What Happened Next in San Francisco

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1.

These are sentences from my notebook from the last 8 months. I’m putting them in their place, shuffling my cards so I can make a new hand.  Two-thirds of a year. I’m not old enough, yet, to count time too closely. But I moved here on purpose. I shifted my storyline with so much intention. I’m curious to find out what happened next.

2.

When the tide goes out at Ocean Beach, I learned in September, the Bay is emptying like a bathtub. We drank beers in the haze and the boys surfed. Don’t get used to this, everyone said. The city steamed in the day but by evening was like the cool side of the pillow. I loved California already for its peaches and plums, stayed up too late baking pluots into pie.

During the heat wave, I saw homeless San Francisco at the San Francisco Public Library, washing in the public restrooms and napping in the corners. I saw startup San Francisco at Uber, eating beet chips in the cafeteria and holding meetings in backlit spaceship chairs. Hayes Valley felt like a chic French village at night and the Mission felt like McAllen’s tough cousin, muscled with murals and garbage. The city smelled like eucalyptus and pot and urine, a city of dreams and dreams deferred or never even dreamt.

Right after I got hired, I pretended I was comfortable holding an old fashioned at a fancy restaurant under the highway in SoMa, asking the Mayor of Charlottesville for his unvarnished stories while picking at a cheese platter. 24th Street was better. Sage, drums, girls in feathered headdresses riding slowly down the street. Hair salons making an extra buck by painting faces. The small of pan de muerto in fluorescent-lit bakeshops where the grandma only speaks Spanish but the grandson prefers English. You’re welcome.

I came back to SF in January to skies that turned pink before rain. I came back to the sunrise cracking over the Transamerica tower, late to work. I came back to weekends golden and liquid. I bought a wetsuit and surfed, noticing when I breathed into the wall of water and stood up, and when I just said shit. I biked up and down Golden Gate and Folsom and Oak. I spoke in meetings. I walked in and out of bodegas and fish shops and Chinese grocery stores. I owned a view of San Francisco from a second-story window. The whole city spread below like a picnic blanket and the Salesforce Tower was a delicious rainbow fish.

“You can see why people stay out here,” my east coast parents said, after a day of riding bikes through the Presidio. We took a ferry across to Alameda like a late-night vaporetto ride in Venice. We ran through Golden Gate Park like it was our New Jersey loop. But we ate in the Outer Sunset and I told them how this city felt like nowhere else, like something I could only build myself.

Spring: the rain that makes everything green, exhilarated. The rain that highlights the homeless. Everyone with a place to go evaporates, and everyone in tents or bus stations is left on misty streets like a soggy paper bag. Spring evenings still felt soft like in high school. Days felt bright and raw and the surf was choppy and the coast south was jagged, new.

It’s baseball season now and I run after work. I run along the Embarcadero, I run past the stadium, I run into electric scooters on the sidewalks. I found a place by the Bay where the water is still and the path peters out like writing you’ve erased. I keep running. I haven’t been here long enough to own anything. From my house, you have to run up a hill in either direction to get a view. Then the sun drops into the Pacific and mist rolls across the mountains in Marin like you made it happen.

Around the Valley, Rain

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Found words from October - 

 

The sun here beats so strong that my students sometimes don't even want to have recess. It's too strong to think or play - all you feel is heat. When it rains, a different place descends, calm and cool and reflective. Green shoots come up and the next day, it seems, they're ready to be harvested as cotton, corn, soy, sugarcane. Our backyard has sprouted bananas and avocados. The citrus is coming. 

It rained yesterday. I woke up at friends' house in Harlingen, a city known in the Valley for having the most white people and the most Winter Texans, retirees who come south for the winter (we spent Friday night at a soda bar watching 50 year men in bandanas play the blues). Saturday morning can be sleep or work in coffee shops - but we, Northeast transplants, chased the thought of a city. We drove to Brownsville because it promised buses and parking meters. 

Every city in this Valley has its own distinct feel. Brownsville moves at the pace of the slow-flowing Rio Grande. Coming into the city, if you forget to turn right on Washington Street, you'll end up in Mexico. When we arrived, we wandered slowly, lazily down sidewalks. We gloried in the paired luxuries of walking and accidental human contact. It began to rain and huddling under an awning watching steam rising from those rich sidewalks brought the smell of cities far away. 

