CHAPTER 1

LEAVING HOME

Emma

Gessi Bones and Vera Fracasso were teenagers when they founded a women'smovement that would transform the lives of women in southern Brazil. Twodecades later, the movement—and the stories of the women who dared tostart something their friends and family believed would fail—had a powerfulimpact on me. When Gessi and Vera talk about the early days of the movement,their stories sometimes have the sound of distant reflections. But whenthey try to explain what so enchanted them about activism, and how theirlives and the movement they created have changed, they speak with the mix ofpassion and uncertainty they felt when they were my age.

Vera's father made all the decisions at home during her childhood. Herparents worked side by side in the fields, struggling to make a living on theirsmall family farm. Her father made decisions about what crops to plant, whento harvest them, and what products to sell at markets in nearby towns. Hermother worked on the farm, prepared meals, cleaned the house, and washedlaundry by hand. "She participated in the work," Vera told me in one of ourearliest conversations, "but never expressed opinions or made decisions."When Vera asked her mother why she hardly spoke at home, her motherresponded that life had always been that way.

Vera wasn't content with her mother's silence. "I never accepted that," Verasaid, but daily realities resisted her at every turn: like most young women whogrew up in the southern Brazilian countryside in the 1980s, Vera had to askpermission to leave the house. The difficulty of daily farmwork, paired withlong-standing beliefs about men's and women's roles in the household, meantthat there was little space in rural homes for conversation. Good soil andplentiful water allowed many rural families in Vera's state, Rio Grande do Sul,to achieve basic economic security, but solid wooden houses and a modestcash crop did not bring schooling beyond primary grades, access to basicmedical care, or an escape from the authority of fathers accustomed to being incontrol. Even as the physical touchstones of modernity became available torural Brazilians in the mid-1980s, new agricultural policies made it even moredifficult for family farms to compete with large landowners and agriculturalcorporations. Vera watched her father work to end corruption in the localfarmers' union and admired his commitment to making the union a reliableforce for defending farmers, but the only workers the union took seriouslywere men.

Gessi's father also worked in the unions. He had "a vision of participation,"she remembers, "and of fighting for rights for farmers." Gessi learned aboutpolitical organizing from her father and about a different kind of organizingfrom her mother, who worked on the farm and managed to divide food, farm-work,and household chores among her nine children. Gessi didn't start schooluntil she was nine—it was too much of a burden to get there every day—andwhen she did start, she walked five kilometers each way, missing two of thenext six school years due to sickness. In the winter, she left for school beforethe sun rose. "We didn't have the road you drove here on," she told me twodecades later, "so I walked through forest, on rocks." Growing up, Gessi saw upclose the difficulty of everyday life and didn't believe things had to bethat way.

Local priests and nuns were the first to take seriously Gessi and Vera'srefusal to accept the limitations of their parents' way of life. Bishop OrlandoDotti of Rio Grande do Sul was known for his commitment to liberationtheology, a radical current that had been gaining ground within the CatholicChurch. Along with other leaders in the liberation theology movement of histime, Bishop Orlando insisted on incorporating the fight for social changeinto his religious practices and was committed to using his power as representativeof the Church to initiate and strengthen this fight.

In the 1960s, when teenagers in the United States were taking to the streetsand beginning to speak about citizenship and sexuality in new ways, Brazilwas seized by a military dictatorship that would rule through violent repressionfor the next twenty years. Citizens who dared to continue protests in the1970s risked and often lost their lives. So the 1980s, the decade when Braziliansoverthrew the military dictatorship and could discuss politics andprotest against the government without as high a risk of arrest, was in manyways Brazil's version of the 1960s: a moment of possibility and determinationthat stood in stark contrast to the past. But for Brazilian teenagers in the 1980s,the past was darker than it had been for their American counterparts twodecades earlier. Gessi and Vera didn't experience police brutality firsthanduntil they joined social movements in the mid-1980s, but they still experiencedthe 1985 transition to democracy against a backdrop of torture anddeath. Like many Brazilians of their generation, they were both cautious anddesperate for change.

For supporters of liberation theology in Brazil's Catholic Church (liberationists),the political shifts of the 1980s led to a period of rapid internal change.Conditions in rural Brazil improved after the military dictatorship ended, butliberationist nuns and priests, who worked closely with community membersand communicated with a wider network of clergy across the country, sawthat poverty and violence endured. They developed new ways of thinkingabout Jesus, the Bible, and the Church itself, and they approached their workwith an unprecedented level of commitment to improving the material conditionsof poor Brazilians and to helping people live with voice and dignity.

