Praça da República

This guide to Praça da República in São Paulo opens with a question: why police here once shoved a young artisan off this lawn simply for wearing his hair too long. It traces the mid-1960s, when long-haired vendors selling handmade leather goods were jeered, stoned, and driven off by police under a military dictatorship that prized short hair and shorter tempers. In 1968, of all years, the city's mayor Faria Lima signed a decree carving out a tolerated pocket of counterculture inside an intolerant state.