THE NEW AMERICANS : AMERICA: A CONFLICT OF IMAGES AND REALITIES : MARCELO FILARDI, from Rio de Janiero

Whether through natural cataclysm, pestilence or genocide, the chronicle of history is rife with human dislocation. The Old World offered its uprooted the daunting spectre of the unknown. The new still offers America.

At 18, Dan Nadler of Romania is quietly flourishing in the heady atmosphere of free speech and other discoveries in his government and civics classes at El Rancho High School in Santa Fe Springs, and sensing as well the subtle distance his education is creating between himself and his parents, who still feel the grim constraint of Iron Curtain memories.

Marcelo Filardi, a 25-year-old Brazilian musician, is amazed at how eagerly American pop musicians jump at the chance to make a buck and re-tool their talents to the latest commercial blueprint; he claims that comparable musicians in Brazil are disdainful of get-rich-quick motives--or at least their outward show.

They are two of a number of people interviewed by Calendar who have come to the United States within the past two years and therefore still live in the anxious interregnum between two worlds--the old, with its ancestral universe of landscape, family and friends and the restorative moods of place, and the hard and fast new, whose unfamiliarity is redeemed by the promise of the future.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 625,000 immigrants showed up at our borders in 1986--at least that’s the number who registered themselves. Some came to make money or to get an education. Some got out the back door when a new dictator’s police force came through the front with guns blazing. Some left dead-ended economies, some sifted out of refugee camps.

What many fail to anticipate in their hoped-for freedom is that America is a culture as well as a polity, and that it can often assault old country values. Few know to expect the deep loneliness of being set apart by language and customs, the confusing voracity of the American tempo, the sheer enervating grind of having to make a living, and the endless traffic of media imagery.

In addition to Dan Nadler and his parents and Marcelo Filardi, we spoke to a Vietnamese refugee family whose American deliverance came through a bottled message that had drifted across the Pacific Ocean for years; an Iranian family twice removed from the pleasurable and orderly customs of the past, first by the Ayatollah Khomeini, then by the struggle to make ends meet in the United States; and a Cuban emigre to whom nothing in American culture is seriously suspect except its (to him) naive complacency toward communism--after 18 years in jail as a political prisoner, he’s just happy to be here.

How do they see our culture? Largely as a mirror of a prodigiously exuberant, outgoing, optimistic people, tinged with the portent of moral decay.

A couple of them are leery of the press--what was once a handmaiden of oppression is now impertinently, even dangerously free. All are more or less at sea in the language, whose unfamiliarity and elusiveness seals them off from the full-blown sense of having arrived, of taking part, of being here.

Almost all of them are concerned to one degree or another with the corrosive pressures the American Way puts on family life. They all come from cultures where the support systems of family are virtually sacrosanct. If family was hallowed then, it’s all they have now. Shahin Mohajer was raised in Iran’s tradition of sexual protectiveness toward women. Just what is she to make of her 6-year-old daughter’s report that a strange boy came up to her at school and said “I love you. I want to kiss you.”?

At 25, Marcelo Filardi is a pale, ethereally slim Brazilian whose dark hair and finely honed good looks would make him a natural lead for sophisticated Continental romances--the look isn’t rugged enough for heroic Americana, but it would come up splendidly for a camera alert to light poetry.

Filardi has been through some hard scenes, including a rugged three-month dead-of-winter period in London in his late adolescence (“It was cold. The country was cold, the people were cold and everybody still acted as though the sun never set on the empire”), and on his arrival last August from Rio de Janeiro he took a job waiting on tables in one of those grim, all-night, mid-Hollywood coffee houses that tend to collect the drift of human debris--a man was murdered there shortly after Filardi quit.

Still, he comports himself with a balsa-light aristocratic ease, no doubt induced in part by subtropical languor, and in part by growing up in a protective family life, added to his youth and his consciousness of absorbing new experiences for their own sake. Occasionally his English lapses into eccentric locutions, such as “It is warmful music.”

“I think it’s important to see yourself in the world; then you see yourself in perspective,” Filardi said, with a singsong voice in which references to good times and bum times take on a certain jaunty equivalency. The man in transit rarely tastes bitter finality.

“I started playing the guitar in 1970, at the age of 8, and later had 10 years of classical training at the Brazilian Conservatory of Music,” he said. “I was born in Minos Gerais but grew up in Rio de Janeiro and consider myself a carioca. I have one brother, who’s eight years younger than me. My father used to work for General Electric as a salesman of electrical projects and later went to work for Brazilian Petrobas. I have one grandfather who’s Portuguese. The rest of my grandparents are Italian. Italy was destroyed by the end of World War II and a lot of Italians came to Brazil. My grandfather always had great Italian parties full of spaghetti, lasagna, wine, and he’d ask me to sing. One of his proudest possessions was a record signed by Caruso. ‘My grandson will be a guitarist one day,’ he liked to boast.”

