Brazil: Moving Targets

摘要

In the 1960s ubiquitous street urchins in Brazil were referred to with a blend of annoyance and affection as moleques, meaning ragamuffins, scamps, or rascals. Moleques were streetwise, cute, and cunning, sometimes sexually precocious, and invariably economically enterprising. The moleque was an amusing enough popular stereotype that an ice cream bar, chocolate- covered and flaked with "dirty" bits of coconut and almonds, was later named the pe de moleque, "ragamuffin's foot." Moleques tried to make themselves useful in myriad ways, some bordering on the criminal and deviant. Think of Fagin's boys in Dickens's Oliver Twist, especially the Artful Dodger, and you have it. Shoppers would slap their heads in exasperation when a nameless scamp they had hired to carry home a market basket on his head made off with their watch in the quick final transaction.