““1960s—enshrined the Northeast as the most representative example of Brazil’s problems with hunger, poverty, subdevelopment, alienation, and despair. Accepting without question the spatial existence of the Northeast, these “leftist” works ultimately reinforced a series of images and enunciations of the region that had emerged through the discourse of the droughts by the end of the nineteenth century. They combined the idea of the Northeast as victim, as a place of ruin (product of droughts), with the idea of the Northeast as poor and wretched (product of entrenched oligarchies), adding to the mixture a jarring dose of stern Marxist topicality and aestheticized realism””
![“I gave up trying to establish where progress lay, and where revolution, or to see the plot -- as Amparo's [Brazilian] comrades expressed it -- of capitalism. How could I continue to think like a European once I learned that the hopes of the far left were kept alive by a Nordeste bishop suspected…” quote by Umberto Eco](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/1c2/umberto-eco-313_beauty_i-gave-up-trying-to-establish-where-prog_807144.jpg)
