The First Family is in Rio

The First Family accompanied the President on his economic goodwill tour - now up, Rio.


US President Barack Obama (L), First Lady Michelle (back-R), and their daughters Malia (R) and Sasha (back-L) descend from the presidential airplane as they arrive in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 19, 2011. Obama arrived in Brazil Saturday, calling for bolstering economic ties between the United States and Latin America to open new markets and create more jobs.
---- VANDERLEI ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images

The President and First Family visited the CITY OF GOD area in Rio.



 


U.S. President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Sasha (L) and Malia tour the Christ the Redeemer Statue on Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro late March 20, 2011.
-----REUTERS/Jason Reed




US President Barack Obama (C) is greeted by members of protocol after descending from the presidential airplane with his family as they arrive in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 19, 2011. Obama arrived in Brazil Saturday, calling for bolstering economic ties between the United States and Latin America to open new markets and create more jobs. ----VANDERLEI ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images










President Barack Obama gestures to the audience after giving a speech at the Municipal Theater in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 20, 2011. Obama arrived in Brazil on Saturday for the start of a three-country, five-day tour of Latin America.
----AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano


Neighborhood residents cheer for US President Barack Obama as he plays soccer with children during a visit to Ciudad de Dues Favela in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, March 20, 2011. Obama will address Brazilian people in a speech Sunday hailing the country's global prominence and the importance of bilateral trade.
---- JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images


Army soldiers in an armoured vehicle leave the Cidade de Deus (City of God) slum after the visit by U.S President Barack Obamain Rio de Janeiro March 20, 2011. Obama is on the first leg of a three-country tour of Latin America. ---REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes



Neighborhood residents cheer for US President Barack Obama as he visits Ciudad de Dues Favela in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, March 20, 2011. Obama will address Brazilian people in a speech Sunday hailing the country's global prominence and the importance of bilateral trade.
---- JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images






US President Barack Obama (C) steps into the street to wave to neighborhood residents while visiting Ciudad de Dues Favela in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, March 20, 2011. Obama will address Brazilian people in a speech Sunday hailing the country's global prominence and the importance of bilateral trade.
----JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images




A resident walks past an armoured personnel carrier in Cidade de Deus (City of God) where U.S President Barack Obama is expected to visit in Rio de Janeiro March 20, 2011. Obama is on the first leg of a three-country tour of Latin America. ----REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes


Boys gather in Cidade de Deus (City of God) slum streets where U.S President Barack Obama is expected to visit in Rio de Janeiro March 20, 2011.Obama is on the first leg of a three-country tour of Latin America. ----REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes


U.S. President Barack Obama (L), first lady Michelle Obama and their daughter Malia (R) watch a performance by children during their visit to the Ciudad de Deus Favela neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro March 20, 2011.
----REUTERS/Jason Reed


First Lady Michelle Obama (C) talks with her daughter's Sasha (R) and Malia (2nd R) as US President Barack Obama (2nd L) talks with the audience during a cultural performance while visiting Ciudad de Dues Favela in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, March 20, 2011. Obama will address Brazilian people in a speech Sunday hailing the country's global prominence and the importance of bilateral trade.
----JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images


U.S. President Barack Obama kicks a soccer ball with children during his visit to the Ciudad de Deus Favela neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, March 20, 2011.
----REUTERS/Jason Reed


US President Barack Obama (C) plays soccer with some children while visiting Ciudad de Dues Favela in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, March 20, 2011. Obama will address Brazilian people in a speech Sunday hailing the country's global prominence and the importance of bilateral trade.
----JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images




U.S. President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama watch a Capoeira Brazilian martial arts performance during their tour the Ciudad de Deus Favela neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, March 20, 2011. ----REUTERS/Jason Reed








First Lady Michelle Obama, left, talks to her daughters Malia, center, and Sasha, right, during their tour Ciudad de Deus Favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 20, 2011.
---AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais


US President Barack Obama (R) turns to have his picture taken by a child as he watches a cultural performance while visiting Ciudad de Dues Favela in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, March 20, 2011. ----JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images




U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama and her mother Marian Robinson (2nd L) are pictured with Michelle Obama's daughters Malia (L) and Sasha during their tour of the Ciudad de Deus Favela neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, March 20, 2011.
----REUTERS/Jason Reed


U.S. President Barack Obama (L), First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Malia (2nd R) and Sasha watch a drum and martial arts performance by children during their tour of the Ciudad de Deus Favela neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro March 20, 2011.
----REUTERS/Jason Reed


U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama smiles at her daughters Sasha (R) and Malia, alongside U.S. President Barack Obama, during their visit to the Ciudad de Deus Favela neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, March 20, 2011. ----REUTERS/Jason Reed


U.S. President Barack Obama (back rear), First Lady Michelle Obama (4th R) and their daughters Malia (2nd R) and Sasha (3rd R) pose with children who played street soccer with them during their tour of the Ciudad de Deus Favela neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, March 20, 2011.
----REUTERS/Jason Reed


U.S. President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, their daughters Sasha (L) and Malia tour the Christ the Redeemer Statue on Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro late March 20, 2011. ----REUTERS/Jason Reed


U.S. President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Malia (2nd L) and Sasha (R) tour Christ the Redeemer Statue on Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro late March 20, 2011.
-----REUTERS/Jason Reed

What Exactly is Latin America?

