What is It Like Teaching in Sao Paulo, Brazil? A Reflection on the Issues Facing Brazil Today

I recently spoke with Sao Paulo teachers. To protect their actual identities, I will refer to the first one as Gabriela and the second woman as Ana. They taught me a lot not only about life as a teacher in Brazil but also about societal forces affecting regular people in Brazil. Here are their perspectives on life as a teacher and Brazilian society overall:

Working as a Teacher

Ana teaches middle school reading, and Gabriela English for middle schools and high schoolers. Most schools in Sao Paulo and Brazil overall have two or three sessions throughout the day: one in the morning (say from 7:00 am to 12:00 pm), the second in the afternoon say from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm, and sometimes a third night session after 7:00 pm. Students attend one session each day. 

To make ends meet, most teachers, however, teach both in sessions at two different schools: teaching the mornings at one school and then going to another school to teach evenings, which seems to amount to 11 hour days (plus lesson prep and grading). Ana knows a teacher who teaches three (night shift too). 

Gabriela teaches a morning session at one school five days a week and then an afternoon session two days a week. Thus, she said she works about 35 hours a week, which is a bit more manageable. 

As a teacher, Gabriela said she makes about $3000 Real (about 600 US dollars) a month. They both teach in a poorer neighborhood in a black suburban community. They said that sometimes the students and others in the community express concern on their behalf that they do not make a lot of money. 

At the same time, their students will see that they can afford certain things like a car or the ability to travel to other countries, and think, “You are wealthy. I thought you didn’t make a lot of money.” To their students, that seems like a lot of money, but to them, they are not paid a lot relative to their level of education. They can still almost afford things like international travel and cars if they budget their money well, but that is significantly less than many other college-educated professions. From this depiction, I got the sense that they would fit into the lower middle class. 

Despite this, they said that some days they love teaching and feel like a champion, and other days, they can’t wait to leave and go home. They see their students everyday for a year or sometimes multiple years, which gives them a long-term vantage point on their students’ learning.

The Worrying Creep of Authoritarianism in Brazil

They felt that democracy is fragile in Brazil. Gabriela’s father was born in 1966 and grew up under Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorial regime. Brazil eventually became democratic afterwards, but leaders like Jair Bolsonaro speak nostalgically of the regime. When the current president Lulu (or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) beat him in the last election, Bolsonaro still tried to agitate his followers to reinstate him after he lost the election. 

Even during the election, they felt Bolsonaro used his power to try to cheat and maintain power. For example, in the remote rural provinces in northeastern Brazil where Lulu’s base is, a special service busses people the far distance to the polls on election day. They said the federal police under Bolsonaro pulled over these busses and insisted on seeing everyone’s papers in order to waste time. That way, by the time the bus of people got to the polls, they were closed, preventing them from voting. 

They said that as teachers, they see some of the parents of their students start to advocate for family values and other ideas that they worry about. These movements they see as connected to the above authoritarianism. This can come up when they discuss certain issues in the curriculum like sex education and racism in Brazil. 

Sex education can make many parents skeptical, but it’s important for students to learn. They don’t just teach about sex but also about how teenagers should treat the changes in their bodies. They also teach how to be treated properly and respectfully in relationships, including how to identify abusive or violent sexual acts. In situations where a family member is sexually abusing a child, that behavior is often depicted within the family as normal and okay. The school is most often the place that teaches the kid that this behavior is wrong and unacceptable. The sex education curriculum is the best defense against such behavior, even though that can cause a pushback against families where such behavior is normalized.

Afro-Brazilian Experiences of Racism

Gabriela, herself a black woman, said that many people in Brazil act as if racism is not a thing, as if this place is a racially just society now, but there is a long history and structural racism until this day. Slavery was awful in Brazil, lasting for several centuries. Brazil was one of the last countries to end Transatlantic Slavery. Then once they were set free, it wasn’t like they had a place to go or got any resources. 

Gabriela’s family came from the backlands, a word for a desert-like wilderness area without a lot of infrastructure or resources. Her grandparents moved to Sao Paulo. Many black people from there moved to Sao Paulo several decades ago in the second half of the twentieth century to build the railroads that connected Sao Paulo with more remote parts of the country. 

These people usually lived in eastern Sao Paulo where their existence as poor black people from rural communities were considered a “problem” by many Sao Paulo residents. Yet, the city needed their labor to construct the railroads, so they tolerated their existence somewhat. After the railroad was completed, many remained in eastern Sao Paulo. This resulted in a huge boom in Sao Paulo’s population: both because these railroad workers chose to stay and because the trains made it easier for people to migrate from the countryside into the city. Most people in Sao Paulo have parents and/or grandparents in some rural part of Brazil who migrated in the second half of the twentieth century. 

People in Brazil often talk about the US history of racism. For example, Gabriela said that people who want to argue that racism does not exist in Brazil will point to the fact that Brazil never had legalized segregation like in the US South. 

She also said that she and other black people loved the shows “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Everybody Hates Chris.” They, especially Fresh Prince, had a formative experience for her and other black millennials. The show was the first time she saw really successful black people navigating high society. It taught many Afro-Brazilians that black people could be successful. The controlling nature of Chris’s mother in “Everybody Hates Chris” also reminds her of how many Latina mothers are. 

The group who dubbed Fresh Prince in Portuguese here in Brazil became famous here. They retranslated the language (or codes if you want to use more academic linguistics terminology) that the various characters spoke into parallels in Brazilian Portuguese. 

They explained that central parts of the city tend to be wealthier and the outskirts or suburbs of the city tend to be poorer (where there is less infrastructure like subways or other public transit). Structural racism is very prevalent in how people from the poorer suburban areas are more likely to be black. 

This is the opposite of the US where based on redlining and white flight, the suburbs are often wealthier and whiter, and communities in the city nonwhite with less wealth accumulation. Gabriela likened it to how when the black slaves were first freed, they had nowhere to go, so they went up into the hills around the community and built homes for themselves there. She surmised that was how favela’s first formed (poorer black neighborhoods in the hills surrounding a city). 

Conclusion

In this conversation, I found it fascinating learning how societal dynamics are similar yet different between the United States and Brazil. There are many overlaps in the stories – such as structural racism, overworked yet underpaid teachers, and troublesome authoritarianism lingering under the current in politics – yet Brazil has some stark differences in how these manifest. 

I find it particularly interesting learning about the history of Black peoples and racism in Brazil. The many parallels yet contrasts with the experiences of African Americans in the United States taught me a lot about how racist historical forces influenced both, giving me a case study to view what is unique to the United States or to Brazil or what experiences seem common for Black peoples across the Western Hemisphere. 

You can learn a lot by visiting other parts of the world and then once you are there, talking to people and listening to their stories. 

(If you find discussions of people’s experiences in other cultures around the world like this interesting, please let me know, and I will be sure to keep writing these.)