched out for them.
And seeing this inequality up close,
daily,
is very painful.
And it was precisely this pain that I tried to portray
there in that text that went viral.
Not just the pain, but the hope as well.
A great hope moves me:
the hope that we will manage to overcome
these horrible conditions that I’ve mentioned here,
but I understand that this depends on our organization
and our collective struggle
which first passes through a comprehension of reality.
We need to understand how this system functions -
how it comes about, how it develops, how it maintains itself,
and where we want to go, right,
for us to really manage to change this reality.
And it is precisely to keep us from answering these questions
that education and knowledge are denied to us.
And that’s exactly why I,
someone who managed to contradict the statistics and to break the bubble,
use my reach and my internet channel to dialogue directly with my people
to instigate in them a love for reading, for study, for politics,
and also to help them build self-esteem.
Those of us who are poor, who are Black, haven’t been taught to love ourselves
and to see ourselves as valuable people, full of the potential, right,
to do a ton of things.
I believe very much that knowledge is power.
As Paolo Freire said,
“Education does not change the world. Education changes people.
People change the world,”
and we, Black, favela dwellers, workers, poor people,
more than anyone - we need to change this world.
If not, I don’t even know if there will still be a world
for us to leave for future generations.
Thank you.