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The Brazil of the imagination is shattered in Samba Dreamers, a novel of two Brazilians in America who wrestle with the myths of movies, politics, and the American Dream. José Francisco Verguerio Silva, fleeing the brutal Brazilian dictatorship, arrives at Los Angeles International Airport and decides he will be Americanized at all costs. He gets a job driving a bus for a Hollywood tour bus company, gets married and fathers twins, yet the Dream remains elusive as he wrestles with flashbacks of his prison torture. His relationship with Rosea Socorro Katz, the crazed daughter of Hollywood’s Brazilian star Carmen Socorro, proves to be more harrowing and dangerous than what he bargained for. With his life in shambles, Joe realizes that the American Dream, just like the Brazilian dictatorship, was built on lies. Joe returns to Rio de Janeiro to face the demons he fled, but Rosea, drowning in the dream of the Brazil of her mother and the Amazon utopia that never was, throws herself in the ocean. The frame story of the Portuguese explorers pursuing the mythical Amazon warriors echoes in the modern conflict. In both the frame story and in the novel, the new arrivals want to capitulate to the new culture, yet want to withdraw to the values they’ve always known. The fantastical tales of strange birds and tempting fruit give way to the cannibal ritual which enticed and terrorized the European imagination. In the same way, American freedom and the myth of unbridled opportunity can also consume and destroy. Fans of immigrant fiction will recognize some of the common struggles: adjusting to the culture, the language, the racism. Yet the book offers a look into the less well-known Brazilian community which thrives alongside other Latino cultures. Many of these immigrants wrestle with the memory of their exotic yet cruel homeland, and become involved in obsessive and fragile human relationships. For those unlucky ones, the myths of American opportunity become almost sinister, and the abandoned homeland once again, becomes bittersweet. In Samba Dreamers, readers will be able to see not only the personal struggle as offered in fiction, but how historical and cultural forces shape our desires. |