#MemoryMonday - a glimpse into Brazilian history: Milton Santos (1926 - 2001) | Black History Month
Hello, fellow humans! Here’s my (very late, sorry) Memory Monday of this month! This month I took a surprisingly larger amount of responsibilities than usual so I hadn’t really been able to make time to write this section of the blog. Because of the delay, March’s Memory Monday will be two weeks from now instead of next week. Now off we go with this scholarly black Brazilian icon named Milton Santos!
Milton Santos, Brazil’s most important geographer and one of the world’s most important ones as well, was born in 1926 in the state of Bahia. Moving from small cities to the next until he settled on the state’s capital, Salvador, he was alphabetized by his parents and learned French and algebra. At age 8, he had already completed the equivalent of an elementary school education. At age 10, he joined the Bahian Teaching Institution boarding school, where he took an interest in geography and, quite the prodigy, became a math teacher at 13 and a geography teacher at 15. He entered law undergraduation when he was 18 and graduated at 23, but never exercised the profession. Nonetheless, he became a left-wing activist and journalist in his college years, already penning a book about cocoa focusing on geomorphology and climate elements. He was eventually invited for PhD in France in the Université de Strasbourg, completing it in two years and creating a geography lab when he returned to Brazil. He remained prolific in scholarly, journalistic, and activist fields, and even worked for both federal (in 1961) and state governments - in the latter job (1963), he addressed regional planning and economic policy.
However, both jobs were short lived, for the country’s Military Coup in 1964 overthrew the civilian elected government and replaced it with a military regime. Right after the coup, he was arrested due to his left-wing leanings. In a few months he left for a hospital after the beginning of a stroke, and French diplomats were able to negotiate his departure from Brazil. He left for the Toulouse-Le Mirail University, where he received his first of his twenty Honoris Causa PhDs. The six months Milton thought he was staying abroad became 13 years, during which he got married, had a son, moved to Canada and the USA, and worked with prominent cognitive and language scientist Noam Chomsky. He worked in the University Of Toronto, the MIT, the UN, the OAS, the ILO, among others. Milton, during this time, began his research on urbanization processes in “third world” cities. His work was characterized by the questioning of the neopositivist hegemony in geography of the time, proposing instead a science that is critical and permeated by sociological aspects. He became a staunch critic of the way globalization was happening, in service of multinational corporations that don’t often have the best interests of countries and peoples at heart, and also of capitalism and its tendency to concentrate wealth and increase inequality. Milton introduced new concepts of ‘space’, ‘center x periphery’, ‘landscape’, circuits of urban economy, derived spaces, among others.
Santos returned from his exile in 1976, sparking the beginning of huge structural changes in the teaching and the research of geography. He continued to write books and teached in many universities, tutoring many researchers who further contributed to the field. Among his 40 books and 300 scholarly articles, are geography worldwide classics such as For A New Geography, The Divided Space, For Another Globalization, The Nature Of Space, etc. Milton also wrote books specifically as science communication to the Brazilian people. In 1994, he received the Vautrin Lud Prize, considered the Nobel of Geography - the only latin american to receive it.
He died of cancer in 2001. One of his students said about him: “Milton became more than a geographer, he became a thinker in Brazil. His work underlies a libertarian perspective for humanity. That is why Milton Santos was brilliant.” Film-maker Silvio Tendler said “My surprise was meeting one of the most brilliant men in my life. Everything he did was with a very ironic, sarcastic smile. He was at the same time very hard and very sweet, able to speak the hardest things in the world with a smile on his lips. He envisions today's picture. The boats turning in the Mediterranean with people coming from Africa, from the Arab countries, from all cultures and people suffering in these wars caused by the capital. Capital only promotes hunger and misery. It does not share wealth, it only concentrates it.” Their claims are surely backed up by 9 prizes and 20 PhDs Honoris Causa Milton Salton received. His name even became the name of a prize given to people who contribute to the improvement and growth of superior education in Brazil. He also stamped a Google Doodle in his anniversary of receiving the Vautrin Lud Prize. The legacy of a black boy from a small town in an often dismissed state, who also didn’t shy from addressing racism and his personal experiences with discrimination, is so wide the world has not been able to fully absorb it yet.
Sources: x, x, x, x, x, x
