Becoming Brazilians Race And National Identity

In Twentieth Century Brazil Marshall C. Eakin

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 Becoming Brazilians

This book traces the rise and decline of Gilberto Freyre’s vision of racial
and cultural mixture (mestiçagem – or race mixing) as the defining
feature of Brazilian culture in the twentieth century. Eakin traces how
mestiçagem moved from a conversation among a small group of
intellectuals to become the dominant feature of Brazilian national
identity, demonstrating how diverse Brazilians embraced mestiçagem,
via popular music, film and television, literature, soccer, and protest
movements. The Freyrean vision of the unity of Brazilians built on
mestiçagem begins a gradual decline in the 1980s with the emergence
of an identity politics stressing racial differences and multiculturalism.
The book combines intellectual history, sociological and anthropological
field work, political science, and cultural studies for a wide-ranging
analysis of how Brazilians – across social classes – became Brazilians.

Marshall C. Eakin is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

A specialist in modern Brazilian history, he is the author of four
books including The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures.
He coedited Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the
United States, with Paulo Roberto de Almeida.
 New Approaches to the Americas

Edited by
Stuart Schwartz, Yale University

Also Published in the Series:

Arnold J. Bauer: Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture
Laird Bergad: The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba,
and the United States
Noble David Cook: Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650
Marcos Cueto and Steven Palmer: Medicine and Public Health in Latin America:
A History
Júnia Ferreira Furtado and Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century
Alberto Flores Galindo: In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes
Herbert S. Klein: The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd edition
Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien: The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth
Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796
Sandra Lauderdale Graham: Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian
Slave Society
Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá: The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master
Anthony Knivet: An English Pirate in Sixteenth-Century Brazil
Jeffrey Lesser: Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808
to the Present
Robert M. Levine: Father of the Poor? Vargas and His Era
J. R. McNeill: Mosquito Empires: Ecology, Epidemics, and Revolutions
in the Caribbean, 1620–1914
Shawn William Miller: An Environmental History of Latin America
Natalia Sobrevilla Perea: The Caudillo of the Andes
João José Reis: Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodré, an
African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (translated by H. Sabrina Gledhill)
Susan Migden: The Women of Colonial Latin America, 2nd edition
 Becoming Brazilians
Race and National Identity in
Twentieth-Century Brazil

MARSHALL C. EAKIN
Vanderbilt University
 University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107175761
DOI: 10.1017/9781316800058
© Marshall C. Eakin 2017
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2017
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-107-17576-1 Hardback
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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
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aos meus amigos brasileiros e brasilianistas
Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries with
him in his soul, when not in body and soul . . . the shadow, or at
least the birthmark, of the Indian or the Negro.1

Gilberto Freyre

note
1. “Todo brasileiro, mesmo o alvo, de cabelo louro, traz na alma, quando não na
alma e no corpo … a sombra ou pelo menos a pinta, do indígena ou do negro.”
Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e senzala: formação da família brasileira sob o
regime da economia patriarcal, 49ª. edn. (São Paulo: Global Editora, 2003),
343. The translation is mine, slightly altered from Gilberto Freyre, The Masters
and the Slaves [Casa-grande e senzala]: A Study in the Development of
Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nd edn. rev. (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 278. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
 Contents

List of Figures page xii

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Creating a People and a Nation 1

Gilberto Freyre and the Myth of Mestiçagem 1
Gilberto Freyre and Casa-grande e senzala 3
Constructing Myths, Rituals, and Symbols 7
Key Themes 11
Modernism 17
Decline of the Freyrean Vision 23
An Overview of the Book 26
1 From the “Spectacle of Races” to “Luso-Tropical
Civilization” 43
Constructing State and Nation 43
Race and National Identity 48
Modernism and Modernity 56
Gilberto Freyre and the Creation of the Myth
of Mestiçagem 58
2 Communicating and Understanding Mestiçagem: Radio,
Samba, and Carnaval 79
The State, Media, and Popular Culture 79
Radio and the Creation of Samba 84
Samba, Carnaval, and Getúlio Vargas 89
Carnaval, Gender, the Malandro, and the Mulata 95
The Malandro 97

