Tico-Tico Leaves Fubá

In 1941, Cecília Meireles wrote: ‘Portugal é, para o Brasil, o amoroso passado; os Estados Unidos estão sendo uma espécie de sedutor presente. Mas o Brasil é o futuro’ [Portugal is Brazil’s old romantic past; the United States is becoming its seductive present. But Brazil is the future]. 1 As part of a newspaper article published in A manhã , Meireles cautiously warned against flirting with ‘the American way.’ For Meireles, it could only turn out to be a short-lived love affair. When we think of Cecília Meireles, we do not often associate her with critical narratives which explore inter/dependent relations between the United States and Brazil. Yet Meireles was not only a poet but also a prolific cultural critic. During the 1930s and 40s Meireles published articles in the Diário de notícias and A manhã on the ways that the United States seemed to be changing Brazil, on topics ranging from using washing machines to making public policy decisions. In light of globalization and post-colonial debates, Meireles provides a variety of critical approaches for understanding the cultural transformations that have influenced Latin America as a whole, and as Roberto Schwarz reminds us, to realize that there is something ‘lacking’ — signs, people, discourses which have yet to be heard. 2 Certain perspectives seem to be absent in these debates and only with a bit of discursive distancing and metacriticism, like the ‘olhar irónico’ found in the detached texts by Machado de Assis, are we able to recognize the many marginalized or ‘localized’ voices still hidden or left behind.