In the late afternoon, I drove back to Weslaco. Brownsville is gritty wet sidewalks - Weslaco is a new housing development still tickled by the warmth of bordering fields.  I went to the bridal shower of a 3rd grade teacher at my school. We played wedding bingo and spoke Spanglish and ate small plastic plates heaped with desserts - cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies, a mandarin cake the school nurse had baked for the occasion. I did my grocery shopping on a sugar high and by the time I was driving home, along the local highway, the clouds were over town.

When I got home it started thundering, then drizzling, then raining, that all-out downpour that makes this Valley one of the most fertile in the country. My roommate and I went for a walk at dusk around the citrus groves and marveled at the smell of new dirt. 

Pick Up Duty

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Every afternoon at 3:45, after the tornado of the last class period has passed through our doors, we go to the curb to send kids back out into the world. The sun warms faces, hands, wrists. The context of my classroom returns. 

The pickup line stretches past the gate of our campus, to the potholed roads outside the gate, and as parents pull up we pace the curb passing students’ names back to the school building like hot potatoes. 

At my small private elementary school in New Jersey, pickup was similar, except that a lot of parents arrived an hour early because they didn’t work. The line of Chevy suburbans, minivans, and BMWs reached the gates of campus, too, and caused traffic in downtown Morristown. Mr. Mortensen’s voice came crisply from the loudspeaker, clearly enunciating each first and last name. 

On East Las Milpas Road, around the corner from Juniors’ taco mart and in between two huge fields, there is no traffic to be caused, but the rhythm of names is the same. 

The window rolls down. Para quien? I ask. Ponce. Ponce, I shout, and Vargas tips it up to Karina, who passes it to Ms. Medina on the mike in the hallway where the kids wait. Barragannnnnn. I relish the rolling my rs, i relish projecting names not mine with confidence, passing them down the line to other teachers until the child emerges from inside, book in hand or backpack messily unzipped, ready to go home. I relish thinking that each child is a part of the hopeful fabric of our school.

Parents often look surprised to see me, la guerita, out there. In my first week, I had to ask “otra vez” many veces when I asked for a child's name. There are many Mexican names I have never heard before - or names that, in the mouth of a mother, come out so quickly my brain needs a minute. I’m learning. I try to channel the simple solid I mean business tone of the women in kindergarten who herd small children efficiently and kindly. This week, a dad smiled at me when I bellowed his son's name up to the front of the line. “Good pronunciation,” he said. I acted like it was no big deal, but that made my day. 

***

98% of our student body qualities for free or reduced lunch; I’ve been surprised by the number of big, new pickup trucks, Ford F150s and Toyota Tundras and Chevy Silverados, cleanly washed with shiny chrome rims. When they get into gear to move up two places in the pickup line, they roar. You need to pick up a pre-K student, Dora the Explorer backpack and all, to load her in. 

Then you have the smaller trucks with farm mud on the flaps and bulk crates of eggs in the bed. The low Hondas, bumpers dented, with rattling doors. The dusty minivans with cleaning equipment inside and mom in her cleaners’ uniform. 

Such a window into a world, the threshold of someone’s car. Mom’s driving, with gold-teeth grandma in the front seat, or it’s an older sibling, or a young couple who could be the parents or the older siblings. Healthcare’s the fastest growing industry in the valley and many of our kids’ family members wear scrubs. I see big new cowboy hats, engine-grease-stained t-shirts, polo shirts from Churchs’ chicken. One mom in a black Acura SUV wears yoga pants. They listen to norteno or country music or Mexican ballads i recognize from 105.1, radio internacional. 

Parents pass back gummy bears with chamoy, or Doritos. sometimes an orange. I've seen empty Coke cans in the back seat, rolling around near the feet of a Kindergartner with three silver fillings in his teeth; I’ve seen 2nd graders sit in the front of a huge truck without a car seat. It’s not my job to judge; rather, putting a child in their car, back with their families, reminds me to think carefully about why they may not be doing their homework, or why they complain about stomachaches all the time, or why they are not reading on grade level. 

