Araci Matos
1 min readFeb 21, 2022

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Alan, I just wished politicians in the USA weren't all millionares, billionares, whatever. Now, I don't know more about it, but this is what some students tell me . One from California, living in Portugal "political parties in my country are all sponsored by people with money, and only rich people get there whatever whatever"; then because you put that picture of that young lady, another student said "even Cortez is now a millionaire because she's a politician, why is this like that?". The same student who said this about her, then went on telling me his trips around the USA and the time when he went to Detroit and told me about how poverty in the USA looked like so much the same poverty he saw in South Africa. He said "there is a very different type of poverty that you just do not see in Europe, it is outrageous. When I was in Detroit there was this neighborhood (Flint he said? I don't know), where they were given toxic water to kids and this whole are, and everybody knew about it, but no one really cared because the water was being sent to this place". I don't know how much of what they tell me it's true or not, because usually people have a tendency to exaggerate things." What do you think of what my students told me?

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Araci Matos
Araci Matos

Written by Araci Matos

Trying to be the Portuguese Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante

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