At 80 years old, Ruy Antônio Barata makes his literary debut with "Esse Rio é Minha Rua" (This River is My Street), a fascinating account that reenacts almost a century of Amazonian culture and politics.
By Jotabê Medeiros

How many Brazilian families were able to welcome into their circle of friends the poets Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Stock, and Mário Faustino, the traveler Mário de Andrade, the guerrilla fighter Carlos Marighella, and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre? Who were able to experience the blossoming of life in the languor of a sunset on the green waters of the Tapajós River or from the window of a bungalow on the Rio Negro, from the splendor of riverside mansions to the cramped 70 m² studio apartment in Copacabana?

Simply by revisiting this vast array of scenarios and experiences, This River Is My Street (Paka-Tatu Publishing, 2026)The literary debut, at age 80, of the Pará-born physician Ruy Antônio Barata would already be astonishing. But, by reenacting the nearly century-long history of his family in various locations in Pará and Rio de Janeiro, the author goes much further: he recovers an unprecedented vision of the construction of national identity, rescuing an aspect almost neglected by historiography and sociology – the impact of national politics on the deep Amazon, and vice versa. There are dozens of attempted coups d'état, actual coups d'état, coups from within and coups from without, from the tenentismo movement and Getúlio Vargas to the ineffable Jarbas Passarinho and his innate vocation for authoritarianism.

This family saga, which begins at the dawn of the 20th century, captivates the reader through the intimate flavor of the narrative, the poetic pulse of the stories, the consistency of the text and visions, the profound political and social awareness, and the historical clarity. The inventory of qualities in the work of this native of Óbidos, Pará, is presented not to satisfy the trivial appetite of literary vanity, but to tell a real and dizzying story of a Pará that few have lived through, and even fewer could describe with such presence of mind.

The book spans more than half a century of the development of a regional and universal consciousness. An explanation of how the Cold War, World War II, and the political and military battles in Brazil (from Luiz Carlos Prestes, Carlos Lacerda, and Brizola) and in Latin America (from Perón to Che Guevara) influenced the social and cultural formation of Northern Brazil is the essence that emerges from the book, and which is precious for the illumination and revelation it brings. “I think that even today Pará remains an orphaned child of the Nation, to whom it gives everything and from whom it receives nothing,” writes Ruy, who was imprisoned twice during the civil-military dictatorship and beaten by his captors.

Ruy Antonio Barata, a doctor from Pará state.

The words present another Brazil, a different reality. Peraus, for example, are treacherous abysses that ambush travelers in fast-flowing rivers or mysterious banks. The survival of the grandchildren of Alarico Barata (a pioneering lawyer for political prisoners and human rights) and Noca Barata, of their only son, Ruy (and his beloved, Norma), acquires a double meaning in these peraus, these fluvial abysses: that of physical and also symbolic survival. Born in a house whose backyard had the Amazon River flowing in the background, Ruy Antônio, who has lived in São Paulo since the 1970s, revisits the history of his grandfather and father in epic progression. Ruy Barata Sr. (1920-1990), a lawyer, poet (and poor pianist), was classified as an author of the Generation of '45 by critic Benedito Nunes, and built his poetry in dialogue with the most consistent authors of his time – such as the notable Mário Faustino. A communist and political idealist, he balanced between the political disputes of his father, Alarico, who was always at odds with the authoritarianism of self-destructive regimes, and the artistic idealization of a nativist dream, a movement that would lead him to create, with Ruy Antonio's brother, Paulo André Barata (1946-2023), a large part of the foundations of modern Pará music.

Ruy Antônio Barata had his graduation speech edited by Juscelino Kubitschek, received the physicist Mário Schenberg in his living room, received an offer from Carlos Marighella to join the armed struggle, and had his medical career sabotaged by political repression. All of this happened in the Amazon, in the folds of a diverse cultural adventure unknown to most Brazilians. Political terror, censorship, exile, the consolidation of the power of the press, the mystique of exoticism, the art of football, the guitar circles, the piano teachers, the friar educators: everything that Ruy Antônio witnessed in his family life contributes to the construction of this book, a legacy that is part of what he became and that propelled him to this apotheotic literary journey.

It's all so surprising that it sometimes seems like magical realism. After all, what childhood memory would allow for such an unorthodox solution as placing a boa constrictor in the ceiling of a house at night to eat the vampire bats that live there? And what narrative from the civil-military dictatorship recalls a mother entering a communist safe house seized by the Army, in 1964, to snatch her daughter from the hands of the military and even publicly punish them? This Rio is My Street is a story that borders on the novels of García Márquez.

The political and cultural formation of Belém, the capital of Pará state, is inextricably linked to the trajectory of the Barata family. There, the Baratas exerted influence, organized resistance, fought cultural isolation, and envisioned the future. Between the beginning of the 20th century and the aftermath of the 1968 coup, the book primarily assesses a formation, a conviction, an ethical faith – that science cannot be done apart from culture, humanism, idealism, friendship, and camaraderie.

Beginning with the socio-political portrait of his grandfather, Alarico, amidst the diasporas of the rubber boom, a bitter political duel with a Jorge Amado-esque adversary, and the adventures of a semi-aristocratic court (“extractive and academic”), Ruy Barata presents us with a rich, surprising, and multicolored personal account, always interwoven with music, cinema, and the glamour of a province that once dreamed of being a metropolis. His poet father, his goalkeeper cousin, his composer brother, his banker uncle who escaped to Rio de Janeiro, his teachers, his girlfriends, his passing foreigners. His stories are like Russian matryoshka dolls, small stories that escape from within other stories, revealing new connections and new insights.

Always from a personal point of view, the saga of the Barata family, with their mannerist uncles, their mysterious grandmothers, their wayward grandchildren, their syncretic cuisine, their bedroom secrets, their combat poems, the parabolic guitar of composer Paulo André, everything becomes new and profoundly Brazilian literature. Good and bad river dolphins, bossa nova and foxtrot, anthill tests, orphaned wet nurses for a lifetime, protagonists in the ethnology of Henri Coudreau and witnesses to the dream of Fitzcarraldo by Henry Ford, Viceroy of the North and Velvet Mustache – the result that emerges from Esse rio é minha rua, at the end of its reading, is one of stupefaction and wonder. There is a Brazil that silently shaped the country we know and which we have never been given the honor of truly knowing. Diving into the deepest DNA of our ancestry reveals a history that, while so personal, is even more ours and collective than the streams concealed.

SERVICE

This River is My Street. By Ruy Antonio Barata. Paka-Tatu Publisher, 2026. 438 pages, 120 reais. National launch this Friday, the 6th, at the UFPA Bookstore, in the Mercedários Complex (Boulevard Castilhos França, s/n, Historic Center, Belém, Pará).


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