Paulo Pilotti Duarte

How did the periphery make it to college?

I entered UFRGS in 2003. I was one of four students in that class who came from a public school. At that time, we didn't have quotas, so it was uncommon to have students from public schools at UFRGS, especially in exact sciences, which required a very peculiar and demanding study plan throughout the course. But fortunately, that has changed. Nowadays, many underprivileged individuals are at UFRGS, especially people of color and from public schools.

But in 2003 it wasn't like that, and I was there in 2003.

The professors needed to be more accustomed to the reality of financial limitations. However, today, most of the faculty can understand the different backgrounds that make up the student body.

But in 2003, it wasn't like that. My professors assigned extensive assignments and recommended attending conferences across the country. I didn't go, of course. In 2003, the university had no easy access to plane tickets or financial assistance. Or there was, but it was limited, very limited. And the research scholarship always paid poorly.

Where I came from, I was expected not to have hopes beyond a stable job at the GM factory or AMBEV. I am the only one among my childhood friends who don't work in a factory. Only one other friend and I are not “factory floor” workers. Interestingly (ironically), he and I are the only ones with a higher education degree. I was the only one among the six friends who traveled to Planeta Atlântida in 2002 who went to UFRGS. I did it because I got into UFRGS. It was my “bachelor party,” so to speak. After all, we didn't get into “Planeta,” but it was a week that generated stories for years.

But I'm not going to talk about that. I will speak about shocks, people, social class, and privileges.

I've never experienced racism, of course (I'm not black). However, I have always struggled with the lack of opportunities that a life in the periphery provides. Until I entered UFRGS, the idea of traveling abroad or living in a two-story apartment was bizarre. I didn't even know two-story apartments existed; a “triplex” was some sexual position I saw in the now-defunct Brazil Magazine. But that was relatively normal in the social class that dominated UFRGS in 2003. And it's not abnormal today; I can confirm that. Parents with higher education? Rare, if not non-existent. My mother is still the only one among the mothers who achieved it. My father didn't. My grandparents are all literate, but nothing more. Having a grandparent with money to help with daily struggles was a dream; my grandmother could only afford to buy a basic food basket to help us when my father lost his job. And that was a lot for those living on two minimum monthly wages.

Life in the periphery is more complex than people with blue hair and turbans can imagine.

The shocks came daily. People with cars are given as gifts. With credit cards – my father only got a credit card when he was over 40; before that, everything was paid in installments at Arapuã. I remember I once came with my parents on the Anchieta bus (the name of the bus line from downtown POA to Gravataí) with a microwave oven. Another time, I spent all my money buying a computer cabinet and had no money left for the return fare. But shocks.

During that time, UFRGS needed more diversity of opinions. It was mainly divided between radical identity politics activists and budding anarcho-capitalists. I don't remember being either of them, but my memory is fading as I approach 40. But the shocks continued. The duplex and triplex apartments. Cars are given as gifts by parents for passing the entrance exam. Trips abroad like their friends, backpacking in Eastern Europe, exchange programs in Ireland that “taught them to fend for themselves.”

Regarding self-sufficiency, it's a trend now for women, usually from upper-middle-class backgrounds, to claim that men are spoiled. But let me tell you, most women who complain that men are spoiled at 30 are just as spoiled as the men they criticize. But their ivory tower is so detached from the reality of Brazil that they see themselves as warriors. This doesn't mean men aren't spoiled; everyone in the upper class is spoiled. And these people are the majority on social media. They see themselves as “grown-ups” because they pay bills and clean the house. Where I come from, we've been doing that since we were 14. Cleaning the home started at age 9. My two neighbors have been working since they were 11, one helping his father, a bricklayer, and the other supporting his father, a mechanic. Occasionally, during vacations, I worked with them. I cleaned many vans owned by a friend's father. Our competition was to see who could find more change on the van floor (sometimes, we even had some forgotten snacks, but it had nothing to do with poverty; it was just messy). Helping at home was normal for both boys and girls, depending on who was the oldest. Another friend of mine always took care of his two sisters while his parents worked at a gas station. Starting to work at 14 and having a bill to pay (usually for water) was normal. College? Only I attended UFRGS. Only one other friend did; he got a scholarship to attend ULBRA. Going abroad was just on TV, at most to Uruguay, often to buy cheaper groceries. The wealthier ones would go shopping in Paraguay.

But of course, I'm spoiled because I live with my elderly mother. The real warriors are the women who wear Frida Kahlo tank tops and travel to London three times a year.

So, that was me in 2003. I had come from a completely different reality for them, having worked in my father's tobacco shop for two years. I had experience cleaning travel vans, selling Paraguayan magazines and cigarettes (and making hot dogs in a trailer). That was my reality. It still is. But at the time, I didn't realize this was an entirely invisible life within a specific social spectrum. Just as I was invisible to them, they were invisible to me. None of their concerns made sense to me or moved me. Their hardships were not something I took seriously. Just as my problems, to them, were sterile issues of a person without experience. After all, they had the same problems as those they were trying to help. The daily struggles of a person who worries about living alone at 19 didn't affect me because, in the periphery, we built a house in the backyard of our mother's property and lived there. The car was just that 10-year-old 1.0-liter one, preferably one without paying property tax. My father said insurance didn't exist; it was a rich people thing. Eating out? Only when we received our meal vouchers at the end of the month, and even then, it meant a trip to the food court at the Shopping do Vale with whatever was left from the groceries (why do groceries? Because the taxi from Big to home was expensive).

Of course, over time, I acquired

The habits of the class I was in contact with. I wanted to be rich like the majority there. I wanted to have the same problems. But you can't pretend forever that you're from the Moinhos district when Morada do Vale calls you every day, and the traffic jam on the Cachoeirinha bridge devours two hours of your life daily. This created a particular internal division in my personality. On the one hand, I knew my reality; on the other hand, I denied it to most people I interacted with. It wasn't out of malice, of course. It was an inability to cope with the impending shock when a world of limitations confronts a world of opportunities. My inability to deal with this new reality while remaining true to where I came from created social and psychological scars that were only resolved years later (many years later, I would say they were never fully resolved). They shaped a persona in me that no longer exists today (thankfully) but still exists in the imagination of many people who knew me then. It's like an autoimmune disease that occasionally attacks me and reminds me of what I went through and how incapable I was in 2003.

Are these shocks necessary? I don't think so, but they happen, especially to those from the bottom of the social pyramid. I came from there, and I'm still there, but today, I no longer get shocked, and I can channel that reality shock into something more substantial (class resentment, peace among us, war to the masters). But that doesn't remove the scar I and everyone in the same situation carry. Branded with a hot iron on the back. The constant feeling of “you don't belong here.”

These various shocks still resonate with me to this day, to the point that I reject the ideological identity-based left, which plays the flute and travels to London during summer vacations.

In 2003, UFRGS was a dream-crushing machine. It turned everyone into hamburger patties after four years. I feel that this has changed a lot with the introduction of quotas (although they are still poorly received in many courses; I even remember a classmate from that time saying that campus robberies would increase now that there were “a bunch of quota students”).

That's why I don't believe in the university left, the student movement, the idealistic posturing, identity politics, and all the nonsense the middle class has created to absolve their bourgeois guilt. The only way forward is through rupture.

But this is not a text about the left or rupture. It's a text about shocks. And I've talked about my biggest shock in 38 years: my poverty.

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