ix
x Contents

3 Visualizing Mestiçagem: Literature, Film, and the

Mulata 107
A New Visual Culture and the Freyrean Mulata 107
Carmen Miranda: An Iconic Cinematic Mulata? 111
Carnaval and Cinema 116
Mestiço Nationalism, Cinema Novo, and Bossa Nova 120
Creating the Iconic Mulata: Jorge Amado and Sonia
Braga 123
4 “Globo-lizing” Brazil: Televising Identity 136
The Television Revolution and the Rise of the Globo
Empire 136
Modernity, Identity, and the Jornal Nacional 144
Telenovelas and National Identity 147
Broadcasting Carnaval and Futebol 155
5 The Beautiful Game: Performing the Freyrean Vision 165
Creating the Myth of Futebol-Mulato 166
From English Sport to Jogo do Povo 170
Futebol-mestiço, Futebol-mulato, Futebol-arte 175
Identity and the End of Futebol-arte? 183
Gilberto Freyre, Mário Filho, Mestiçagem, and
Citizenship 188
6 The Sounds of Cultural Citizenship 200
Cultural Citizenship and Cultural Nationalism 200
Music, Region, Nation 202
Música Popular Brasileira and Cultural Nationalism 206
Popular Music, Nationalism, Citizenship 213
7 Culture, Identity, and Citizenship 220
Civic and Cultural Nationalisms 220
Citizenships 221
The Diretas Já Campaign 227
Impeachment, Citizenship, and Nationalism 231
Challenges to the Freyrean Vision 237
Epilogue: Nation and Identity in the Twentieth
and the Twenty-First Centuries 251
The Return of Gilberto Freyre 251
Technology: Forging and Eroding Narratives 253
Modernity, Post modernity, and the Creation
of Identities 257
Back to Race and Identity 260
 Contents xi

Nation, Regions, Nationalism, and National Identity 266

Brazilian Exceptionalism? 269

Bibliography 285
Index 315
 Figures

I.1 Gilberto Freyre, 1967 page 3

I.2 Candido Portinari, “Entry into the Forest,” Mural,
Hispanic Reading Room, Library of Congress 16
2.1 Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro 91
2.2 The Malandro-Musician Look (Date Unknown) 96
2.3 The Mulata as the Centerpiece of Carnaval 98
3.1 Carmen Miranda circa 1945 113
3.2 Sonia Braga circa 1982 126
4.1 Television Reaches the Amazon (Gurupá, Pará) 143
5.1 The Brazilian National Team, 1958, Stockholm, Sweden 167
5.2 Leônidas da Silva, World Cup, 1938, Bordeaux, France 176
5.3 Casagrande and Corinthians Democracy 190
7.1 Diretas Já Demonstrations 229
7.2 Fernando Collor Impeachment Demonstrations 236

xii
 Acknowledgments

This book has had a very long gestation, and it has been nurtured along
the way by numerous people across several continents, many of them
without knowing it. The first book I ever read about Brazil was Gilberto
Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves. I vividly remember reading Freyre
one scorching summer (1972) in a tiny one-room apartment (without air-
conditioning) in Lawrence, Kansas, in between my freshman and
sophomore years in college. Little did I realize that summer in the
middle of North America that this thick volume was one of the most
important books about Brazil, and that it would become one of the most
important in my life. Enthralled, during those torrid Kansas summer days
I slowly sweated my way through this brilliant, eccentric essay. Looking
back, I realize that I barely had begun to understand what Freyre was
saying. My lack of comprehension was countered by the enthusiasm the
book generated in me for this “new world in the tropics.” Although
I would take a very indirect path (through Central America), over the
next decade I gradually became a historian of Brazil. Although my first
writing and publications were on race and identity in early twentieth-
century Brazil, for more than twenty years – from the 1970s to the 1990s –
I studied and wrote primarily about the economic history of Brazil.
Periodically, I would come back to my ruminations about Freyre and
Brazilian culture, but it was not until recently that I finally returned to
where I began. Over the years, as I researched, taught, and lectured about
Brazil, I became intrigued at how the ideas and work of Gilberto Freyre
became the central mythology that propelled the formation of Brazilian
national identity in the twentieth century.