***

i have one student, whom I’ll call Emiliano. Many teachers have called him chiflado, lazy. He still does not start his work until you’ve gone over to him, crouched at his face level, and asked him to tell you what the instructions are. He has tried to run away from mandatory tutoring 3 times, sobbing. This child has never loved school, except for one day when we read part of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. 

On Thursday, his mom came to pick him up. She drives a white suburban and wears reflector aviators. She had her phone held up to her face after saying hello, and it took me a second to understand what she was doing. Emiliano was walking out of the building with his 1st grade sister by the hand, walking and smiling slowly when he saw his mom. She photographed them in that golden afternoon light and Emiliano happily hopped in when I opened the door. Mom took off her glasses, smiling. 

This student is a child, loved by a mother; this student is a child who matters, and it’s my job to figure out how to get him to smile like that every day before he comes to the curb to go home. 

 

In the Valley, Before School Started

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Notes from a long time ago, in another country. 

Buying a Car

I spent my first day in the Valley looking for a used car. My friend Juan picked me up at the Harlingen airport and we went right to a dealership housed in a vintage building where the flatscreen TVS blew out the electricity. Juan lamented that girls in the valley only like guys with big trucks. We test drove a new Rav4 and returned it to a parking lot where heat waves mixed my vision. The next dealership had cookies and popcorn but no car in my price range. After that, I ordered my first Big Mac and acquiesced to go see Antman. The trailers were for Mexican kids’ movies. When we returned to reality, we went to Walmart and bought shampoo with families doing Saturday night shopping. 

Signing a Lease

Mr Thompson, the landlord and proprietor of Thompson Citrus, drives a white suburban with a grapefruit on the license plate. He was born in this house and he calls Mexicans Latins, though he speaks a calm respectful Spanish with his guys. 

“Don’t get snookered,” he told me. “Don’t go to the wrong Walmart or they’ll steal your purse,” he told me. “I can be there in 5 minutes flat with a gun if need be,” he told me. 

I locked all the doors and set the alarm the first week, but I don’t think we’ve set the alarm since then. Cumbia music comes from down the road some nights, but mostly dark is the sound of crickets and a moon over the citrus groves. 

Running

The week before school started, I got a drink at Chili's off the highway with three TFA women and then I ran in the Weslaco city park, where I was the only white person. A truck with a loudspeaker sold ice cream and elote, corn in a cup with mayonnaise. Little kids tentatively kicked soccer balls while their older brothers ran laps around the field with graceful footwork. Packs of grandmothers sauntered around the outside trail hablando en Spanglish. 

I’ve been running alone in the state park about a mile from my house, where the sky is open and my footfall surprises rabbits and flocks of small yellow birds from sage brush and cactus. In the city park, I moved feeling part of a beating heart of human activity.

On the drive home, at dusk, a neon car wash sign glowed beautiful in my rearview mirror. 

Driving

During TFA training we watched a video about a woman namedCarmen Anaya and how, speaking no English, she still managed to agitate for change so that, eventually, children in the colonias didn’t have to ruin their shoes walking through sewage puddles on the way to school. 

After that training, I filled my car up with its first full tank of gas (2.40/gallon), and drove out to Las Milpas, the neighborhood of Pharr that Carmen Anaya helped pull up and out of the most extreme poverty. There was no one on the road but me and a bunch of shipping trucks headed to Mexico in a hazy, vaguely holy evening light. I stopped at my school, which was quiet. 

The drive back along Military Highway was almost empty too. Flat and green, the type of landscape that might make you imagine you’re on dirt roads. Mexico, arrow to the right. I got home and ran in a new direction, in a housing development called Springfield Estates where they’re still trying to sell lots. Financing available with $500 down. Electricity from the city of Weslaco. The American dream! Across the street, in a small, fenced-off clearing, a woman pitched hay and a small goat bleated. 

On the radio, the Mexican government proclaims in baritone, “move to Mexico for your prosperity…”

The Border

After I met my students’ parents for the first time, I ran to the border. I carried their questions and their bendicciones. It was dusk just before darkness: The Rio Grande swung past, a calm seafoam green, an easy swim. Cows mooed bucolically on the other side. 

We had started our run in the evening. Santa Ana felt empty, jurassic. As the gold went away and dark fell it became emptier. DPS suburbans illuminated the dark on the drive home.

