Maria Bonita and Lampião

This week I'm in Bolivia, working on a telenovela (Latin American soap opera) made by indigenous kids from the shantytowns above La Paz, which sadly leaves me far from our beautiful and smart daughter.  None the less, I can at least tell some stories from last week and keep her in mind, even from far away.

Last weekend we went to visit Rita's parents in Braço do Norte, a small town in the foothills of the Serra do Corvo Branco, because it was her father's birthday.  On the wall of their living room, there is a wood-cut print that Rita and I gave him several years ago when we were working in the northeast: the print shows a family leaving the countryside to move to the city because of drought (the attached image is similar to the one on the wall, but made by the artist's father).  Even when she was a tiny baby, Helena fixed her eyes on the picture, perhaps because of its simple, black and white forms, orperhaps for more existential reasons.  Rita's parents faced the same tragedy when she was a little girl: they lost their land and had to move to the city to make a new life for themselves.  Rita's mother learned to sew clothes, and her father became a stonemason, a hard life for people accustomed to the rich farmland of Santa Catarina.

I started off by telling Helena Iara this family history, but then moved on to the historical reasons why so many people have been forced from their land in Brazil: the unjust distribution of land, Portuguese colonial policy, slavery.  And while many families have responded by moving the huge favelas that surround every Brazilian city, many have also resisted.  And since Helena Iara and I always talk about philosophy, I decided to tell her a little of the most philosophically sophisticated of these rebellions: the cangaço led by Maria Bonita and her husband, Lampião.

Different cangaços had long been a part of the northeast of Brazil, small groups of men without land or possessions who robbed the rich o sustain themselves, and Lampião grew up in one of these groups.  However, as Maria Bonita integrated herself into the group (she fell in love with Lampião when his group camped near her husband's ranch), their band began to develop a real philosophy of social justice: not just to rob from the rich to support themselves, but to undermine the unjust system of huge landholders and military leaders who lorded over landless peasants.  The redistributed land, taught the peasants reading, writing, and history, and united many of the varied bandit groups into a sort of proto-state struggling against the injustice they had lived.

In the end, Lampião and Maria Bonita were killed by the army and their movement lives only in memory, in music, and in dance and crafts pioneered by the group (they believed that culture and fashion were an integral part of the revolution).  But as I told Helena the story, I got an insight into the connection between childhood and political philosophy.

Every kid knows the basic tenant of any political critique: "That's not fair!"  Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Marx... they all start with that basic issue: Life isn't fair.  The bandits of the cangaço had the same insight, and they wanted to get a bigger piece of the pie for themselves, just as a boy declares that it isn't fair that he gets less birthday cake than his brother.  Real political philosophy emerges when one universalizes the question: not how life can be more fair for me, but how it can be more just for everyone: that was the move we see in Lampião and Maria Bonita, and one that I contend is the basic insight of many great children's movies today (A Bug's Life, Robots, Monsters Inc).  [I'm afraid I have only written about this in Spanish, but it is great fun to use philosophy to analyze Pixar!]

Maybe this story will help Helena see, as she grows up, that what matters isn't getting more for herself, or her family, tribe, country... but for everyone.