xiii
xiv Acknowledgments

Long ago and far away in Kansas, Betsy Kuznesof helped get me started
as a historian of Brazil. In Los Angeles, Brad Burns taught me to see the big
picture and to try to speak beyond the narrow confines of academia. Many
years in Belo Horizonte and my good friends in Minas Gerais persuaded
me to see Brazil from inside out and not from the coast inward. In 1983, at
a time when my academic career appeared to be stillborn, the History
Department at Vanderbilt University took a chance on me, changing the
trajectory of my life. I will be forever grateful to my colleagues in the
department, then and now. I have benefited enormously by working at an
outstanding university with even more outstanding programs in Brazilian
and Latin American studies.
I am very fortunate to have received generous funding from a Fulbright-
Hays Faculty Research Abroad Award (2009–2010) and a National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2015) to spend long periods
writing intensely while living in Brazil. Sabbaticals are one of the great
privileges and luxuries of the life of a professor at a major research
university. Longstanding and ongoing financial support from Vanderbilt
University has been crucial throughout my career and especially in the
work on this project over the past eight years. I am particularly grateful to
former provost Richard McCarty for his support. Eight years ago he asked
me to become the faculty director of the Ingram Scholarship Program.
I began writing the first pages of this book at the same moment I joined the
program, and I am writing the closing lines as I finish my time as director.
In many ways unrelated to Brazil and Gilberto Freyre, the socially and
civically engaged students in the program have pushed me to think deeply
about my own worldview, beliefs, and assumptions. They have taught me
a great deal, and this book and the Ingram Scholars have been equally
important focal points in my life for the past eight years. I am especially
indebted to my two exceptional program coordinators, Anne Gordon and
Bryn Sierra, for all their support and for helping me balance my teaching,
research, and administrative work.
I have been very fortunate to have worked at Vanderbilt University
for more than three decades with a wonderful group of colleagues.
The Center for Latin American Studies and the History Department are
vibrant intellectual communities that have shaped my life as a scholar and
teacher. The strength of the Brazilian studies program has constantly
enriched my life and made it possible for me to grow. The late Alex
Severino, Margo Milleret, Earl Fitz, Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte, Ben
Legg, and Marcio Bahia all in their own ways helped me think and
rethink cultura brasileira. Our program in Latin American history
 Acknowledgments xv

includes a truly wonderful and collegial group, including more than

thirty graduate students over the last two decades. Jane Landers, Eddie
Wright-Rios, Celso Castilho, Frank Robinson, and the late Simon Collier
have been exceptional colleagues and friends. A special thanks to Joel
Harrington for his support over the years, at home and abroad.
While I mentored Courtney Campbell, Max Pendergraph, Tiago
Maranhão, and David LaFevor in their graduate training they also
pushed me to think harder about my notions of nationalism, regionalism,
and identity. Graduate and undergraduate students from various
departments and programs took my classes on Latin America and
seminars on race, nationalism, and nation-building, and they made me
think more about the comparative picture, and even read and critiqued
parts of my manuscript. Yoshi Igarashi, Gary Gerstle, Paul Kramer,
Michael Bess, and Helmut Smith shared their own writing and research
on nationalism and national identity with the seminars on nationalism.
The graduate students in the interdisciplinary Brazilian Studies Reading
Group also gave me valuable criticisms of the manuscript. From 2001 to
2015, Jane Landers, Celso Castilho, and I codirected a series of FIPSE-
CAPSE student exchange grants on race and inequalities in Brazil and the
United States in collaboration with the Universidade de São Paulo, the
Universidade Federal da Bahia, the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande
do Sul, the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Howard University, Fisk
University, and the University of Florida. The three dozen students from
Vanderbilt who attended our Brazilian partner institutions and the three
dozen undergraduate students from Brazil who spent a semester at
Vanderbilt, in many different ways, made me reflect often on the
complexities of race and national identity.
A special thanks to Paula Covington, the incredible Latin American
bibliographer at Vanderbilt. Due to Paula’s work and that of her
predecessors we have one of the great collections on Brazil in our library.
For many years Paula has helped me with my research and taught me to be
a better researcher. Mona Frederick has made enormous contributions to
the intellectual life of Vanderbilt as the executive director of the Robert
Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. I spent much of my last sabbatical
at the Warren Center in a year-long seminar on public scholarship with
a great group of fellow faculty and had the enormous luxury of a beautiful
office where I could hide, read, write, and move this book closer to
completion. Thank you, Mona.
As will be evident in the text, but especially in the endnotes, I could not
have written this book without the vast and excellent scholarship across
xvi Acknowledgments

