The Good Ol’ Boys of Brazil
08.12.156:00 PM ET
Every April, the Fraternidade Descendencia Americana gather in the south of Brazil to celebrate a strange and incongruous shared history. “Stonewall Jackson’s Way” is piped out of speakers, chicken is fried, and girls in hoop skirts dance to old Dixie tunes. Men in Rebel-gray uniforms with yellow trim browse dozens of stands of Confederate memorabilia. The Confederatos, as they’re known, are the descendants of Americans who fled after losing the Civil War ...
In the years after 1865, a wave of Southerners fled the newly unified United States and made their way down the continent in a vast diaspora. Between 3,000 and 10,000 Southerners are thought to have settled from Mexico to Brazil. Newspaper ads promised land to those who knew how to farm; Venezuela offered up the area of Guyana; Mexico gave free passage and 640 acres per newcomer; and Brazil greeted its arrivals coming off 30-day voyages at sea with huge festivals and land for pennies ...
A particularly vivid account of the community at its most insulated came from a reporter who arrived in the 1970s and was amazed by the time-warped cadence of the Deep South that hit his ears. “What I was hearing didn’t sound like it came from someone of this generation, even of this century,” Stephen Bloom wrote in a remembrance last year ...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/12/the-brazilian-town-that-loves-the-confederate-flag.html
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