Happy Birthday, Érica Malunginho!
Source: Alesp via Creative Commons BY (photographer unidentified) <https://www.al.sp.gov.br/deputado/?matricula=300625>
Today is the 41st birthday of the incredible Érica Malunguinho, who took office in 2019 as the first trans woman to serve in the São Paulo state assembly. Below is the conclusion of my translation of the article “The Woman Who Birthed an Urban Quilombo” about her in Trip magazine. (Read the first part and second part from last year before continuing!)
The place breathes art. Spread out around the space there’s a painting of black mothers, a piece that alludes to the orixás, drums, black dolls, antique furniture, lamps, a jewelry box. There are so many items that trigger affective memories, especially the yellowing photos of the space’s founder’s family.
To hear Erica talk about the Aparelha Luzia is to revisit the black intellectual Lélia Gonzales, who wrote about the historic racial division of spaces in Brazilian society and how places of power are destined for white people and marginalized spaces are for black people. The Aparelha Luzia is a black space, guided by cultural resistance and by the politics of negritude. “The Aparelha takes that black magic out of the pejorative into its proper place, which is life,” as she defines it, recalling Sérgio Vaz, who cites great black names from music, politics, and literature in one of his poems as legitimate practitioners of that “black magic.”
In the cultural center there’s a kitchen with a menu developed and executed by chef Cícera Alves. Artisinal drinks and beers are served, like Guerrilheira [female warrior] beer, produced and grounded in the feminist and racial fight. “Here we try to break with that history of servitude that so persecutes us. Thus, after eating and drinking, people take their plates, silverware, and cups up to the counter,” Erica explains. The urban quilombo is kept going by a black team: Malu Avelar, Marcia Izzo, Alessandra Souza, Juliana Santos (Lilica), Fernanda Alves and Julio Cesar Ribeiro, Valéria Alves and Julia Souto.
Erica personally curates all the house events. That makes it possible to present “decolonizing narratives,” as she herself says. Moreover, black protagonism is the central point. “It’s important that a large part of the construction of language be generated by black women and men. From creation to presentation of the work,” she says. There are more than 20 events per month. Audiences vary according to the activity, but there’s an increasing number of captivated attendees who see the right refuge in the Aparelha Luzia. “We get about 3 to 4 thousand people per month,” Erica calculates.
The name “Aparelha Luzia” is a mixture of homages and references. To the so-called “aparelho” [apparatus, gadget, device] spaces, where those who fought against the military regime gathered to think and resist the dictatorship of the 60s and 70s; to all those who since the beginning are helping the founder to keep the place going and to transform it into a space of black conviviality; to Luzia, the first Brazilian, the oldest fossil found in the Americas, specifically in Minas Gerais, with black features and dated to 12 thousand years ago - which would prove the possibility that people of African origin already existed in Brazil even before the traffic that sustained slavery.
“Moreover, there’s the Luzias Quilombo, and all the metaphors that exist because it contains the word luz [light] and luzir [shine], Erica finishes. “It’s the result of a black historicity long before me, which goes back to the black Muslim Malês, the Teatro Experimental do Negro [an experimental theater company of the 1940s and 1950s], the recent Black Occupation of FUNARTE [the Brazilian National Foundation of the Arts], the Palmares quilombo, the Unified Black Movement, the maracatus... I believe that the feeling that makes us feel so good here has to do with our memories and ancestrality.”
The Barra Funda region where the Aparelha Luzia is located is the cradle of São Paulo samba and of black cultural effervescence. In earlier decades, important figures such as the writer Oswaldo de Camargo and the poet Solano Trindade lived in the area, which at the beginning of the 19th century was one of the areas of greatest concentration of black people in the city. “We recently had a visit from Mr. Xavier, a musician who in the 40s was a resident of the building next to the Aparelha. He was moved upon entering the space and told us his experience in the neighborhood, until he was driven out of there by real estate speculation,” Erica says. It is common for those visiting the location to hear her state that being there is “a process of reintegration of ownership for black women and men.”
Erica says that it’s not uncommon for white people to be surprised upon coming face to face with a black territory, where we’re not seen for our vulnerability, but rather the opposite, with self esteem and awareness of our identity. “Everyone is welcome, but white and non-black people have to negotiate their presence in here, because some unwary people try to reproduce racist behavior.”
For the white people who call themselves partners in the space, Erica warns that they need to start “producing anti-racist practices”: “Nobody is anti-racist because they samba, eat feijoada, or go to the Aparelha, we are talking about institutional racism."
The Aparelha Luzia is like a quilombo due to the number of black bodies, but mainly because it is a place of freedom and sociability that offers striking and pedagogical encounters. It’s a black space that is working so that one day all places can be like that.