1.1. Humor/Laughter help the Brazilian classes keep their composure. "Unable to revolt, they use their laughter to oppose official Brazilian racial, class, and gender ideology. Laughter reveals the fault lines in social relations" (pp. 35).
1.2. "Carnival" plays a role with laughter because it allows for the classes to laugh without feeling guilt towards the other. "The carnivalesque laughter- the black humor- may appear to the reader as just another example of bad taste...Such humor begs for some kind of analysis, an understanding that can be achieved only by knowing intimately what the lives of people in these classes look like from their own perspectives" (pp. 35).
1.3. The Black Humor helps to shade society's true feelings toward the poverty, economy, and politics. "Black humor as an emotional aesthetic emerges out of the difficult circumstances of everyday life. It is a living example of the interconnectedness between comedy, on the one hand, and suffering and tragedy, on the other" (pp. 37).
2. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2.1. Brazil loves their festivals! "New Year's celebration that takes place every year on the beaches of Rio's Zona Sul. It is a major festival, perhaps second and only to Carnival" (pp. 25).
2.2. Even through all the negativity, Brazil still is exuberant in beauty. "Despite the contradictions of class, violence, race, and gender that I later came to understand over the course of my field work, this peaceful, composite image of untroubled fellowship remains with me to this day" (pp. 26).
2.3. Brazil is exciting and becomes a different world when celebrations are in order. "The warmth and friendliness of the people, the Afro-Brazilian aspects of culture that persist, the beach culture, the exuberance and sex appeal of the yearly Carnival celebration, along with the violence and messy, exaggerated inequality that characterizes a great deal of social life have led some to comment that 'Rio is a movie trailer for Brazil'" (pp. 27).
3. Carnival
3.1. Carnival is an important celebration . "Carnival as a ritual of inversion, where the poor and marginalized- and their accompanying aethetic forms- temporarily take center stage and allow a critique of standard elite culture" (pp. 32).
3.2. It is a way for the poor to feel rich for a day. "It is a time when the world of the home and that of the street are inverted and members of the poorer classes don costumes of nobility while those in the wealthier classes parade in the streets without regard for bourgeois morality" (pp. 32).
3.3. It stands for multiple meanings for not just Brazil but for other Latin American countries as well. "Carnival' is a looking glass image through which Brazilians define themselves and by which they present themselves to the world... Carnival can ultimately serve as a conservative...not just a time of laughter and forgetting. It can also be...a time of remembering, a profoundly ambivalent and ambiguous event" (pp. 33).
3.4. It still does not change poverty in the country. "It could be argued that Carnival may well reinforce the dominant social structure simply because the inversions that take place during the week are temporary and ultimately take place only with elite approval" (pp. 34).
4. Politics and Economy
4.1. She took time throughout her education to study politics and economics of society. "As an undergraduatte student, I became absorbed in the political activism and solidarity movements of the early 1980s at Cornell University" (pp. 28).
4.2. She became passionate about the economies' politics. "I wanted another chance to get closer to the lives of people on whom the politics and economics of capitalism impringed" (pp. 28).
4.3. After learning about the politics, she shifted her research to neighboring ideas. "I decided to shift my research focus to analyzing the effects of the AIDS epidemic on low income women" (pp. 30).
5. Poverty
5.1. Poverty appeared in the scenery because of the uncleanliness and the outdated materials. "rusty Volkswagen Beetle...swarming bus terminal...heavy in-dustrial and trucking zone...endless procession of crowded busses delivering the throngs of predominantly dark-skinned service workers to their homes on the outskirts of the city" (pp. 20).
5.2. People were not wealthy at all and it would show through their cars. "two or three families owned cars...never actually saw any of these cars running or transporting people" (pp. 21).
5.3. Poverty surrounded the city but it was everyday life for Brazil. "Poverty, inequality, racism, and violence are everywhere, so pervasive that they are some-times hard to see" (pp. 27).
