Campina Grande

The trip to Campina Grande on Sunday and Monday was a good one. It gave me a chance to see some of the countryside in the interior (although given the size of this country, we didn't get very far into the interior). It was a four-hour trip to the north and west over roads that were sometimes very good 4-lane divided highways and sometimes 2-lane roads full of potholes (and yes there were also 4-lane roads full of potholes). Angela knows this route very well because much of her family lives there, and she grew up on a farm near Campina Grande. (She's very good at avoiding the potholes.)

Campina Grande is in the state of Paraíba, the one just north of Pernambuco. Pernambuco is a land of sugar cane. The economic engine of colonialism and growth (and slavery) here was sugar cane, and Recife was the export center. The fields in Pernambuco are still a monoculture of sugar cane. When you cross over into Paraíba, you leave the sugar cane behind quite suddenly. There's a change of landscape, soil, and weather, and the agriculture is cattle, corn, and soybeans. Pernambuco is hilly, but Paraíba is more rugged, with stony outcroppings and low mountains.

Campina Grande is a city of 350,000 (according to the CityBrazil website), and the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande is considerably smaller than UFPE in Recife. My invitation to speak was from the graduate program in language and teaching in the Center for Humanities. Here's the web notice of my talk (I don't know how long this link will stay active). My paper was on the questions that blogging raises for genre theory, and I think it was a little too much theory—and too much English!—for some of the audience, most of whom were master's students in the language and teaching program. But there were some good questions at the end, with the translation help of a faculty member there who is fluent in both English and Portuguese, about how internet genres like the blog can be used to help students learn about the phenomena of discursive change and stablity that had been my theme.

One of the things I noted on the trip there and back was the role of the federal government here in Brazil. Road construction is done by the federal government, not the states, and the occasional traffic stop is conducted by federal police. And so is the commercial air system, which is why President Silva replaced the Minister of Defense after the recent accident in São Paulo. The public schools and the universities are run by the federal government, with national standards and procedures and bureaucratic intricacies that Angela has become all too familiar with in bringing in international guest faculty. Academic program evaluation is also done centrally, program by program, not institution by institution, with numerical ratings given for a 3-year cycle. Getting a high rating for means more travel money for faculty, more scholarships for students, and more prestige and visibility.

The best picture I got on this trip was not of the countryside or of Campina Grande but of Angela and her niece, Bianca, at lunch when we arrived. Bianca was the second person I met when I arrived in Brazil, because she had then been staying with Angela in Recife during a school holiday. She makes an excellent executive assistant for Angela, answering the cell phone in the car, remembering appointments, and back-seat driving.