The Pulga

Today, when the heat was heaviest, we went to La Pulga, the sprawling flea market off the freeway. 

We parked in a lot by dudes who would tint your windows. The whole thing felt like a mall in a highway underpass. The old woman at the check in booth had a gold tooth and asked what time it was. 50 cents to go to Mexico. Casi no hable una palabra de ingles between the stands selling new DVDs, the kitchen appliances, the old clothes, the piles of fruit. Griffin told me about chiles that grow native and wild, little pinpricks of heat. We bought tacos and micheladas at an outdoor stand where Aimee and I were the only white girls. Inside the dance hall, old couples twirled, touched, took each other’s hands to the back bar when a song ended. I still don’t know my research question for the Valley. La Pulga reminded me that I am in a place of fluid identity where I have a lot to learn. 

Sick Day

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I drive to school in the morning at night. The moon and the stars still hang in the sky. The llano fed by the Rio Grande stretches soft and dark outside my car window like the bed I leave behind. 

When I turn onto Military Highway, white US Border Patrol suburbans appear now and again like ghosts. They train their headlights on Mexico, 1.6 miles away. I haven’t seen any people emerge in those beams yet. The lights at the international road bridge to Progreso blink red, green. Sometimes there’s a parade of 18-wheelers; mostly, it’s just me and a few other early commuters. The animals at this hour are still nocturnal. When I get to school, the milk is just being loaded into the cafeteria. I see the sunrise from the hallway door when my first period class lines up outside my room. Unless I have recess duty, I don’t go outside until 6 pm. (My students don’t have it much better, on the days when they have inside recess). Military Highway winds me home between the llano’s fields when the sun hangs close to setting. 

On the drive to school on Friday, I hit a racoon. Baby’s first roadkill. Thump. I saw its eyes shine in my headlights. 

My voice was almost gone, anyway. All I did last week was wake up, go to school, drive home, prepare for the next day, and fall asleep worrying about how I was going to get all the pencils sharpened before class. How N. has been more and more defiant. How I feel like all I do say is no. How the kids who speak the least English misbehave the most because they're not engaged. I noticed myself getting sick but was too worried I was an incompetent teacher to pay it any mind. 

On Thursday, most of my 120 students had been sweet. Miss, you’re sick, they said. Miss, you should go see the doctor. They were less chatty than usual, sort of, out of kindness. 

But your voice, you see, is power. Tone and volume change responses and reactions in ways I’m just beginning to comprehend. I still believe there’s power in silence. But you need vocal power if you’re going to corral 120 under-exercised, over-sugared Friday-morning ten-year-olds into a hallway to read silently while Kindergarden gets to use the playground. That didn’t go so hot on Friday. I rasped and coughed instructions to a substitute and drove home feeling defeated. The raccoon’ s corpse lay on the middle of Military in the midday sun.  

I got home and sorted through the surveys I had given my morning classes. I had asked them to tell me how they felt about our class, statements like (Agree or Disagree) “Miss Parker believes in my potential” “Our class feels like a safe place” “I feel like Miss Parker is working to get to know me."

I had expected their responses to be negative, based on how many of them mocked the questions while I was reading them out loud, how loud our room still gets at breakfast, and how my pockets fill with confiscated eraser bits and cootie catchers by the end of the day. 

 And I couldn’t decide if that expectation, or their positive, thoughtful responses and notes (“This is my favorite class” “Can we decorate the classroom for the seasons?”“I wish everyone were respectful to everyone else” ”HARRY POTTER”), made me more melancholy. How the heck can I tap into the potential of all of these children when I spend most of my time with them and away from them worrying I’m not doing things right? 

I just taught simile and metaphor, sorry. I lost my voice and I have been losing my voice. I have been forgetting why I’m here. I’ve been in a daily tunnel of stress and nerves, driving up and down Military Highway in a fog even on the brightest evening. 

The fog was so thick it took me about 24 hours to remember that when you’re sick you normally try to get better. I drank tea on Saturday morning and called the doctor, who told me I had laryngitis, badly infected. Don’t talk, she said, until you’re back 100%. 

