The recent events for which Rio de Janeiro made headlines across the world show the dangers of dividing a society between a few haves and many have not’s, and of neglecting those in most urgent need of government services. It made us remember the obvious yet long ignored necessity to integrate, through accessible and quality education, children and adolescents of our Marvelous City.
For a complete version of this article, please visit The Rio Times.
Enrico Miguel Thomas, 39, is popularly known to New Yorkers as the “Subway Map Artist of NYC.” His studio: the city’s subway cars, platforms and train stations. His tools: an easel, every existing Sharpie in the color spectrum, acrylic paint, MTA subway maps, and endless determination. Thomas can be spotted at Union Square or by the 72nd street station meticulously recreating cityscapes as perspective drawings and transforming subway maps into masterpieces.
When I arrive at Thomas’ Red Hook, Brooklyn studio he is waiting by the elevator wearing a New York Yankees hat and a friendly smile. He takes me down long labyrinthine corridors to room 90, where the walls are colored with some of his favorite pieces and a framed New York Times article, in which he is featured.
“Art mimics life,” he says, explaining how drawing on subway maps turns one man’s trash into another man’s treasure. With expressive eyes and a calm, clear voice, Thomas has survived by doing just that. “It is like turning your life around,” he adds.
Art is more than a breadwinner for Enrico Miguel Thomas, it is an escape from a world that has left him physically and emotionally scarred. At the hands of his biological father, Thomas was driven into a coma with burns on more than 60 percent of his body when he was only three years old. Three facial reconstructive surgeries followed, leaving scars covering his scalp and running down either sides of his face. “A bit self-conscious” of the marks of abuse, Thomas is rarely seen without his Yankees hat.
“Art provides a therapeutic refuge so that the world essentially disappears—because my father is still in this world and my body that was severely injured is still in this world. But when I am doing my work, my body seems to disappear and my spirit comes out, and that is what is doing the drawing. So I don’t care how I look to others or what happened to me. [Art] is absolutely wonderful and powerful, and it has never failed me.”
Desperate to “make it to the big city” and escape a Staten Island home “run in a military fashion” – his mother remarried, and his stepfather was strict – Thomas ended up at Covenant House, a young-adult shelter on Manhattan’s West 17th street. “Finally,” he says, “I was completely free.”
“[Covenant House] didn’t feel like a shelter,” he recalls. “They had rules and requirements, but they created an atmosphere that helped [me] thrive and embrace [myself] as who I was. This was completely non-existent in the home I grew up in.”
Thomas never turned back, and claims to feel more at home than ever. “There is a logo that says ‘the spirit of NYC,’ and it’s true, … whether it’s the firefighters from 9/11, the police officers, the commuters in the subway or its entertainers. The spirit associated with NY is contagious and you become inspired simply by living here.”
He says there is no solitude in the city’s subway art world. “It is a vast world below. There are a lot of artists down there, all with big dreams of making it. When you see them, either as a commuter or as a fellow artist, you don’t feel so alone.”
With few exceptions, New Yorkers have welcomed Thomas’ work. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without the support given to me by the city’s population,” he admits. “Even little kids are inspired by my work, intrigued and amazed by it. So many people have bought my pieces. This means so much to me, [knowing] that my art is hanging on someone’s wall and that they see that piece every day.”
Thomas realized early on that the best way to attract potential buyers was by working instead of sitting and wondering when someone would purchase his work. “That is not the energy I want to emanate,” he claims. “When you are engaged in your work, it becomes contagious. When people see that you love what you are doing, it is so attractive that they will approach you, ask you questions and even want to purchase something.”
Thomas believes his duty as an artist is to communicate the state of our world, to show that adversity can be turned on its head and conquered. “I have come from really nothing,” he says, “from being in a coma with tubes connected to me so that I could breathe, to being a Pratt Institute graduate, to being featured in the New York Times. This is all because I never gave up. I fought so hard and I never took no for an answer.”
A conqueror of life’s hardships, Thomas refers to himself as the Rocky Balboa of the New York City art world: “You take the punches, you are all pummeled, but you keep on going.”
This article was published by Columbia University's Communique.
Shock. Disbelief. Fear. Insecurity. Adrenaline. Tension. Anger. Frustration. My Cidade Maravilhosa is under siege. Tracked armored tanks, M113 personnel carriers, hundreds of camouflage-painted soldiers and black-clad police officers flocked the streets of Rio de Janeiro this week. Bullets and low-flying police helicopters buzzed the clear blue sky as security forces battled against heavily armed youths.
For a complete version of this article, please visit The Rio Times.
Passengers of American Airlines flight 256, departing from Rio de Janeiro’s Antonio Carlos Jobim (GIG) Terminal 1, to New York’s John F. Kennedy (JFK), were lucky to make their 11:30PM flight on November 20. The same was probably true for passengers of British Airways 248, Aerolineas Argentinas 1257 and American Airlines 904.