Joel Wolfe

After a lecture I gave to my Modern Latin America survey, a student asked me how Haiti could be considered Latin America given it had been a French colony. This is a great question, but it was also a little annoying, because one of the themes I use to organize the survey is whether or not it makes sense to consider the region a region.

One point I make on the first day of class is that there is no right or wrong answer to that question. There are very strong arguments both for and against seeing Latin America as a unified whole.

Looking at the region as everything in the Western Hemisphere south of the United States can be very useful. The vast majority of the nations in this area share a common Iberian heritage. Most of them are predominantly Catholic, have large mixed race populations, and have had complex and often contested relations with the U.S.—the hemisphere’s dominant power—for more than a century. And, on many significant levels, these nations tend to see themselves as having a shared history. Sure, Haiti’s French roots complicate things (along with Jamaica’s and Belize’s ties to Great Britain), but even those countries tend to have more in common historically with the other nations of the region than not.

We can also find a great deal that differentiates one country from another, however. In the colonial era (ca. 1500-1820), Mexico City loomed as one of the world’s great cities, but the villages that became some of the great cities of the present (Buenos Aires and São Paulo, for example) were tiny backwaters. Today, life in Buenos Aires or São Paulo is more consonant with that in Barcelona or even Chicago than with that in the villages of highlands Guatemala or Bolivia or any number of other places in Latin America. It isn’t just a matter of the physical geography of these cities versus rural spaces. Many of the region’s largest cities exude a modern ethos and Western orientation. Such identities are often absent or at least contested in other, particularly rural, Latin American spaces.

This tension about Latin America’s coherence as a concept or even region has fueled more than just the ways I organize some of my classes; it has also shaped my scholarship. My first book is a study of the rise of Brazil’s industrial working class in the city of São Paulo. After writing my doctoral thesis and then revising it for publication, I realized that one of my study’s limits was São Paulo’s uniqueness. It is simultaneously the largest metropolitan area in the entire southern hemisphere and Latin America’s largest industrial complex, and yet in many ways it is atypical of Brazil. Within its own country, São Paulo (the city and the state), with its modernist ethos, large immigrant populations, devotion to both advanced agricultural and industrial production, is both unique and dominant. In other words, you can’t rationally analyze Brazil without reference to São Paulo, but you would be wrong to see Brazil through Paulista (a resident of the state) eyes.

I tried to address this issue in my new book on automobility in Brazil. Autos and Progress is a study of Brazil’s struggle to integrate the massive, often disconnected, and regionally diverse nation through the use of technology (cars, trucks, and buses). In many ways, the embrace of the technological fix by Brazilians was a Paulista idea, although autos and automobility had and have broad appeal throughout the country. The tensions among Brazilian regional identities and the very real (you can’t say “concrete” when you write about cars and road building!) struggles to physically, socially, and economically unify the nation became a central theme for the book and have become part of how I organize my History of Brazil class.

In other words, there is a great deal of utility in asking whether or not it makes sense to think of Latin America (or Brazil or Mexico, for example) as a unified whole. Thinking about what we gain and what we lose when we either split or lump regions and sub-regions in our teaching and scholarship can not only help our students make sense of a lot of complex history, it can also clarify key aspects of our research agendas.

Learning from the History We Don’t Study

Joel Wolfe

Today's post on what we can learn from other fields comes from Joel Wolfe, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wolfe "studies the impact of modernity, industrialism, and trade on Latin American societies and their politics. His primary focus is modern Brazil. He is the author most recently of Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford 2010). He also published Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil's Industrial Working Class, 1900-1955 (Duke 1993). His articles have appeared in the Latin American Research Review, Hispanic American Historical, Radical History Review, Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Revista Brasileira de História. He is at present working on a book tentatively titled, '100 Years of Trade in Latin America.'"

And now for something completely different. . . .

To those of us of a certain age, hearing those words meant we were about to see something absurdly funny. This isn’t so much funny as it is completely different from what’s been on this blog. Unlike most of the folks who post here, I’m a historian of Latin America. What exactly constitutes “Latin America” will be the topic of a future post, but only if people like this one.

What interests me today is our collective ignorance about the things we don’t study. I recently read Gordon Wood’s magisterial Empire of Liberty, and I had to balance the awe in which I hold Wood’s work with my panicked sense of ignorance about key aspects of American history. How deep is my ignorance? I’m just now starting Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought and I have James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom on the shelf in the “on deck circle.”

