A Commemorative Speech

Kristin Bollig

One of my amazing students from fall 2006, Kristin had a class in which she needed to do a speech on someone she admired. What follows is a short speech she gave about Mev.

In 1964, the military takeover of the country of Brazil inspired men and women to rejoice in the streets. But soon after, these same men and women faced the oppression of a military government, a government that used torture and mass executions to squash rebellions. Even the Catholic Church was not completely safe from the military dictatorship that plagued much of South America. The military government in Brazil lasted 20 years, and the current civilian government is still recovering from those violent and bloody decades.

It was against this backdrop of turmoil and oppression that liberation theology was born, a type of theology that seeks to bring about a kingdom of God that “takes root in the soil of human community, equality and dignity,” that declares a preferential option for the poor and a God that lifts up those at the lowest levels of society. And it was against this backdrop in Brazil in 1977 that a very unlikely liberation theologian was born. She was not a nun. She was not a scholar. She was not even Brazilian, but she was a woman who saw the face of God in the poverty she witnessed during a vacation with her parents to Rio de Janeiro at the age of 14. Her name is Mev Puleo, and her message of liberation theology is as simple as the face of a child.

Mev was born to a middle class family in St. Louis, and she attended undergrad here at SLU. Even before college, she knew she loved photography; her father, Peter, was a photographer himself, and both of her parents encouraged her to develop her talent with the camera. Soon after school, Mev found her path in life leading her back down south to the poverty she witnessed on that vacation just a few years before. Camera in hand, she made several trips to Brazil and many other countries in Central and South America. There, she set about filling rolls and rolls of film with pictures like the one behind me that reveal the close proximity of poverty to our own lives and beliefs. This particular photograph, taken by Mev in Sao Paulo, Brazil, illustrates this striking proximity as a street child slumbers just feet away from privileged students like ourselves. It is images like this that made Mev’s photos so powerful; she was able to share with the world the scenes that would have otherwise been lost in the turmoil of injustices in Brazil and other struggling nations. Mev shared the truth so that we might see and know and continue to spread her message on to others.

On the trips that Mev made to Brazil and other nations, she set about not only giving a face to the oppressed, but also giving them a voice by interviewing them and publishing these interviews. PWPT VA She compiled her interviews with 16 individuals in Brazil along with many photographs in her book The Struggle is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation, which was published in 1994. This book is influential in the area of liberation theology because it was written to show that the poor are children of God, and they deserve the same humanity that the rest of the world has. In it, Mev offers her hopes for the book:

“Through images, narratives, and interviews, this book seeks to give a face and a voice to this new way of being a church, to the silenced and the outspoken, to the privileged and the impoverished…For holistic liberation, the struggle must reach both the individual and the societal, it must embrace the personal and the political.”

The Struggle is One follows the fight for liberation in Brazil through the work of 16 men and women, some famous and some not. By combining these interviews with photographs, Mev shared with the entire world what the kingdom of God looks like and how the men and women in Brazil are struggling to bring about this kingdom. Some of the photographs in her book are scenes that contrast privilege with poverty, but many are pictures of her interviewees, like the woman in the picture here. These simple pictures connect us to the most basic form of humanity: a person in need, a person struggling.

Unfortunately, Mev’s work was cut short in 1996 when this spectacular woman died of cancer. She spent her entire life working to give a face and a voice to the oppressed of our world, and there are hundreds, maybe thousands of undeveloped photos and un-translated interviews that Mev did not have time to share with us. But what we do have, we must cherish, for Mev’s final months were spent voiceless. On the day that Mev’s tumor took away her speech, she passed the struggle on to us that we may hear her voice in others. For we are all one, and we all struggle. As Mev pleaded in her book, “Hear in [the words of the oppressed] the echo of your own struggles and desires. And see in their faces a reflection of your own.”