Brazil told by the academic son of a truck driver

It's a short book, but with a profound and sweeping ambition. It's an intimate book, but not at all shameless, and with a militantly communal dimension. It's a raw book, but with a love and a delicacy that are moving. And it's a book that seems like a small book, but in reality, contains many books. It's titled, simply, Mine, although the Catalan edition, in a good translation by Pere Comellas, has added the following explanatory subtitle: A son's journey to his father, an intimate account that reveals Brazil's recent history.The author is José Henrique Bortoluci (Jaú, 1984), a son of a modest family—a Brazilian working class family, always on the brink of poverty—who, thanks to a brilliant academic record that allowed him to obtain all kinds of scholarships, earned his doctorate in sociology from the University of Michigan and is now a professor and writer.

Having escaped his "class destiny" has not led Bortoluci to pettily deny his origins. Quite the opposite: it has helped him rethink them in order to revalue them. At the same time, it has given him an interclass perspective—or rather, a self-consciously declassed perspective—that runs through the entire book and places him in a unique position. This hybrid identity, the fact that he grew up in a truly working-class environment but left it and now belongs to the sphere of academic progressivism, makes him aware of his privileges (he is white, a condition that in a structurally racist society is already an advantage), topics that he only knows from what he has read, as often happens to the intellectual left when they pontificate about the working class.

A Book of Mixtures and Borders, Mine It is written "between two destructions", the one that causes cancer in the body of the author's father and the one caused by the brutal policies of Jair Bolsonaro in the human, socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural fabric of the country. Thus, the book is constructed and moves between an intimate or personal narrative and a sociopolitical essay, just as it is constructed and moves between family memory and national history, between commitment and self-criticism, between fate and hope. And, also, between the author's split certainty of no longer being part of the world into which he was born and the genuine desire to recognize his value and express appreciation for the people (especially his family) who populate him and who still are, and always will be, his people. In that sense, the figure of the father is central.

A life marked by work and hardship

A truck driver by profession for fifty years, Bortoluci's father, to whom the son-author occasionally gives free rein to speak in the first person, acts as a guide for the reader through a life marked by work and economic hardship (extremely hard work, involving travel of thousands of kilometers on dangerous roads that kept him away from home for months at a time). We sometimes tend to forget, but the protagonists of this great story are also the small, anonymous men and women who make it without anyone giving them credit. Bortoluci gives them credit.

The savage repression of the dictatorship, the construction of the great Trans-Amazonian Highway, the devastation and exploitation that this monstrous maneuver of "internal colonization" entailed, the inequalities and underlying injustices that structure Brazilian society: all this is explained in a beautiful and precious way.