many disciplines, especially among those who study Brazil. For seven
years (2004–2011) I served as the executive director of the Brazilian
Studies Association and organized three international congresses for
BRASA during that period. I cannot imagine what this book would look
like, if it would even exist, had I not spent so much time collaborating in so
many ways with Brazilians and Brazilianists during my time with BRASA.
Um obrigado muito especial for my hardworking colleagues in leadership
and support roles during those years, especially Jim Green, Tim Power,
Jan French, Ken Serbin, Susan Quinlan, Peggy Sharpe, Jon Tolman,
Cecilia Grespan, and Carolina Castellanos. A special thanks to Paulo
Roberto de Almeida for asking me to coedit a survey of Brazilian studies
in the United States that educated me extensively and resulted in two
books.
Talks at a number of institutions helped me formulate, reformulate,
and sharpen my arguments. Thanks to Mariza Soares at the
Universidade Federal Fluminense; Jurandir Malerba and the
Department of History at the Pontifícia Universidade Cátolica, Rio
Grande do Sul; Ondina Fachel Leal and the Department of
Anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; the
Fundação Casa Rui Barbosa; Paula Barreto, the Centro de Estudos Afro-
Orientais and the Universidade Federal da Bahia; colleagues at the
Universidade de São Paulo in the departments of history, economics,
and business; Parry Scott and the Department of Anthropology at the
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco; Russell Walker and his students at
the Kellogg School at Northwestern University; the Race Relations
Institute at Fisk University; my colleagues and their students at the
Owen Graduate School of Management, and the Osher Lifelong
Learning Institute at Vanderbilt University. Some of my colleagues
have been kind enough to read and comment on parts of this
manuscript including Scott Ickes, Roger Kittleson, Jason Borge, and
Bianca Freire-Medeiros. Chris Dunn, Bryan McCann, and Celso
Castilho read the entire manuscript and provided me with very
valuable feedback, helping make this a better book than it was in
manuscript form. Over the past two years I have benefited from
working with Liz Zechmeister, Tim Sterling, Fred Pereira, Heather
Ewing, and Guilherme Russo on a healthcare study in Rio de Janeiro
funded by Vanderbilt University. My colleagues in Brazil and at
Vanderbilt in the project on “Building a Multi-disciplinary Approach
to the Assessment of the Quality of Healthcare in Brazil” have provided
me entirely new angles on race and national identity in Brazil. Kara
 Acknowledgments xvii

Schultz and Jeff Crosby facilitated the cover art, and my editorial team at
Cambridge University Press skillfully guided me through the production
process.
Finally, thank you Michelle for putting up with my long absences in
Brazil and in Nashville hiding in my office working on this book. I could
not have done this without your understanding, love, and support. Um
obrigado muito especial para o grande amor da minha vida.
 map 1 Map of Brazil and Its Regions
Source: Beth Robertson, Mapping Specialists Limited
 introduction

Creating a People and a Nation

[N]ations are constituted largely by the claims [they make for] themselves,
by the way of talking and thinking and acting that relies on these sorts of
claims to produce collective identity, to mobilize people for collective pro-
jects, and to evaluate peoples and practices.1
Craig Calhoun

gilberto freyre and the myth of mestiçagem

The history of nationalism and national identities is a history of myth-
making. This book reconstructs the story of how one myth of national
identity became history. Brazilian national identity, like many other
national identities, was constructed from local society up as well as from
the State down. The combined and often conflicting efforts of the power-
ful and the less powerful forge peoples and nations over decades and
centuries. Elites who wish to construct nations consciously seek to create
a cohesive sense of national identity, solidarity, and allegiance to an
articulated set of myths, rituals, and symbols. They pursue progress
through order, and that order and progress hinge on the success of their
attempts to impose homogeneity and uniformity. Despite their best
efforts – and their power – often the plans of the nation-builders fail,
either in part or in whole. The less powerful – especially the so-called
masses (o povo) – quite often without setting out to do so create and
shape their own myths, rituals, and symbols that sometimes reach a wide
audience resonating with hundreds of thousands – even millions – of
persons they have never met nor seen. This complex and dialectical
process of the conscious and unconscious construction of peoples and
nations through the emergence and evolution of a shared set of myths,

