Tired of being called “crazy” when she says she wants to return to Brazil, after three years working as a nanny in the United States, Larissa Brum (@bocarosax_), 28, decided to write a thread on Twitter, which went viral. Her purpose was to propose a debate: the real USA vs. the USA as idealized by some Brazilians.
The sequence of posts narrates the good aspects, but especially the bad ones, of being a Brazilian indigenous woman, LGBT and of poor origin, living and working in the North American country.
In an interview with the blog, she tells a little about her experiences and explains the reservations she made to the country on the social network, such as racism, lack of labor rights, insecurity due to weapons and difficulty in accessing health services.
Shortly after graduating from law, Larissa managed to save money from an internship and, with an uncle’s loan, entered the exchange program to work as an au pair in San Diego, California. Making the exchange was an old desire, but until then it was not “part of the reality” of his family.
Larissa had no illusions before leaving for the US, “she no longer had an adolescent mindset”, but she says she embraced the opportunity to improve her English and qualify. There, she works since 2019 taking care of a couple’s children.
If, on the one hand, the dollar salary and purchasing power open doors, on the other, Larissa points out, life as an immigrant worker there is far from the “Disney vision”, as she describes it, that many Brazilians still have of the country. Even for those who are there legally, your case.
“As a woman and LGBT, I feel very safe here. [na Califórnia]. I live in a place that every LGBT dreams of living, close to a neighborhood with the most queer possible. But the color of my skin is a problem, there’s no way to ignore it”, he says, stating that racism seems to him intrinsic to American culture, and stresses: “Even in a more open state, like California.”
Right at the beginning of her stay, at the height of summer, when the grandmother of the children she is responsible for helped her to adapt, Larissa had a day off and went to enjoy the pool at her “hosts” condominium, as the families receiving exchange students.
Two neighbors did not like her presence and, aloud, began to wonder who that girl was: “So far so good.” Larissa was about to get up and, in a good-neighborly gesture, she intended to introduce herself. Until she heard: “She’s not a resident, with her skin so dark she wouldn’t be able to live here”.
“That broke me,” he says. “At that moment I was sure I was going to return to Brazil”. The neighbor approached her and began to question how Larissa had “invaded” the condominium. As she explained, she concluded, “I will never fit in here.”
“The icing on the cake of my grief was when I came home and the children’s grandmother from Tennessee, one of those most troubled states,” on hearing Larissa’s account, said, “I knew this was going to happen.”
Born in the city of Miguel Pereira, in the interior of Rio de Janeiro, Larissa had never experienced racial prejudice in Brazil. “I was in a bubble of standards in Brazil, I’m not a fat person, I don’t have dark skin, my hair is straight, so it’s socially accepted.”
“Many Brazilians think it’s okay to be treated this way because they have an iPhone in their pocket and a car in the garage,” he says, and that was one of the aspects he wanted to question in his posts.
She recognizes all the perks and privileges of earning in dollars and remembers how impressed she was when, with a week of her babysitting salary, she was able to pay cash for an iPhone 11 the week it was launched — something she could never have done in Brazil. “I come from a very financially deprived family, I wasn’t raised with privileges. Here was the first time I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can buy it!'”.
But the precariousness of work, despite the purchasing power that even underemployment guarantees, is for her the reality of foreigners in the USA.
“Purchasing power is one of the things that brings this romanticization, because the Brazilian unfortunately does not have this reality”, ponders and tells the story of a friend, also Brazilian, graduated in engineering, but who prefers to continue working as a nanny in the USA.
With the money she earned in the US, Larissa renovated her mother’s house, a dream she had, and bought an apartment. “It was the dollar that allowed me to do that, I’m fully aware. But I have to be realistic: I’m 28 years old, I don’t have a pension either here or in Brazil. But I want to get married, I want to have children, and I can’t do that in the US.” Putting it in the balance, she’s decided it’s time to go back.
About the thread, he says: “I wasn’t comparing Brazil to the USA, I compare the unreal USA of Brazilians’ heads with the real USA. It’s past time for people to understand what this ‘American way of life’ is”, he says. .
And, in the same way that he went to California without illusions, he also doesn’t romanticize Brazil, to which he returns at the end of 2022. “My girlfriend already tells me: you’re going to go crazy in the market”.