A friend and colleague expressed a similar sort of ignorance about the country that I study. She told me she had recently seen a map of South America and was truly stunned by Brazil’s enormousness. I agreed. It is big. She continued to express her extreme surprise, her complete perplexidade. So, I did something only a historian would do. I sent her a map. It shows that every country of Europe fits comfortably within Brazil’s borders. (Click to enlarge.) Neat, huh?

Brazil’s great size is important for a lot of reasons that should interest U.S. historians. Brazil, for example, has been expansionist at the expense of many of its neighbors. Indeed, Brazilians are comfortable with some aspects of U.S. notions of manifest destiny because they see themselves in a similar light. Brazil is literally the opposite of Mexico, the region’s second largest and second most populous nation, in this regard because Mexican history has been marked by invasion and annexation that led to the loss of more than half its territory to the United States.

Latin America’s geography has shaped these nations in ways much more significant than their relationship to the United States. Mexican history has long involved attempts by the center (Mexico City) to gain control over the periphery, including the northern states in the nineteenth century, Yucatán in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Chiapas more recently. Brazil, on the other hand, has been trying to move off the coast to know, claim, and control its interior spaces. The 1960 opening of Brasília, its modernist capital in the interior, is only the most obvious manifestation of a history that includes wars against far-away millenarian communities (Canudos and the Contestado) and endless schemes to control the vast Amazon from an ill-fated attempt to build a telegraph line through the jungle to Fordlândia and Belterra (Henry Ford’s modernist interventions in the jungle) to doomed settlement schemes advanced by the nation’s military dictators in the 1970s and 80s.

We can never know everything in our own fields, let alone even the basics of others. Returning to some of the activities that drew so many of us into history as children, such as playing with globes and studying maps, can help us begin to know other countries and fields. Maps are great tools for thinking about a country’s size, what region or regions it helps constitute, and how it relates to other parts of the globe. Thinking about maps, space, and place should remind us of how geography is central in history and it can help us start to bring our disparate fields a little closer together.

Jabulani

The word, in Zulu, means rejoice.

But, in Brazil, few folks could tell you that.

If you say Jabulani around here, people think  football.

More specifically, the football, the one being used in the FIFA World Cup.

And they think crap.

Time was, that the Cup was played-out with balls that had no name, and were brown, like the one above. That changed in 1970, when the event was broadcast live, on television, for the first time.

A ball was required that would be clearly visible in black and white, and Adidas, the German manufacturer, was asked to make one.

They came up with a design that most of us are familiar with today, a sphere with 32 panels, white for visibility, and black to help players detect swerve when the ball is in flight.

Enter the Telstar, named after a communications satellite to which it bore a distant resemblance.

The Telstar was a great success. So much so, that Adidas got the contract to supply World Cup balls ever after. (Or through 2014, at any rate.)

But they didn’t rest on their laurels.

No, they kept on tinkering with the product.

Every new ball got a new name, the Tango, the Azteca, the Tricolore, to name just a few.

And now, God help us, we have the Jubulani.

And devoutly wish we hadn’t.

Because this paragon of the ball maker’s art responds to kicks in an entirely new way.

Former Liverpool player Craig Johnston believes the "erratic, wild and unpredictable" nature of the Jabulani is "contributing to a much poorer World Cup".

England’s coach, Fabio Capello claims  it’s the worst ball he’s ever seen.

 Júlio César, Brazil’s goalkeeper, called it “as unpredictable as one of those cheap balls you’d buy in a supermarket.”

And striker Lúis Fabiano referred to its radical changes of direction as "supernatural".

In the midst of the ruckus, and responding to the complaints, two Brazilian scientists got their hands on a Jabulani and dragged it off for tests in a wind tunnel at the University of São Paulo.

Here’s what they discovered:

The Jabulani has more wind resistance, and therefore loses velocity faster, than any of its predecessors.

But that’s not the major problem.

The major problem is that, at slow speeds, the Jabulani moves through the air pretty much like any other football.

But at speeds above seventy km/h, the direction of motion begins to become erratic.

And becomes more erratic as the speed increases.

How fast is a kick when a striker is shooting at the goal?

Sometimes as much as 140km/h.

See, now, why so many players and coaches are concerned?

And their concerns are mounting.

Games, from here on in, could be decided by penalty kick shootouts.

And how’s that going to work if neither the shooter, nor the goalie, can be sure of the direction that will be taken by the ball?

The FIFA has, at least, acknowledged that there’s a problem.

After the conclusion of the Cup, they’ve agreed to discuss the matter with coaches, teams and Adidas.

Meantime, everyone is just going to have to live with it.

A footnote: the Brazilian experience prompted scientists at Caltech to test the ball on the 23^rd of June. Their results confirm what everyone else has been saying about the Jabulani.

Check it out here:

http://thesoccerroom.com/?p=11968?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Caltech%3A+Jubilani+is+counterintuitive

 Leighton - Monday