---

RED WING, Minnesota — It was not difficult feeling at home in Minnesota. When I first told my friends in Brazil that I was going to spend four months in the United States, they all asked me where I was going to live.

“Well,” I answered, “most of the time I’ll be in Minnesota.” “Where is that?” was the unanimous reaction.

In Brazil, everybody knows where Florida, New York and California are placed on the map, but most people have never heard about Minnesota. I myself knew very little about it.

Now, being here for a month, I can tell that Minnesota and Brazil have more in common than many Minnesotans and Brazilians can imagine. One particular part of Brazil, the southern area, is very similar to Minnesota in many aspects. I’ll try to explain in a few lines some facts that make me think that way.

I live in Porto Alegre, a city of 1.3 million inhabitants, capital of the state called Rio Grande do Sul. It’s the coldest region in Brazil — the temperature in winter can reach the 30s, which is pretty cold for a tropical country.

Rio Grande do Sul is very different from the rest of Brazil. As it is in Minnesota, the population there is mostly white with origins in Europe. The majority of the people in the other Brazilian regions descend from Indians, Africans and Europeans.

In the middle 1800s, Southern Brazil attracted a lot of immigrants form Germany, Italy, Poland, Ukraine and other European countries who joined the Portuguese people already settled in Rio Grande do Sul. They were seeking good lands to build their farms and a climate more similar to the one they had in the old continent. Because of that, nowadays Rio Grande do Sul has its economy based in a high-tech agribusiness producing wheat, soy, beef and leather, among others.

The European roots aren’t forgotten there as they aren’t here. In some small Brazilian cities it’s still possible to hear people talking in old dialects of German and Italian.

Oktoberfest is celebrated every year. Grape, cheese and strawberry festivals, for example, are big hits and aren’t much different from the Minnesota festivals. On the weekends people go from the big cities to the countryside to enjoy the festivities.

The Minnesota landscape sometimes reminds me of my homeland. If I took a picture of the prairies here, in the summer, and showed it to my friends, they would probably think it was from the Pampas, a region of our state. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have so many beautiful and abundant lakes, but we have hills, valleys, canyons and beaches.

Considering what I have seen so far of the United States, and what I have heard from the people here, I dare to say Rio Grande do Sul is to the rest of Brazil as Minnesota is to the rest of the United States.

The Brazilian state has the best quality of life in the country, the smallest index of illiteracy and one of the highest levels of culture and education. Among the Brazilian metropolitan cities, Porto Alegre was cited as the one with the best level of human development in a recent UN report.

Last week I wrote about these similarities between the two states in a story for the daily newspaper at which I work in Brazil. I thought my readers should know that they have something in common with some Americans. I might be wrong in my observations, of course. But even if I am, I’m sure that right now at least a few Brazilians know where Minnesota is. And I guess I won’t hear “Where is that?” again when I go home.