So I called a sub for today. This weekend, I did all of the things I normally do for the upcoming week but breathed in between them. I took more than five minutes to eat dinner and I vacuumed my room and I spent a few hours on Sunday morning exploring river channels with my roommate in an inflatable kayak. I’m starting to remember that I need to do the things that fill me with joy, so I can bring that joy into my classroom. (Duh, but revelatory, two months into this job). 

This morning, I drove to school so I could make copies of a work packet to leave for my students. I left the building just when the kids would be pulling the breakfast cooler into our classroom. The sun’s fingers appeared. Parents’ pickup trucks lined up outside the long, low building. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, it all seemed sort of miraculous: two faithful buses shimmered on the horizon, bringing a hundred more kids for another day of learning. 

Long Weekend

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On Sunday, we found an abandoned pool club on the Rio Grande. Four pools, hot tub, beer (warm) still in the bars. Mexico on the other side of the river and border patrol vans driving by.

In the old Spanish chapel next to it, a woman prayed and gave us dirty looks for our dirty feet. I stayed outside, bare shoulders. 

We kept driving along the military highway that tracks the river and the border - past a burned out monastery that sits on a Catholic schools campus, past old men drinking beers and shooting doves pop-pop  from folding lawn chairs, past the road bridge to Mexico, past a small red bar called El Vaquero, right under that bridge, past about a mile of shipping warehouses with NAFTA flags. 

I bought poblano peppers and bistec suave from the meat market, La Michoacana, got looks because I was the only white girl. A father and son joked while they waited in line with the butcher. I drove home missing the evening light in NJ, joking with my parents in our kitchen. I cooked for my roommates and my hands burned for two hours after from the pepper seeds, reminding me that I did not come here to feel at home. 

New Posts will be under "Borderlands"

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...but I have yet to set up a subscription widget!

So for now, I'll post links here:

I'm living in a new country in my own country, on the border with a country that permeates every aspect of the day. 

I toggle between South Texas country 100.3 and 101.5 Digital, which plays Enrique Inglesias and Mana on heavy rotation. Que dios te bendiga, God bless you, the ladies in the front office say, at the end of every conversation. The nurse orders us plates of flautas and tacos for lunch on Fridays. My kids are testing out swears in Spanish and they eat gummy bears and chili on their shaved ice after school. The drive-through convenience stores sell micheladas and avocados and all the flavors of Takis. 

I'm working in a new country, too, a nation of  120 ten year olds who test me and push me to remind myself, every day, that respect is earned, not given. Confidence covers up most mistakes. Everyone wants to be loved, and no change happens over night. My voice sounds like I've been on a three week bender, not working from 6 am to 8 pm in an air-conditioned schoolhouse. 

I've been writing more lesson plans and sticky note reminders than anything else, but there are rich words and images here to share and I'm working on pulling them together. 

 

Postscript, aka Publication

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After spending most of my trip, it felt, pitching my research to various publications, I placed two articles with OZY, a new media outlet focused on the New and the Next. 

If you haven't already seen them, here they are. Thanks for reading. 

"Why the Keyword in Farming Startups is Regenerative," June 26:

http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/why-the-keyword-in-farming-startups-is-regenerative/60722

"Going Wild on the Coast of Uruguay," July 24:

http://www.ozy.com/good-sht/going-wild-on-the-coast-of-uruguay/40940

Sunbathing

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I read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Cancun, on a beach under a sun that laughs at you for previously thinking you could tan. The book made sense there. Junot Diaz calls the places that speckle the Caribbean sea surreal, for their heat and their water and the true myths of their histories, and Cancun definitely fits the bill. It’s Disney surreal, not the dirt-floors-and-guns absurdity of countries under dictatorships, but still - you question the reality of the whole place. The sun that pulls sweat out of your pores and dulls your brain. The water that’s brighter blue than a blue raspberry Slurpee. The sand and the high-rise hotels that are blinding white; the fact that someone thought to line a thin strip of barrier shore with those high-rises in the first place; the fact that in high season every room in every one of them is occupied by people who are escaping their own reality, wherever in the world that may be. 

Maybe most surreal was the documentation of that escape. Everywhere we looked: phones out to capture arms reaching to the sky, hats at a jaunty angle, abs tightened. Props, I guess, to the numerous women I saw attempting the complicated mermaid-selfie maneuver: lounge in foamy surf in small string bikini, take selfie without drowning phone or self. 