For a complete version of this article, please visit The Rio Times.
Development advocates at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank claim corruption is a pervasive evil in most emerging economies – both a cause and consequence of poverty – in urgent need of eradication. Some may blame its existence on poverty, immorality, or even culture. Here are some news: regardless of its origins, corruption isn’t unique to the “developing” world and although nobody is keen to admit, the practice cannot and, arguably, should not be annihilated.
Transparency International (TI), the “global civil society organization leading the fight against corruption” which recently launched the 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, claims to challenge “the inevitability of corruption, and offer hope to its victims.” The ideal is noble and evokes other grand Plans, like the call to end world poverty, which, after over US$2.3 trillion devoted to the cause in recent decades, remains far from being achieved.
Critics say corruption is one of the main obstacles to much needed progress around the world. Can this assertion be universalized? Take the case of Brazil. Outgoing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party (PT) – built on a reputation of clean government – has been involved in repeated corruption scandals since da Silva took office in 2003. Amongst the most notorious is the 2005 Mensalão (“big monthly payment”), involving allegations that prominent PT members, including former Chief of Staff José Dirceu, orchestrated a scheme to pay congressmen monthly allowances of around US$17.5 thousand to secure votes for legislation.
While half of congressional deputies were kicked out as a result of Supreme Court indictments and investigations in 2007, over a dozen individuals involved in the affair remain in the legislature. Although the party fiercely denies any link to the president in this and other corruption scandals, it is hard for any well-educated and well-informed individual to believe da Silva ignored what was going on under his nose.
It is no secret to Brazilians or international observers that corruption is endemic in the country. The world’s eighth largest economy, Brazil received a score of 3.7 on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (highly clean) in this year’s Corruption Perceptions Index, placing it at 69 out of 178 countries ranked from least to most corrupt. Unsurprisingly, nearly three quarters of countries studied scored below 5.
Critics claim corruption produces devastating impacts on men, women and children. And yet, Brazil’s internationally admired pro-poor policies for which da Silva is frequently praised (think Bolsa Família, which provides financial aid to families on condition that children attend school and are vaccinated), helped lift around 10% of the population out of poverty and increase primary school enrollment to above 95%. The PT’s economic policies ensured Brazil was one of the last countries to enter and first ones to leave the global recession, and are pushing the country towards becoming the world’s fifth largest economy by 2020. Who can soundly argue Brazil is fairing badly?
Transparency International purports to want to raise awareness about the practice and diminish apathy and tolerance of corruption. The organization’s bottom line: “corruption hurts everyone”. While rhetorically powerful, the statement is factually inaccurate. It is a pervasively and openly corrupt administration that propelled nearly 20 million Brazilians into the market economy. Politicians definitely did not suffer in the process, and the people seem to be very content with increased, albeit limited, benefits.
On October 31, 55.7 million voters elected Dilma Rousseff, da Silva’s handpicked successor, to become the country’s first female leader. Elections came in the midst of allegations that Rousseff’s “right hand woman”, former Chief of Staff Erenice Guerra, was implicated in a corruption scheme involving contracts to favor her son’s consulting firm and that prominent PT members had broken banking secrecy laws of members of the opposition Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB). Even so, da Silva’s “chosen one” easily won and he is set to leave the presidency with above 80% approval ratings.
Anyone familiar with Brazil knows of the popular jeitinho brasileiro (“Brazilian way”), roughly described as the “art of working things out” and often involving monetary transactions. This is true for the young boy guarding your car on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to the president of the Workers’ Party sitting in Brasília.
The country slipped from 124th to 127th place in this year’s World Bank “Doing Business” report, which assesses factors like the easiness of opening, running and closing firms around the world. If you don’t have an ally in the government, all you have to do to bypass painfully slow bureaucracies, is hire a despachante, a middleman who gets official documents pushed through “suspiciously quickly”.
You can object to the abhorrent convention, but if you do not know how to swindle, it is unlikely you will get anything done in Latin America’s giant. Reality is, you cannot eliminate an integral part of a well-functioning machine, especially one that is being successful at moving a country of continental proportions forward.
Claiming to fight for eradicating corruption might fulfill moral aspirations for a more equal and just world. But when it comes to realities on the ground, priorities quickly shift. Maybe the problem isn’t with corruption as a practice in itself, but with politicians who live out it while denying their people’s most basic needs. So the real lesson may be that, if you do it, just make sure you do it well, and the world may very well allow you to slide by.
Please note this article was written as an exercise on arguing for a view WHICH I DO NOT HOLD. In other words, defending the abhorrent practice of corruption.
