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巴西的贫民窟生活

来源:英语生活 时间:2018-12-16 点击:

IN THE mid-20th century Brazil was convulsed by a flood of migration from the countryside to the city. This had happened before in other places: millions of Americans moved from the fields into the cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, creating such marvels as skyscrapers and jazz as they did so. But the scale and speed of the Brazilian migration was something new. Over the four decades covered by “Favela”, 108m people—more than half of Brazil’s population—went to town.
20世纪中期,一次农村到城市的移民潮让巴西政府措手不及。不过这也并非史无前例:19世纪和20世纪早期,成千上万的美国人离开了田地来到城市,创造了如此宏伟的摩天大楼和爵士乐。但是巴西移民的规模和速度却是前所未有的。40多年的时间里,居住在"Favelas"1亿8百万(超过了巴西总人口的一半)巴西人来到了城镇。

Many headed for Rio de Janeiro, lured by the new radio broadcasts and, later, television, which depicted the city as a sun-kissed place where everybody seemed to have a maid. Their timing turned out to be poor, though. Rio’s economic decline, and the decline in the quality of politicians who got involved in city politics, can be dated from when Brasília usurped Rio as the capital city in 1960. When the new arrivals got to Rio, often the only way to find a home was to build one out of orphaned bits of timber and masonry. And the only available land was either high up on the hills above the city, where the views are unrivalled but the risk of landslides ever-present, or low down on the flood plains.
新的电台广播以及后来的出现的电视将里约热内卢刻画成一个阳光普照女孩遍地的梦幻城市,因此吸引了很多的移民。只不过他们的时运不佳罢了。里约热内卢的经济在倒退,政治家们的质素亦每况愈下,后者可以一直追溯到1960年巴西利亚篡夺了里约热内卢的首都地位。当新的移民来到里约,找到栖身之地的唯一方法就是用小块零碎的石头和砖瓦自己动手盖。现成的地只有城市之上的山冈,虽然有无与伦比的视角,但是长期以来有山体滑坡的威胁;又或者只能把房子盖到洪水泛滥的平原地区。

Still, for a while the occupants of the favelas made the best of it, with the determination of people with the chutzpah to leave their home villages far behind (and helped by the “economic miracle” that briefly came to pass in Brazil during the third quarter of the 20th century). Talk to elderly Cariocas (as present or former residents of the city are known) about the favelas of the 1950s and they often turn misty-eyed, recalling peaceful places with the best views in the city and plenty of good live music.
尽管如此,一段时间内棚户区的居民还是勉为其难的度过了难关,他们背井离乡的决心不容小窥(20世纪中后期传入巴西的稍纵即逝的“经济奇迹”也发挥了很大作用)。和年长的里约人(现在和以前的里约人都被称作Carioca)说起上世纪50年代的棚屋,他们总会眼神迷离的回忆起那个安详的地方,那有着城市里最好的风景和许多好音乐。

The city authorities saw things differently, particularly after the military coup that snuffed out democracy for two decades in 1964. Favelas were cleared around the lagoon between Ipanema beach and the hills behind and in Leblon, now the most expensive part of town. Sometimes this was done by sending in the army, sometimes, it seems, by starting fires. The people who lived there gathered up their surviving family members and possessions and started again elsewhere, occasionally separated according to their income and ordered into government-built blocks on the edge of the city.
政府机构的想法却不尽相同,尤其是1964年军事政变后民主被消灭的二十多年里。伊帕内马海滩和山群之间的泻湖区周围、以及黎布朗周围的Favelas都被情理干净了,现在那里是城镇最贵地区。有时候,驱赶那些棚户区居民要动用军队甚至发生枪战。然后居民们集合起生还的家庭成员和剩余的财产在别处开始新的生活。间或因为他们的收入不同,被分开安排到政府在城市周边修建的房子了。

Into this sadness, in the late 1960s, came Janice Perlman, a young American sociologist and self-confessed lover of favelas. Despite arousing the government’s suspicion (in 1969 she was branded an international agent of subversion), Ms Perlman and her team completed a study of 750 people. The book that came out of this, “The Myth of Marginality” (1976), argued that far from being a cancerous growth that was harming the city, favela dwellers actually kept the place going, by doing all of the low- income jobs that a city needs to get done.
上世纪60年代末,美国社会学家珍妮丝-珀尔曼得知这种社会现状来到了巴西,她是一位公开的贫民窟热爱者。伯尔曼女士不顾引起政府的猜疑(1969年她被丑化为国际颠覆者),和她的团队完成了对750人的调查研究,1976年在此基础上出版了一本名为“边缘迷思”的书,这本书中提到,贫民窟并不是阻碍城市发展的毒瘤,相反地,贫民窟的居民包揽了城市所有低收入的工作,实际上保证了一个地区的正常运作。

Earlier this decade Ms Perlman went back and tried to track down as many of the original participants as she could, to see how they had fared. She managed to find just over 40% of the original study group, and set about working out why some had stayed poor while others had flourished, and whether the favelas were the poverty traps that they seemed to be.
本世纪初期,珀尔曼女士重返巴西试图尽可能多地找到曾经参与过调查的人员,了解他们生活的境况。她成功找到了40%的人,并且开始找原因:为什么一部分人始终贫穷而另外一部分人则成功摆脱了贫困的生活?贫民窟是否真的像人们认为的那样是贫穷的深渊?

Her findings were surprising. More than half of the original study group had moved out of the favelas, suggesting they are not the dead-end that many people suppose. In general, Ms Perlman finds far more social mobility than the reams of favela studies would suggest. Whereas education levels were the best prediction of whether someone born in a favela would make it out, hard work and good luck were also needed.
她的发现是令人吃惊的。超过半数曾经参与调查的人已经搬出贫民窟,可见他们并不是像人们预想地那样走投无路。总的来说,珀尔曼女士发现当地社会的流动性比大量贫民窟调查得出的结论要多。尽管受教育水平最能预测出身贫民窟的人能否出人头地,但是努力工作和一点点好运也是成功所必不可少的。

The main brake on human achievement in Rio’s favelas, however, is the drugs trade. Since the 1980s, when Rio became a transit point for cocaine heading to Europe, the Brazilian state has given over the monopoly of violence in these areas to drug gangs and militias. Many of Ms Perlman’s study group, their children and grandchildren, have been caught in the crossfire.
里约贫民窟发展的主要阻碍是贩毒,自80年代里约成为向欧洲贩毒的一个中转点之后,巴西政治集团就放弃了该地区的暴力垄断,由毒贩和民兵接手。许多曾经参加过珀尔曼女士研究的人,以及他们的子孙都在双方交火中被逮捕了。
 

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