So on this beach, drifting in and out of sleep, I was reading Oscar Wao, a story that’s basically about how real life can feel like a fable and dreams can infiltrate reality. The sentences of sneakily poetic slang, Dominican and American, went down like cool water because that’s how my brain feels, right now, a total mezcla. It’s running back towards sure-footed English but feeling like it’s picked up a few words in Spanish it doesn’t want to let go. 

I fell asleep on a page where Junior, our main guide through all this quilombo, is talking about his drives around Paterson and Camden and Perth Amboy. Place names and their peculiar gravity. These are the cities on the highway signs on my way home from the Newark airport. Like Oscar Wao’s Dominican grandmother La Inca is stringing their names together, incanting me home. 

Somewhere else, Yunior talks about “a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres,” but I woke up sunburnt on a surreal beach to the feeling that this time the longing is for places that are real, that are already there. 

Notebook Scraps from Mexico

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//Time started here with oranges. On the way from Tuxtla to San Cristobal, when I was giddy with arrival, the bus driver stopped by the side of the road, bought a bag of oranges warm with sun. He passed me one. Its peel was scraped away, leaving a thin white spiral of pith like a planet’s rings. 

 

//I’m enjoying my newfound status as pure tourist. I wore flip flops in town yesterday and running shoes today. 

But I took photos in a place where they said not to take photos and all of a sudden it felt like I was taking it too far. It was in San Juan Chamula, a church near San Cristobal. The building is a Catholic church, built by the Spanish when they invaded, but its shell protects the beliefs and the rituals of the indigenous community. Inside, there are pine needles on the marble floor and a tree in the back corner by the shrine of the Virgin Mary. The entire perimeter of the church is lined with fire - hundreds of tall candles in glass jars, a tribute to the God of the sun. People kneel on the floor and sacrifice chickens to chase away spirits of sickness, swig from a bottle of clear alcohol, light thin colored candles that leave wax puddles on the floor. I’m still trying to figure out why I couldn’t just see it, why I had to try to take a piece of it away with me. 

 

//One day, we left at 5 am to drive in a white van with six other tourists to see waterfalls and Mayan ruins. The van stopped at 8 am at a roadside restaurant where the buffet served beans and rice, plantains, or pancakes to people who had emerged from about twenty other white vans. We rolled in a caravan, with a police escort, to the first waterfalls. We ate lunch facing the waterfall and had the bittersweet pleasure of watching people pose for photos that they'll show their coworkers or grandchildren next Monday. They used selfie sticks, drones, long arms, and/or an iPad on a stand in a bush. 

At the top of a temple in the Palenque, the Mayan ruins, a guy in a straw hat held up a black flag of the Harley Owner’s Group of some small town in France. 

The frogs, or the bugs, sound like the whine of an arriving UFO. Not too far from the realm of possibility, if you believe the Mayans built UFOs. 

 

//They grow coffee here, for Starbucks and Green Mountain coffee. There's no time for much subsistence farming when the coffee day is over, so many of these indigenous communities don't see a lot of vegetables. Beans, onion, tortillas; maybe some tomatoes. The chicken is all free range (on your house floor) and beef is almost non-existent. Kids drink soda, which is cheaper than bottled water and cleaner than well water. Sometimes, Ali said, she stayed with families who could only scrounge together cookies and coffee for dinner, before waking up in the morning to harvest the beans for Starbucks again. 

 

//On the night bus from Tuxtla to D.F., Mexico City, the driver played a movie about a prison uprising and the bus stopped two times so that federal police could check for drugs in the sides of the bus and in everyone’s backpacks. After the second stop, in the final scene of the violent prison movie, a baby in the front of the bus wouldn't stop crying.   

 

//Every street corner we’ve passed in D.F. smells like lime. There is so much food on the street in so many different colors. By the Palacio de Bellas Artes, there was a cart bursting with bouquets of fried snacks. Red, green, orange - the same color as the fruit they sell In cups, watermelon, lime, mango, all with a dusting of chili if you want. A woman fries black tortillas with orange filling, lets you ladle red or green sauce. 

