The first thing that struck me arriving back in the United States was apartheid, apartheid and segregation everywhere. This is not to minimize the very intense and brutal reality of racism in Brazil. This however is to point out just how normalized segregation is in every aspect of life in the US. The segregation of social life in the US struck me everywhere I went in the US, from touching down in an Atlanta Airport to wandering between cities in Northern California. Seeing passing groups of friends, couples, workers, everywhere I could only think of how divided everyone is into their own racial and ethnic group. The US is still a country in which an inter-racial relationship can turn heads, in Brazil where so many people are mixed it’s just the reality. While particularly among the rich (alongside the white gringos) you’ll find plenty of social segregation on racial lines, inter-racial relationships are so common in a country where almost everyone is already mixed that only after living in Brazil have I been able to see the sheer extent to which the divide in the US is so strange.

I never felt my own racial position in the United States as much as I did on my return. My father who raised me for most of my life is white, my Mom is Hispanic and I’ve inherited most of my appearance and all of my skin tone from my mom. In Brazil, until I show through my imperfect grasp of Portuguese that I’m not from around here, people assume I’m Brazilian. They never guess I’m American until I tell them, and often think I’m from Paraguay or Peru. It has been nice for me to, for the first time in my life, live in an environment where so many people look like me or close to me, where almost everyone is racially mixed. It made the shock of returning to the racial division of the US much greater.

My time working in a hostel here also certainly reinforced the extent of my otherness to many white people. The difference between how some people treated me (as the Brazilian help) versus how some people would treat my very white co-workers was noticeable. Returning to the US especially to Santa Cruz I could see how I stand out a lot more as well. The feeling of appearing more like a foreigner in your own country than in the one you’ve been in on the other side of the world is a strange one.

The Left in the two countries exists on completely different levels. In the US, with the absence of a broader mass movement, everyone has fallen into surviving, getting by and trying to get their lives together. I went directly from learning about the victory of the wildcat strike of street sweepers in Rio de Janeiro (A strike that won a 40% raise and substantial benefits) to a world which felt like one of defeat and collapse.

This is not a critique of any individuals, scenes or groups; if I felt ready to attempt to offer a substantial political program and strategy for the US Left I would have stayed in Oakland. Rather it is a call for recognition of the difficulties confronting the left, the pressures acting upon it and its comparative irrelevance. Here in Brazil the group I work with is comparatively very small as well, but after being at the wildcat strke from the very beginning, when they brought fliers to one of the later protests workers were pushing ahead to grab them and read them. It was like a scene from how I’d imagine Russian factory workers reacted to the latest copy of Iskra or Pravda.

Living in Brazil has also strongly confirmed the absurdity of most political posturing among university students. The idea of a bunch of mostly middle-class students sitting around and talking about who is more privileged than the other has become an absurd joke. You don’t have the military police busting in to your home, shooting members of your family, kidnapping and torturing you. You don’t even have the faintest idea of the extent of the oppression and violence which people in many of the favelas face every day. And these people fight and struggle regardless, because to struggle is necessary to live, because they don’t have the ‘privilege’ of being able to not fight back. The entire vocabulary which dominates the campus left these days is foreign to struggles where people are much more oppressed, and the whole thing looks even more like the absurd joke that I always thought it was. UCSC is not one of the more bourgeois universities in the US, but there’s a reason its’ exchange program is with the most elite private catholic university and part of that is frankly, UCSC is even more exclusive and elite than any university in Latin America.

The meaning of poverty is obviously quite different here. While I sympathize with my graduate student friends, it was a little hard to keep myself from laughing hearing them refer to themselves as living in poverty. There was a point in my time in Brazil where I had to choose between being able to take the bus to a protest or to be able to buy food. Or even more basic than that, between taking the bus home or having clean water to drink. When I’ve been sick or hurt I’ve just had to figure out what I can do without medical care or anything needing a prescription. I have quite authentically lived in conditions of third world poverty the last months, not as a visitor or tourist but as someone who was left in an economic position that forced them into this. There’s certainly nothing romantic about it, as if that needed to be said. It’s hard and it sucks and even if you have a lot of free time you spend most of that trying to figure out how to be less impoverished.

I have emerged with even more respect and confidence in working class people. There are no petty-scams from the working class people of the favela I live in like those that abound in the middle-class parts of town. People share, have solidarity and community in hard times. Back during Occupy Oakland I was incredibly moved when inside of Santa Rita Jail prisoners pledged to protect me on the yard and others chose to share their commissary food with me as a sign of solidarity with what we were fighting for. The solidarity and generosity of many of the people here in Vidigal has been the same, people have shared food with me, heard my story and told me parts of theirs.

In my experience people from lumpen and working class backgrounds also tend to be much, much harder to crack. Someone who’s already been through a lot of the worst the system can throw at you and survived, continued to be a militant, continued to fight and struggle. You can rely on someone like that. Middle-class people, brought up in protected environments, motivated by sympathy or guilt or a combination of the two, they’re likely to break. They find the conditions of the oppressed too much to bare themselves or they simply fall apart. They can talk endlessly about their solidarity, but often times put them in a jail or near a slum and they can’t handle it. They waver and they break. It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for them, after all those same conditions have broken millions of people of my own class. However I will only have true confidence and respect in revolutionaries from my class.

There are some good things about living in the US of course, and I certainly plan to return there when I’m ready. Well-functioning plummbing and clean water are great to have, as is the immense variety of food. Despite the intense racism and racial apartheid of life in the US, there is also an extent to which you can be an immigrant from anywhere and you’ll be accepted as a part of the US that isn’t possible in Brazil. Everyone from outside Brazil is a Gringo (Used for people from the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia, everywhere outside Brazil), and will always be a Gringo no matter how much time you spend here and how fluently you eventually can speak the language.

While I think Brazil is one of the most important key locations in the world in terms of revolutionary prospects (alongside Argentina and Bolivia) and a theatre which will be absolutely decisive for the spread of any revolution which starts in Latin America (Right now I would imagine that Argentina would be the spark) ultimately my political role is going to be in the United States. I will never really be Brazilian, and even if I could be I’ll ultimately be more useful back home. Hopefully, now that I have a little more stability I can start to intervene however I can in debates around the left back home, and everything I do here will be with the goal of building the kind of direct experience that will let me help reconstruct a revolutionary left at home.