Not Americans but Armenians

There was a slight misprint in my letter about immigrants of May 29, 1996. It is not the Americans who make footwear, but the Armenians. We do have American immigrants though. All of them from the South.

Our Americans ran away from the carpetbaggers. Carpetbaggers were Northern entrepreneurs, educators and missionaries who came to rebuild the states of the Confederacy after the American Civil War. Some thought they could help the black population, others were interested only in making a quick profit. (Sounds as though they were like today's development aid bureaucrats).

The descendants of the Confederates still fly the stars and bars on Thanksgiving Day in Americana, the town they founded in Brazil. Their contribution to us is a red-haired woman called Rita Lee, our greatest rock star. She descends from the family of a general who gave the Yankees a hard time some 130 years ago.

OSVALDO COELHO

Bandung, West Java