Memory of Dictatorship

ABSTRACT: Among my earliest memories from my childhood in Brazil in the 1970s is staying in my uncle's bedroom at my grandparents' condo. Every year, we visited them in Belo Horizonte for the Christmas holidays. In that bedroom, I could see my uncle's clothes hanging in the closet, the papers on his desk, and the works of political and sociological theory on the shelves. Even before I could read, I loved looking at those books with strange covers, so different from the ones at home. But I never met my uncle. Carlos Alberto Soares de Freitas, my father's baby brother, vanished in 1971 at the age of thirty-one—a victim of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 until 1985.