The priests and nuns organized youth groups in which rural teenagersdiscussed issues of gender and inequality, grappling in new ways with thechallenges they faced as a nation and in their daily lives. Father CláudioPrescendo, a priest in the small town of Sananduva, where Gessi grew up,observed "the harm of concentrated wealth, of large landholdings, of neoliberalismand free-trade agreements that benefit the richest groups," and hethought youths would be the most powerful force in countering these harms.Father Cláudio brought busloads of rural teens to nearby shantytowns, just asother clergy had brought him to work in poverty-stricken areas as a teenager.Though many rural families worried about income and food on a daily basis,most of them had shelter and land. This exposure to a different reality, guidedby nuns and priests, was instrumental in providing a broader sense of Brazil toteenagers who, according to Father Cláudio, "had never left their worlds."Many of the people who went on to lead social movements trace their activismto these youth groups, which changed their understanding of the worldand of their power as citizens.

Did parents want their children to change? Gessi's parents were less concernedabout what she learned at the meetings than about her going alone.They didn't mind when she went with her brother, but when he was out on adate or with friends, they always tried to keep her from going to the meetings.Even when Gessi's older sister Ivone began to participate, their parents resistedletting the two sisters travel alone. The social conventions they werefighting against—the silencing of women, the control of fathers over theirdaughters' lives—often kept Gessi and Ivone at home.

That's not to say the guys had a free ride. Gessi's husband, Ari Benedetti(known as Didi), also faced resistance from his family. When I asked Didi'sfather how his son and daughter-in-law got involved in activism, he threw uphis hands and laughed, "When the priests came!" Didi's father wasn't alwaysso easygoing. When Didi asked to join the church youth group as a teenager,his father said no. Father Cláudio worked hard to convince Didi's parents tolet their son participate, returning for three consecutive dinners in a marathoneffort to win them over. At other teens' houses, priests or nuns played cards,stayed for dinner, and, if parents still hadn't changed their minds, came backthe next week. While the priests lived nearby, many of the nuns traveled fromother towns and spent the night with the teenagers' families.

The Church formed a central part of community life in Sananduva, aregional commercial center of fourteen thousand people whose busy mainstreet was surrounded by blocks of brightly colored houses and long stretchesof farmland. Priests and nuns carried out baptisms and funerals, and theywere the public figures to whom people turned in moments of sickness andeconomic uncertainty. Aside from wooden farmhouses, which rarely hadmore than a few rooms, local churches were the only spaces in which communitygatherings could take place. Clergy in Sananduva and surrounding townsgained authority from their religious position, but that position did not dictatedistance from the community the way it might have elsewhere. For Didi'smother, who attended mass every Sunday, going to church was an excuse toleave her house, and she grew close to the neighbors and religious leaders shemet there. Didi's father told his wife that if anything happened to Didi, shewould be to blame for trusting the priests. But he didn't stop his son fromjoining the church youth group. Didi told me this in his parents' house,looking out at the fields where he worked when he was a teenager and walkedthe unpredictable line between what his father tolerated and what he refusedto accept. Didi ran home from the fields each evening, stopped to shower,then sprinted six kilometers to the church for youth group meetings, his dark,curly hair damp with water and sweat. "Sometimes I got a ride back home," hetold me, "and sometimes I walked."

Part of the draw of the youth groups for Gessi, Ivone, Vera, and Didi was thepossibility of thinking about the world in a different way, of envisioning afuture that was different from the world in which they lived. Equally enticingwas the chance to take a break from the fields, leave the house, and escape theisolation of life on rural farms. When the government announced plans toconstruct dams that would flood parts of Sananduva and other towns, priestshelped local teenagers form an antidam movement by making T-shirts andposters and organizing demonstrations in the streets. "There are two types ofsocieties," Gessi believed then and believes now: "The more equal society isthe one in which people participate, in which people have a right to work,home, food, and education. And the other is the society in which we live ...and we need to participate, organize, mobilize to say we don't agree with thissociety." While Gessi's first experience with activism was shaped by this longtermgoal, the urgency behind her work came from the immediate need ofsmall towns and small farmers to survive.

In 1985, in the midst of the nascent antidam movement, Gessi left Sananduvafor a convent in Passo Fundo, a city eighty-eight kilometers from Sananduvaand about ten times the size. The most progressive thinkers and activists sheknew were priests and nuns, and she wanted to be like them. She was sixteen,knew she wanted to work for social change, and figured the best way toimprove the lives of rural families was to become a nun.

