São Paulo: los latinos invisibles

São Paulo still makes its image as a cosmopolitan, welcoming meltinpot, based on the idea that every culture finds its place in the city. But the examples of that are the same images of italians, spanish, lebanese, jewish, japanese that shaped the city, but are no longer coming to São Paulo. This influences the city’s media, preservation policy, cultural policies. Even on the soap opera – maybe the most important instrument of city image-making in Brazil – contemporary São Paulo appears as a city full of european, middle eastern and asiatic accents, thus reproducing the traditional view of the city as a melting pot. On the other hand, latin americans,  the biggest strains of contenporary immigration remain invisilbe of this process of image making. Making these immigrants invisible is part of a bigger context in the city, in which local power does not have specific policies to face the new immigrants. Of course, it is easier for the city’s local government to deny proper policies to an invisible group, and in this sense, an image of a city that focuses on the immigrants that could manage to integrate and are mostly well-off is a complement to the denial of proper policies.

Renato Cymbalista