"Your Village, My Village

Noopur and I headed to Kataria School, another project of the Navsarjan Trust in the Indian state of Gujarat. At Kataria school, students who are now in 5th from 8th grade received us with enthusiasm and curiosity. Six girls patiently sat in front of us and a recorder to talk about their experiences as Dalit children. After interviewing Dalit adult and teenager females, it was time for the kids. Similar tales of discrimination were told: Dalit children have to sit on the back of the classroom, cannot participate, have to clean the toilets while upper caste children play. Different answers, however, were given to us when we asked them to describe their future: while Dalit women could not conceive the possibility of a life that is independent of marriage, a life takes them to live in a single apartment, for example, Dalit teenagers painted their dream as one of social and economic independence. Dalit teenagers, however, different from Dalit children, could not believe that their dreams were likely to happen. Dalit female children dreamed about being pilots, collectors, policewomen, and teachers. The idea of marriage was refused with a unanimous chorus. The idea of any kind of discrimination based on caste and/or gender was not a naturalized one, but a reality contested with great articulation. I can not think of such mature identity-type of articulation coming from kids in my home country, Brazil.

After leaving the office for lunch and masala chai, children sang songs in English, touched us, kissed us and asked us questions. The questions for me were about my name and my village. My village, I told them, is far away. In my village there is a rainforest; there are about 200 million people; there are poor and rich; there are the ones who, as the Dalit, suffer discrimination, which is color-coded; whichprevents Black pride from flourishing; which is a cause for economic deprivation. In my village, I told them, there is a Northeastern corner where food has not arrived; where rain never comes; where schools such Kataria do not exist; where the roads do not find their way.

As I kept thinking about the remote corners of the "Brasil Sertanejo" (the in-land Northeastern Brazil) I was thinking that the sertanejo children face a similar type of social pressure, racial stereotyping, and stigmatization. If they stay where they were born, they will probably remain illiterate even if attending school in the little villages; if they migrate to the bigger cities (generally, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, or Rio de Janeiro,) they are likely to join the group of Afro-Brazilian kids who attend public schools, which, like the Indian governmental counter-parts, do not prepare kids to equally compete and succeed. These schools rather take on the national project of naturalizing hierarchy and impinging in lower-caste kids low-self
esteem and passiveness.

Like the Dalits in governmental schools, Brazilian kids will likely not learn how to ascertain their rights as "Sertanejos" or "Afro-Brazilians" or "Indians." Identity-building is certainly foreign
for the young Brazilians, especially the ones who are lost amongst extreme poverty.

The Gujarati kids who attend Kataria arrived there with clothes and slippers; they probably arrived there, however, with their sense of self torn by previous discriminatory experiences that are rather more blunt than the Brazilian ones. Caste discrimination and untouchability practices infiltrate not only the villages, but government institutions: Dalit kids in public schools are used to clean dry and wet toilets, while Dalit adults are until these days responsible for cleaning toilets in public buildings for very low-paid wages.

Brazilian kids from the Northeast ( and here I am referring specifically to the region called Sertão Nordestino) arrive to village schools without shoes, without food on their stomachs, but with a life that perhaps is marked by racial and ethnic discrimination by abandonment and by lack of identity and pride. The lives of those kids are of almost total exclusion, where no interaction with other people is available. Despite the fact, therefore, that the nature of exclusion is different, Brazilian kids – I speculate—could benefit tremendously from the same remedies conceptualized and applied by the organizations here in Gujarat. Not only food on the table is needed, but especially the building of skills, the building of a sense of self, a sense of importance and resilience.

As I head out to catch the bus with Noopur and our insightful guide Jalpa, I really felt I should go back to my village. I should go back to my village while the momentum is there. My village now struggles to implement programs for equality, it recognizes and fights discrimination. As the efforts of the village called India are still far from remedying the situation of the Dalits, NGOs' mobilization pushes the efforts towards change. The Brazil Village concentrates its efforts in the Southern population, which has been key for the incremental inclusion of Afro Brazilians. Nonetheless, Brazil's undertaking is still far from reaching all of its remote corners and entrenched problems, one of them being the abandonment of one of its peoples, the Northeasterners.

Perhaps it is time to test the replicability of empowerment initiatives successfully conceptualized and implemented by the Dalit Empowerment Center and Kataria school in Brazil. Certain regions of Brazil such as the in-land northeast have similar characteristics: high concentration of land ownership at the hands of the white upper class, institutional abandonment, and a very distinct group of people who similarly to the Dalits have suffered from targeted discrimination, stereotyping, stigmatization, economic deprivation and social exclusion. Despite of the anecdotal and rather superficial nature of this analysis, it tells us that the predicate for exclusion
of Dalits and Northeasters are close enough to justify the use of successful remedial ideas interchangeably.