That idea didn't last long. Gessi arrived at the convent in February and byApril had already butted heads with the nuns. Instead of studying biblicalpassages with an eye toward fighting injustice and inequality, as she had in theyouth groups, at the convent Gessi learned only the most literal approaches toreligious texts. She observed with increasing frustration that the nuns theredidn't share her commitment to changing the world. The nuns spoke aboutbuilding community, but they always ate at a separate table from the girls andassigned the most difficult chores to Gessi and the two other girls who hadgrown up on farms. The nuns talked in vague terms about helping the poor,but, in Gessi's eyes, they wanted to have nothing to do with ordinary people.

While at the convent, Gessi studied religion with the nuns and attendednight courses at a local school to complete fifth grade. At the school, she sawthe violent and drug-ridden realities of urban life more intensely than she hadon trips with Father Cláudio. In May, several of her night school teachers wenton strike, and Gessi immediately spoke up in their defense. The nuns werenot pleased. The strike gained momentum, classes stopped temporarily, andGessi went home, intending to stay and work on the antidam movement. Herfather, from whom she inherited her firm will, told her, "You wanted to go,you're going to finish the year."

In the end, Gessi is glad she returned to the convent, though the nuns' strictrules and narrow worldview drove her crazy. "In the convent I learned todefend what I believe," she said. Perched on a staircase cleaning walls at theend of the year, Gessi told one of the nuns, Noeli de Mello, what she thoughtof the convent. "This convent is going to shut down," she said. "It's going toend with you, because you say one thing and do another." Sister Noeli waiteduntil the walls were clean and then reported the incident to the head nun, whoapproached Gessi and invited her out for ice cream. "I said no," Gessi told me,face flushed as it must have been then: "I wouldn't be bought." She had alreadymade her decision: "the convent wasn't where I would be able to work tochange people's lives." This was the first time Gessi struggled to find a placewhere she could be the kind of political activist she thought necessary tochange the world.

When Gessi finished her time at the convent and returned to the youth grouprun by Father Cláudio, similar groups were flourishing throughout the state.With the priests' support, representatives from each group met in PassoFundo. The teenagers discussed the antidam campaign and ways of pressuringnational leaders to use government funds to feed Brazilians rather than pay offexternal debt. They opted to participate in the unions and in politics, and agroup of young women decided that they should organize around women'sissues, though they didn't yet know how. "The image of youth was of kids,drugs, and music," Gessi said, "and we were trying to show that rural teenagershad value and knew how to do things, how to produce and how to organize."

For many teenagers, this meeting was the first time they visited PassoFundo. Gessi remembers thinking that going there was like going to "the endof the world"—an unimaginably distant place. Didi remembers his first trip toPorto Alegre, a city of 1.2 million six hours away by bus, with a mix of awe andnervousness that hasn't abated with the years. "I arrived there and looked outthe window," he said, describing his arrival in Porto Alegre two decades ago."How could a place be so big? I didn't even know how to ask directions to theplace I was going. I was so scared, I bought another ticket and went backhome." Father Cláudio remembers that when he first visited rural homes topersuade parents to let their children join the youth groups, the teenagers,including Gessi and Didi, were quiet and shy. They had never planned demonstrations,traveled to cities, or spoken in public alone.

Gessi had no intention of speaking out loud when she and Valesca Orsi, a nunin her twenties, stood before a group of priests and asked for their support in anew project. Gessi and other young women in Sananduva had decided that thefirst step in organizing for women's rights would be to bring together womenfrom different towns. They looked to the Church, which had been their entrypoint into politics, to help them bring in others as well. When they arrived tomeet with the priests, Gessi turned to Sister Valesca and said, "you speak."

"You speak," Valesca responded. Father Cláudio opened the meeting andsaid, "Speak, Gessi." So Gessi stood and made her case, deftly describing theproject and telling the priests she was counting on them to encourage womenin their parishes to join discussions about women's rights. "Continue on withthat diplomacy," Bishop Orlando said as Gessi sat down. As she left the room,Gessi turned to Valesca and asked, "What's diplomacy?"

Rural teens gained confidence and skill through their work with liberationistpriests. But when Gessi and her peers put into practice the ability to speak,to organize, and to imagine and strive for new horizons, they found that thepriests were willing to go only so far, and that the lines they drew wereunpredictable. Though the priests encouraged demonstrations against thegovernment, some refused to stand behind the teenagers' decision to challengecorruption in the local union by running an opposition slate in upcomingelections. Gessi still doesn't know why priests withdrew support at thatmoment. One reason may have been that the unions were run by communitymembers rather than distant government officials, and the conflict was gettingtoo close to home. Another is that the priests supported the idea of accountabilitywithin the unions but opposed a grassroots, rough-and-tumble electoralcampaign as a means to promote it.

(Continues...)