Ironbound January - February 1972

 Myself on the left and Kuwenderson Walk on the right.

Since I arrived in Newark, N.J. on 2nd October 1971, and established myself in the Ironbound, more precisely on Wilson Avenue corner with Barbara Street I had a different set of Brazilian friends. Rodrigo who was actually Portuguese, was my very first friend, who turned out to be a room-mate as well. Soon after, I made acquaintances with three Mineiros - young men from Minas Gerais - who shared the room next to ours.

I met countless young Brazilians at Tia Eugênia's news-agency, or at a Brazilian coffee shop-cum-restaurant on the same side as Tia's shop on Ferry St. where there was a juke-box and I heard both Joan Baez's 'The night the drove Old Dixie down' and John Lennon's 'Imagine' for the first time ever. I found it funny how easily one made friends with Brazilians in Newark. People one wouldn't even bother to have a second look at in Brazil became instant friends in an American city. The simple fact of being from the same country made us all potential friends. I thought that was positive in a way.

After living in Newark for some weeks I realized there were 4 different groups of Brazilians: Mineiros, Paulistas, Paraenses and 'others'. Among Paulistas there were 2 sub-groups: young men from Guarulhos and another lot from Franco da Rocha, a small city near Jundiaí-SP. 

Kuwenderson was a Brazilian young man from Bahia who was utterly different from everyone else. He had been a college student in Salvador and was highly politicized. He was into left-wing politics and I could not understand how on earth he was living in the USA, the Mecca of capitalism. Actually he was in the US because he had two brothers already established in the New York area who had helped him find jobs and accomodation. Kuwenderson was partially deaf so he had an extra burden in understanding the English language. He could read English all right but he hardly understood the spoken language which made him irritable most of the time.

He was nice but very judgemental. When I most needed a few dollars he would not lend me any because he thought I had been irresponsible in having left my job and gone away to California. That irked me a lot but I couldn't do much about it. I could not annoy the very few friends I still had left. He would buy me a meal or two until the money my Dad sent me arrived.

I learned to appreciate Richard Wagner's music with Kuwenderson. He would play 'Thannhäuser' overture and go into an ecstasy! It became one of my favourite classical pieces too.

It was through Kuwenderson that I heard of Violeta Parra for the first time. Actually, he was living in Santigado, Chile when President Allende was overthrown and murdered on 11 September 1973. Nine-Eleven didn't start in 2001 in NYC but 28 years before in South America.

This was the vynil album Kuwenderson would play constantly.

Kuwenderson lived at Sing Sing too, I mean the Prudential Apartments on Fleming Avenue. So I started hanging around that tenement in the summer of '72. As I was out of work I had a lot of free time on my hands so I met a lot of Brazilian fellows who lived in the neighbourhood. As soon as I got my work back I started sharing an apartment at Sing Sing with Nagib Luiz, a Brazilian fellow of Arab extraction I met at the record factory. Nagib and Guto shared the living room of an apartment rented by Nagib's cousin Leila, her husband and a baby. So, I finally was living at the infamous Sing Sing after all.