 

//Flying into Mexico City from the flat Yucatan, you understand why Tenochtitlan was the first city of empire.  That Aztec city was made strong by mountains. Today, Mexico’s main city spits houses over hills like its ancestor did. Shafts of light strike the mountains;the clouds are the serpents’ wings.

Rio

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My friend Catherine, a freelance journalist who has been living in Rio for three years, gives a walking tour of Rio’s city center and port zone that narrates disparate neighborhoods through food. She leads the walk through a company called Culinary Backstreets, and if you are going to Rio I HIGHLY suggest that you go on this walk. A few highlights - an aid, if you will, for digesting this complicated city: 

Rio was the seat of the Portuguese empire for thirteen years. The King had barely any idea what lay inside Brazil's borders, beyond jungle and potential slaves, but he did bring a European fondness for pastries that could be made with the new cash crop: sugar cane.

Real Gabinete Português de Leitura (Royal Portuguese Library): When the King of Portugal fled to Rio and moved the head of empire to his new city, he brought a boat full of first editions of Portuguese literature and built this church-like library to hold them. The collection also has a full archive of Brazilian newspapers. From an exhibit poster, a reproduced cartoon, circa late 1800s, as railroads were built across the country: “progress, but for whom?"

In 2013, as private contractors finished stadiums and hotels for the 2014 world cup, millions of Brazilians protested across the country because public transportation fares were too high and buses too slow. Down the street from the library, in the faculty of social sciences, so many people came for an open-mike grievance meeting that they pulled a heavy wood table from the red-curtained auditorium and held the meeting in the square. Thousands of people came, Catherine said, and for six hours took turns speaking for two minutes each about what needed to change as  Brazil went about growing. “Order and progress,” says the Brazilian flag. 

Catherine’s roommate recently wrote a story about Brazil’s guarantee of asylum for Syrian refugees. We drank coffee at this shop that was founded by the first wave of Syrian immigrants, in the early 20th century. The owners started out selling nargileh; now they sell cigars from Brazil’s Bahia region. 

This store, founded by another Syrian family, sells West African red palm oil, Middle Eastern olives, peanut butter, dried mango, pineapple, banana, and pastry supplies; in other words, a nice indicator of how diverse Brazil is. Outside the store, you can eat a middle eastern empanada, sprinkling on each bite a brand of African red pepper sauce that’s now produced in a suburb of Rio. There are five branches around the city.

Tapioca: This is the Brazilian hot dog, choripan, taco, your pick - the street food you grab on your way home from the office or after a late night out. It's made from manioc flour, which looks like little white pearls until it's been cooked in a pan of oil and turned into a crepe-like base for salty or sweet fillings. 

Neighborhood bars are a key social space. "We’re in a boteco and we can talk about whatever we want," Catherine said. We ate bolinhos de bacalao (codfish balls) and bolinhos de feijoada (beef stew, breaded and fried). Feijoada, like cachaca, the sugar cane alcohol, was once slave food - and is now one of the pillars of Brazilian cuisine. 

Also, there are 200 word for cachaca in Brazilian Portuguese. 

From Morro da Conceição, a hillside neighborhood that's becoming an artists' haunt, you can see abandoned buildings in Brazil's downtown. On the right, Catherine shows how the port zone fits into this hill neighborhood and the city center. 

Pedra do Sal, Little Africa: African slaves carved these stairs into this rock before slavery in Brazil was finally abolished in 1888. Their descendants carved out a neighborhood that's become a hub for Afro-Brazilian culture. Now, on Fridays, on this rock, there's a samba show here and so many people come you can't move as anything but part of the swaying crowd.

The view from the top of Morro da Providencia, Rio's first favela. 

Here, at the top of Morro da Providencia, in a square that used to be a public park before the city government built a cable car as a gentrifying gesture, a community pillar makes gnocchi with shrimp in a spicy coconut sauce. She learned to make gnocchi from the Italian woman in whose house she is a maid; the sauce is a speciality of the northeast of Brazil and uses West African red palm oil. "It's an amazing fusion dish," said a Turkish chef who did this food tour with Catherine a few weeks ago. 

Favelas are hillside neighborhoods of adaptation and resistance. People build houses with flat roofs so that they can add floors when the next generation comes along. This building here is covered with portraits of the Providencia residents who were evicted from their homes when the city government built the cable car.