How America’s most controversial legacy became a Brazilian festival

A dirt road, surrounded by crops, under an unforgiving sun. A hot and heavy wind, carrying dust, indicates that the day will be scorching. This setting would be at home in a Wild West movie, but this is no tale of sheriffs and outlaws. This is about long journeys, connections and, above all, narratives, and their endless versions.

At the end of the dusty road, in the town of Santa Bárbara d’Oeste in the São Paulo countryside, there is a place filled with history itself. The Cemitério do Campo—or “American Cemetery” as it is known to the local people—has been guarding the remains of American immigrants for more than 150 years and now is a testimony of a story little known by both Americans and Brazilians.

After losing the American Civil War (1861-1865), the 11 Confederate States in the south were left devastated. The battle opposed northern and southern views, tearing the U.S. apart in many points: they warred over choosing between an economic model focused on agriculture or one based on industry, the states’ right to leave the Union as they please and, finally, whether slavery should be abolished.

Trying to rebuild their lives, people from almost all Confederate states came to several areas in Brazil, particularly an agricultural belt in the countryside of São Paulo, establishing the foundations of the modern towns of Santa Bárbara d’Oeste and Americana (literally, “American,” in Portuguese).

Among them was Colonel Asa T. Oliver. After his wife, Beatrice, died of the tuberculosis she caught on her trip to Brazil, Catholic priests did not allow her, a Protestant, to be buried in the church’s ground. Colonel Oliver had no choice but to dig her a grave on his own land. A few months later, she was joined by a neighbor’s two-year-old son and the couple’s daughters. And this is how the American—or Confederate—community got his own cemetery in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste.

Nowadays, the place is a peaceful oasis amid a sugarcane crop, guarded by the shadow of trees that makes the...