Lembranças a Todos: Gilberto Freyre’s Early Impressions of the United States as Conveyed to His Family Members

This paper explores Gilberto Freyre’s academic years as a student in the United States, focusing on his time as a foreign student at Baylor University, and the financial and personal obstacles he faced upon arrival.  It also traces his first impressions of US culture by examining the letters exchanged between Freyre and his family members, alongside other personal correspondence, from 1918-1920.  Freyre is recognized for his role in changing the image of Brazil abroad, propagating the notion of a racially harmonious nation.  Yet he was once an eighteen-year-old Brazilian student in Waco, Texas, forced to redefine his own identity and that of the country he left behind.  The present work will show how young Gilberto’s experiences in the US South helped shape his understanding of race relations in Brazil, and Latin America as a whole, and fueled his need to reconfigure the way Brazilians saw themselves.

Gilberto Freyre’s youth in the United States played a critical role in his development as a writer and thinker, not only through the guidance of his professors at Baylor and other intellectuals but, more important, through a growing sense of foreignness and a longing for his homeland.  In his personal correspondence we observe a young man determined to justify the value of Portuguese as a language, and of Brazil as a country worth studying.  Scholars have studied Freyre in light of the influence of his North American and European academic training on his intellectual work.  Instead, this presentation seeks to decolonize the scholarship and humanize Freyre by focusing on the discovery and maintenance of his Latin American/Brazilian identity while living abroad as conveyed to in letters to those he trusted and missed the most: his family.