Last Wednesday I participated in Rose Cafe with Andre Simores on the topic of Brazil. Simores touched topics range from geography, culture, to governance. It was interesting to me when he mentioned some of the differences between the U.S. and Brazil. In Brazil, although the universities are free, one needs to have good grades to get into those universities; and public high schools are not good enough. In other words, in order to get college education, one needs to have the financial resources to enroll in a private high school. This is very different, as in the U.S., to some extend, one needs to have financial resources to get quality education in both high school and universities. It was also interesting that for Brazilians, the most important meal of the day is lunch, when they will have rice with bean, and steak; whereas here, we have more food options at dinner. In addition, Simores also discussed the political environment in Brazil and it seems like Brazil is on the path to become more democratic country.

To be honest, I did not have much knowledge about Brazil other than key words like rain forests, soccer, Rio de Janeiro, and the Olympic Game. I wonder why my knowledge about the country, which has the fifth largest population, is so limited; meanwhile I know a lot more about developed countries, even those I have never visited. I tried to recall the textbooks I read and I don’t remember learning about Brazil in world history. The only detailed discussion on Brazil I encountered before was in the Global Cities class I took last year here in Cornell, when I had a reading talking about the aftermath of the 2016 Olympics.  I realized that there are only selected countries with significant political and economic impacts being featured in textbooks; and Brazil with the fifth largest population in the world, is not included. Therefore, it is the power dynamics behind the decision to include certain countries into the discussion of world history and to ignore others that results in my limited knowledge. And all I could do now is to make up the missing knowledge through other sources.