Six years ago I traveled to Rio de Janeiro for the first time to witness the ‘biggest party in the world’: Brazilian Carnaval. Technically a celebration of the beginning of Lent, but in reality a nationwide celebration of life, Carnaval is a week-long Macy’s Day Parade on LSD. It’s unbridled pageantry and sexual carnage with a backdrop of lush jungle, granite mountains and the beach that makes Mardi Gras look like a covered wagon train. There was glitter in every orifice of my body for six months after and I met my future husband at a street party. To say I had a good time would be an understatement. It was the least ‘American’ experience I’d ever had and I was needing an escape.

One month before I’d landed in Brazil, Donald Trump was sworn in as president, women around the world took to the streets and the USA was looking down the barrel at four years of dark uncertainty. Carnaval was a delicious respite; not a religious celebration but a ‘my data plan doesn’t work down here’ bonanza; the perfect antidote to Puritanical America in the middle of February. Little did I know that the nationalist fervor that had just taken the US by surprise was also bubbling in Brazil.

Fast forward two years and Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing military man who wanted to bring back the ‘good old days’ of the US sponsored dictatorship. His casual statements about women’s rights, homosexuality and the lives of indigenous peoples sounded like an unfiltered parrot on captain Trumps shoulder. For two years the presidencies overlapped, and for two years I was astonished at the similarities. One day Trump was lifting protections on the Tongass National Forest, the next day Bolsonaro was cheering on illegal loggers and miners in the Amazon. The two strongmen were pro-business at any cost, never met an anti-vaccination conspiracy theory they didn’t love and were eager to unite against the international community. They both preemptively called fraud on elections that pollsters had them losing, both cheered on angry mobs of supporters who stormed their respective capitals and both went to sulk in Florida when their attempted coups didn’t go their way.

        After being cancelled due to Covid in 2021, and postponed due to the Omicron surge in 2022, Brazil held it’s first ‘normal’ Carnaval this year, and I made sure to be there. The samba was back, as were the street parties, bedazzled g-strings and feather headdresses. But above the posters advertising block parties and Sambadrome tickets, stuck to the taxi stations and hung from apartment windows were political signs for the two candidates who had faced off only a few months before in an election just as bitter as our own in 2020. 

Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, had beaten Bolsonaro and was sworn in as president of Brazil, again. A left wing activist, Lula’s first term had seen unprecedented numbers of impoverished people, of which Brazil has plenty, enter the middle class. He also slowed deforestation in the Amazon, shown respect for indigenous peoples and oversaw an economic boom. At one point he’d cracked eighty-percent approval. Lula had also been caught up in a confusing scandal and sent to prison, from which he had been released and exonerated as innocent.

During my second trip to Rio I realized I hadn’t left America at all. Yes there was singing, dancing and straight men in rainbow tutus, but there were also gated communities full of white people in expensive cars a stones throw from sprawling favelas, (illegally built low-income neighborhoods) mostly populated by descendants of formerly enslaved people. Everywhere I looked was in-your-face religion, from back and arm tattoos of religious iconography to the 98 foot tall statue of Jesus that was visible from almost every part of the city. Brazilians are fiercely proud of their country, for good reason, but at some moments seem obsessively focused inward, perhaps a result of being a Portuguese speaking island on a Spanish speaking continent. All of these ingredients existed before, I’d just never looked at them through clean lenses.

        Brazil is like our overly confident and outgoing cousin; we wish we were more like her but we’re also glad we don’t live with her. But we can’t forget we’re related. Even calling yourself an ‘American’ in many parts of Latin America will garner a side-eye and a friendly reminder that everyone from this hemisphere is ‘American’. We are all in this wacky experiment of democracy and cultural mixing together and we have a responsibility to make sure we don’t all fall back into fascism. 

In my attempt to escape America I inadvertently found another version of it. And in my attempt to escape reality with Carnaval I found that the rest of the world was already there. We as Americans, both north and south, want togetherness, we want to dance with strangers or kiss them in the street if the mood strikes, and we want open expression of creativity. Why do these ideals struggle to translate beyond the Sambadrome?