Carolina Maria de Jesus

Finals week are finally over and you can expect  for me to be posting more frequently. This semester I had the pleasure of having a class on Latin America, we covered the history of Latin America, since the European colonization in the 1500's until today. With the guidance of my teachers I was presented to many new ideas, but most importantly, to many important historical figures that helped shaping Latin America or that were a representation of what the population was going trough. Today I'll be writing about Carolina Maria de Jesus. Her writings are important because they represented the situation which many people were going through in South America during the 1940's, specially in Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

Carolina was a Brazilian women born in 1915 in Minas Gerais, she had a poor childhood, she lived in a rural area and her parents were sharecroppers, her father was married to another women so Carolina was raised by her mother alone. Her mother died in 1937 and Carolina end up moving to the city of Sao Paulo (something that was common at that time, with urbanization happening a lot of people were leaving the rural area and going to the cities), but Carolina didn't have enough money to buy a house so she joined the masses that were just building their own houses out of plywood, cardboard and bricks when affordable, (that was how the favelas started in Brazil, the masses coming from the rural areas and the cities didn't have a structure good enough to accommodate all the people).

At some point Carolina had children and her way of sustaining herself and her family was by collecting paper and selling to make any possible profit. Even though Carolina lived on the favelas she was different from her neighbors, she was truly one of a kind, when  little she learned how to read and write and she made use of that, she would save some of the paper that she would collect and everyday she would spend hours writing a diary. In this diary Carolina would describe her life and everyday happenings of the favela, she would criticize her neighbors way of living, saying that many would succumb to drugs, alcohol, violence and robbery, while she was a very hard working women. She also had many dreams and her writings were very poetic, something extremely unusual for someone that lived in the favelas and practically had no education.

After some time her writings came to the notice of the journalist Audalio Dantas that publicized her diary in 1960 under the name The Garbage Place ( O quarto de desepejo), the book became the most successful book in Brazillian publishing history and it was translated into 13 languages, being a best seller in the US and in Europe as well, under the name Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus.

The book was such a success because Carolina writings represent what thousands of people in Latin America were going through at the time, and her book was the only way of the rest of the world to learn about the life in the favelas.