Babylon of the Tropics

My family’s history unfolds between the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the newly-founded Republic of Brazil. My mother’s side of the family settled in Brazil after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition as marranos – Sephardim who moved through public society as Christians, yet continued to secretly practice Judaism in the privacy of their home. My father’s side of the family came from Ottoman Syria in the wake of the Assyrian Genocide, and from Egypt after WWI. 

These two threads met in an unlikely place-- the South of Brazil, a place that received a mass influx of German, Italian and Polish immigrants who were sent to Brazil throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an effort to “whiten” Brazilian society at the time. Needless to say, I was the only brown kid at my school, belonging to one of the only Jewish and Arab families in my city-- a city that was proud of its European heritage, its Bavarian and Swiss architecture, and somehow took pride in creating a little European village in the midst of a country that had one of the largest Black populations in the world. 

It almost feels like I was born tired of European aesthetics and beauty standards. Growing up, it was common to come into contact with a lot of families who sympathized with Nazism, which was hardly even publicly discouraged. I saw myself as a kid constantly suppressing the little Jewishness that was left in me. Painting, tattooing, and drawing are not only how I pay tribute to my family’s stories, but how I stand up for the place of Jewish and SWANA lives and cultures in Brazil.