Five years ago, Maria Júlia Coutinho arrived in Rio de Janeiro carrying baggage common to those who, like her, come from São Paulo: the understanding that a carioca's "let's set a date for me to come over" doesn't always become reality. What she didn't expect was for the city to dismantle that stereotype with so much affection. Five years later, she gives her name to a library based at CEAP (Centro de Articulação de Populações Marginalizadas), in the Saúde neighborhood.
"I'm 47 years old and have lived five in Rio. I've had more cultural gatherings, music and saraus in my home than in 44 years in São Paulo," she says, still a bit surprised. For Maju, it's a willingness people have for real encounters. Whether on the street, in bookstores, in the park, at the beach or in a community library.
The city revealed itself to her in layers, many of them tied to the Black history that Rio holds onto — and that Maju actively seeks out. Madureira was the first big surprise, seeing Parque do Madureira and realizing that everything fit there at once: the little Charme corner, sertanejo, people from all over coexisting without the noises clashing. Then came Realengo, an hour away by car, which was worth every minute. And Pequena África, which she visits with growing emotion, especially Casa Savana, where she feels something hard to put into words: "I'm home."
The phrase gained even more layers when she discovered that she lived in the region where the Quilombo do Leblon once stood. "I'm just returning to a place that was mine," she says, without drama, like someone stating something the body already knew.
The scenery also helps someone who came from a car-centric metropolis turn into a committed walker. "I always look at a landscape and I'm dazzled, thinking it's beautiful," she says. She fondly asks the cariocas: do you feel that too? The answer, almost always, is yes. Here, being dazzled doesn't embarrass anyone.
But Maju's Rio begins before she moved here in the wake of the pandemic. It begins in a taxi, in Laranjeiras, when she was about five or six years old and came with her mother to visit her godmother. The red balloon ("a bexiga," as they say in São Paulo) that she was holding slipped out through the open window. The taxi driver stopped the car in the middle of traffic, got out, went to get the balloon, and came back with it in his hand. "When would a guy in São Paulo ever stop to get a kid's balloon?" To this day, that scene carries everything she feels about the carioca temperament.
Daughter of two teachers — João Raimundo, a servant of the Portuguese language who, about to turn 82 years old, is now a member of the Academia de Letras, Ciências e Artes da AFPESP (Associação dos Funcionários Públicos do Estado de São Paulo), and Zilma, a public-school educator and retired coordinator for the Prefeitura de São Paulo —, Maju grew up in a household where education was the most essential value.
Her mother, the daughter of a domestic worker, was the first woman in the family to attend university (USP). Her father, the son of a humble craftsman, retired from a public school after a lifetime dedicated to teaching. It is from this legacy that the symbolic weight of having a library named after her in Pequena África comes -- a territory of memory, a place where reading is an act of resistance. "This puts us in another place," she reflects. "We're always seen as talented in soccer, in samba. But here another key opens up, another possibility."
Her bedside books reveal the trajectory of a voracious reader: Canção para Ninar Menino Grande, by Conceição Evaristo; the writings of Beatriz Nascimento, a Sergipe native who lived in Rio and was murdered; and All About Love, by bell hooks, which she read late, but with the intensity of someone who arrived at just the right time. "It took me a while to pick it up, but now I'm in love with it."
The journalist who learned the profession in the TV studio, picking up the microphone for the first time, and who proved herself a true journalist by anchoring the Brumadinho tragedy live for hours on end, found in Rio something that news coverage doesn't teach. The lightness of belonging. And that includes carnival. In 2022, Maju, alongside Alex Escobar, hosted the broadcast of the Special Group samba schools' parades. It's a role that puts her at the center of one of Brazil's — and Rio's — biggest cultural rituals. But she admits that, at first, she was nervous: "If you've been through Rio's carnival, you can get through anything."
