Word: miguel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Under the sponsorship of various Center members, the Center regularly supports the appearance in Cambridge of various foreign intellectuals whose message is characteristically anti-U.S., anti-capitalist, or both. The list in recent years has included Andreas Papandreou, Miguel Wionczek, Helio Jaguaribe, Celso Furtado, and many others. (Celso Furtado, just by the way, is one of those Brazilians we weren't supposed to invite). The appearance of these men is sponsored not because they are anti-U.S., but because they are scholars and intellectuals...
TROPICI opens in the brush of Northeast Brazil, where Miguel, a hired cattle herder, and his wife and children live. The owner of the herd has decided to move his cattle sough, and Miguel is now out of a job. Hearing of work in Recife, he buys passage on a truck for himself and his family, but fails to find employ there. A labor recruiter in Recife convinces him to make the long trip to Sao Paolo, again by truck. There he is hired as a construction worker on the Sao Paolo Hilton, and the films ends...
...political: the effects of foreign exploitation on a Third World nation. Amico has correctly realized that traditional narrative, no matter how portentous, is inadequate for describing a social reality that lies beneath surface story lines. Therefore he has interweaved his narrative with a conventional documentary which attempts to set Miguel's story in context, to explain in party why Miguel is unskilled, why a country so rich in resources has so little for its people. The answer lies in Brazil's history of foreign economic dominations, a history of successive one-product economies (sugar, gold, diamonds, rubber, coffee) developed...
What Tropici does best is record the landscape of foreign business domination. Once we lose Miguel, Tropici is strewn with interesting shots of the billboards that blister the countryside of Brazil, shouting "Texaco" "Ford" "Esso" at the passing cars. But this is rather small accomplishment; it's all there, as obvious as a Wheaties box. Tropici is betrayed by Amico's failure to integrate his narrative and documentary concerns, to deal with them not in isolation but in interaction. This failure gives his statement on foreign exploitation the ring of a superficial overview, rendering it less forceful, less immediate...
...script, by Tina and Lester Pine, is not much more than a revival of the old tenement texts of the '30s. When it comes apart, it is repaired by the star -and by Miguel Alejandro and Ruben Figueroa. As Popi's boys, they are not kids but brittle, wizened old men who pay for survival in the slums with bits and pieces of their most valuable possession. For, as Popi sadly illustrates, the real crime on the streets is not riots or muggings. It is the stealing of childhood from children...