Bernard Weil/Toronto Star

If you’re looking for Brazilians, just follow the sound of the drums. Or the woman carrying the big green parakeet as casually as if she were carrying a cell phone. Sure enough, the bird lady is headed to the second annual Samba on Dundas festival last Sunday (Aug. 17), hosted by the Dundas West Business Improvement Area, an organization that’s only two years old itself.

Brazilians love to wear the colours of their national flag and the festival’s two cramped locations — a blocked-off chunk of Gladstone and the parking lot in front of Bento’s garage — are full of bright yellow outfits trimmed with green. Throughout the afternoon Lula Lounge regulars Samba Squad and Batucada Carioca pound out samba beats as dancers dressed in carnival-styled headdresses and tiny bikinis wiggled their butts.

The rhythms continue as Capoiera dancers duck and dodge each other’s gravity-resistant limbs in moves that were developed by African slaves as a form of entertainment and self defence. In front of the Du West Art Centre, kids are doing origami inspired by Tropicalia, a late 1960s cultural movement that formed a kind of resistance to Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted until 1985.

“Our slogan is ‘Du West: Where the music is,’ and Brazilian music is very exciting,” says BIA chair Sylvia Fernandez, explaining the samba idea. “We want to do something like Salsa on St. Clair.”

Little Portugal starts at Bathurst and continues west along Dundas, trickling out as it approaches Lansdowne. To the untrained eye, it all still seems very old-school Portuguese. Or, I should say, to the untrained ear. Because if you listen closely, you hear more and more of the slower, rounder Brazilian take on the language, a world away from the sharp “sshhzz” of Toronto’s traditional Azores-inflected dialect. As Toronto’s Portuguese community ages and moves to the burbs, their downtown shoes are being filled by their more colourful linguistic cousins.

“The two cultures, they’re so totally different,” laughs Jame Buecke, who is from the Brazilian state of Minais Gerais. She can’t believe I have to ask. “Brazilians are so much more relaxed. We like to have fun. The Portuguese not as much.” Looking around the neighbourhood on this festive Sunday, many of the Portuguese butchers and grocery shops are closed, though you can readily buy a Rio-styled bikini bathing suit.

Statistics tell only part of the picture. The 2006 Census gives the total number of Toronto immigrants born in Brazil as 6,135. Of those, 2,060 arrived between 2001 and 2006. Brazil account for 0.3 percent of Toronto’s immigrants, far fewer than the top countries — India, China, Italy and the Philippines — and fewer than even Granada, Bulgaria and Mexico. Portuguese-born immigrants number 76,300, though the number of Portuguese descendants living in Ontario is considered to be about 250,000.

But those are the official numbers and officiality doesn’t really suit the Brazilian mindset. Many of the Brazilians living in Toronto come as students and visitors and often find not-so-official ways to stay. It makes sense that they end up in Little Portugal, where the locals speak the same language. Portuguese businesses, now in their second and third generations, can also offer work, particularly the construction companies that will overlook a missing Social Insurance Number if you can swing a hammer.

 

But where they overlap in work, there’s not so much overlap in play. Toronto’s Portuguese culture is the conservative product of that first 1950s wave that fled the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar. It’s about keeping to yourself and not attracting attention. Brazil, a country best known for its hedonistic carnival celebrations, is much brasher. When a Toronto AIDS education worker I know tries to place condoms in Dundas’ Portuguese bars, he gets resistance: why would we want those? When he goes into Brazilian bars, the staff make sure they’re free, then ask for more.

“I like Brazilian music very much,” says Bento Jose, the Portuguese garage owner hosting part of the Samba festival. He stands off to the side of the party and watches. “One of my older brothers lived and died there. Brazil is very nice. But their language is not 100 per cent Portuguese. It’s mixed. It’s a mixed country.” Yes, even the language that connects them divides them.

“Another difference,” says Rodrigo Carvalho, a student who hails from São Paulo, “is Brazilian girls are more beautiful.” Then he looks around and points out a few to prove his point.

Brazilians don’t yet outnumber Toronto’s Portuguese. But with their propensity to go out, party and take up space, it can feel like they do.

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