Filardi’s conservative-minded parents weren’t about to let him sail off to la vie boheme without having learned some more prosaic skills; in deference to them, he graduated from law school in Rio and passed the bar. “I worked in falencia, which is what you call ‘bankruptcy’ here,” Filardi said. “But I found law not only to be boring, but nasty. People lie all the time, professing to be honorable. I don’t like lawyers at all--at least the ones I met in Brazil.”

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Filardi went to work for Varig Airlines just long enough to qualify for a discounted ticket to the United States and arrived in August of 1986. “I felt lost. The immigration official said to me, ‘How can you go to a city and not know where you’re going?’ I asked him where the nearest Holiday Inn was. ‘I don’t have to explain where the hotels are,’ he said.

“Well, the atmosphere wasn’t friendly, but it’s the same around airports all over the world. Soon I moved to a hotel in Hollywood and took that restaurant job. The place was full of bums and drug dealers. I was the only one in charge at night. I didn’t know how terrible it was. There were no decent people. It was the worst time. In two or three weeks I bought a guitar and would stay in my room playing five, seven hours a day.”

At a party Filardi met another young Brazilian musician named Clario DeMoraes, who was somewhat better placed. The two have since begun making professional appearances around town, operating principally out of the Comeback Inn in Venice. Filardi now shares a two-bedroom apartment with another Brazilian emigre in a slightly tonier section in Van Nuys.

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He reflected on some of his newer discoveries.

“What impressed me first is that prices don’t change radically. You may complain if inflation goes over 3%, but at home it’s 300%. Everything here is diversified. I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard and saw the Russian ballet billed on the marquee of the Pantages Theater. There were even Russian protesters outside. At the same time, the American way of life is quite standardized. We have a phrase for it: ‘mente coletiva. ‘ That fantastic scene in ‘Five Easy Pieces’ where Jack Nicholson talks to the waitress--he can get the chicken sandwich but he can’t get the toast. People are worried if they have to go outside the rules.”

Filardi had noticed something of this blunt standardization at home, where “you see aggressive American merchandising, like the McDonald’s on Nossa Senhora de Copacabana, or other American companies that pretend to be integrated into the culture but are really only out for profit. Hamburgers are not what we call Brazilian food. We had a Sears & Roebuck in Rio, which for a long time wouldn’t make clothes that fit Brazilian sizes.

“Everything that’s popular in America becomes popular in Brazil. The Beastie Boys will be big there. Bruce Springsteen is big there. Michael Jackson could fill up any theater. Rock is big in Brazil, but Brazilians themselves don’t play it well. Rock implies non-conformity, protest.

“The British are better at it because they have more to complain about. In London there are a lot of gangs, punks. There’s a lot of unemployment. Anger is not in the spirit of the Brazilian people. There’s a lot of suffering and poverty, but people will go to the beach or find any way they can to make themselves feel that everything’s all right.

“Music is a vehicle for the soul of a people. The Anglo-Saxon society is tough. To me, the only real expression of American music is jazz and the blues. Rock isn’t any more natural to America than it is to Brazil. America can’t compete with the British in rock--I’m not talking about Dylan or Paul Simon, who are basically poets influenced by country-Western. But if you go to rhythm and blues, soul--nothing beats it. It comes from the heart of the American people.”

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Filardi worried aloud about America’s obsession with indiscriminate conquest--which he first saw mirrored in movie Westerns, and which he now perceives as having rebounded back into the culture in a mass compulsion toward purposeless change.

“What’s so great or funny about a lot of tough guys moving west?” he asked. “The people who made movies about conquest were so proud that you see it now in a lot of things. For example, do the old films really need color? I think there was magic in the black-and-white. But now they want to do something, and don’t think of whether it really needs to be done. That’s what strikes me about America--an obsession with technology.

“To me, everything here works, is perfect. Or near to it. But in my specific area, music, it doesn’t work. It’s like people here have forgotten they have a soul. A guy came into my restaurant and joked with me that he couldn’t pay. ‘So?’ I said. ‘Pay me with a smile.’ He didn’t know what to do. I feel this lack of sensibility. There’s no spontaneity between men and women; if you express yourself openly and emotionally, in the Latin way, people think you’re crazy.”

Although his observations have a mordant critical edge, Filardi’s manner is without vehemence. “I’m amazed how in America people are willing to admit that they work for money,” he said. “It’s in the Latin manner to deny the need for money. This is just a step in my life. In my music, I would love to learn to mix the great technology of the American school with the feeling of the Brazilian.”

For these eager and reluctant strangers, like their millions of predecessors with their own vivid stories, a new age beings.