1
2 Becoming Brazilians

rituals, and symbols is the focus of this book. A generation ago, Benedict
Anderson brilliantly described this process as the creation of “imagined
communities.”2 Becoming Brazilians charts the emergence of an “ima-
gined community” – what Brazilian intellectuals would call an imaginário
nacional (national imaginary/collective imagination) – the creation of
a people, and a nation, in twentieth-century Brazil.3
Since the 1930s, the most important national myth that has bound
people together in Brazil is what the anthropologist Roberto DaMatta
has called the “fábula das três raças.” This fable of the three races – what
I call the myth of mestiçagem (miscegenation) – asserts that Brazilians
share a common history of racial and cultural mixing of Native
Americans, Africans, and Europeans.4 Although he did not invent this
myth, Gilberto Freyre’s exuberant and optimistic vision of mestiçagem
has been its most potent and influential version. As Peter Fry has
concisely noted, Freyre declared that all Brazilians “whatever their
genealogical affiliation, were culturally Africans, Amerindians and
Europeans.”5 Even those Brazilians who are not biologically mestiços
are cultural hybrids. In Freyre’s own oft-quoted words, “Every
Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries with him in
his soul, when not in body and soul . . . the shadow, or at least the
birthmark, of the Indian or the Negro.”6 All Brazilians, regardless of
the color of their skin, carry with them shadows in their souls, traces of
Europe, Africa, and the Americas in their cultural, if not their biological,
DNA.7 This is the essence of the Freyrean vision of Brazil, brasilidade
(Brazilianness), and Brazilian national identity in the twentieth
century. This book is a sort of cultural history of the Freyrean myth of
mestiçagem.
Before the publication of Freyre’s monumental The Masters and the
Slaves (Casa-grande e senzala in the Portuguese original) in 1933, many
Brazilian and foreign intellectuals had recognized this mixing, but very
few viewed this mestiçagem favorably.8 By the 1970s and 1980s, nearly
all Brazilians, at some level, shared this belief – it had become something
of a “master narrative of Brazilian culture.”9 When queried about race or
ancestry for surveys, most Brazilians tell the questioners they are
“Brazilian.”10 Today, when 200 million Brazilians enjoy the music of
Ivete Sangalo or participate in carnaval, or experience the exhilaration
of their national team (seleção) winning (or losing) a World Cup, they
resonate with some of the fundamental markers of Brazilian national
identity – ones that are all profoundly shaped by the Freyrean vision
of mestiçagem.
 Introduction: Creating a People and a Nation 3

figure i.1 Gilberto Freyre, 1967

Source: Photo By Jack Riddle/The Denver Post via Getty Images

gilberto freyre and casa-grande e senzala

Sophisticated social science research has shown that this cultural mixing
in Brazil has been widespread and deep.11 People of all skin colors take
part in cultural practices and activities that emerged out of European,
Native American, and African societies. Perhaps most visible are the
4 Becoming Brazilians

profound African influences that permeate the cultural lives of Brazilians

of all hues – from candomblé to capoeira and carnaval. In the words of
one writer, “some Euro-Brazilians are more culturally Afro-Brazilian
than some Afro-Brazilians.” African influences pervade all facets of
Brazilian culture and society, leading one scholar to observe that the
dominant narrative in Brazil is that no one is really white!12 As Edward
Telles has shown with sophisticated statistical and analytical rigor,
miscegenation is not “mere ideology” in Brazil. Race mixture has been
taking place for centuries, and continues, and represents a significant
reality in the daily lives of Brazilians.13 The influence of Freyre permeates
nearly every nook and corner of contemporary Brazilian culture. Even
those who vehemently reject Freyre’s ideas must grapple with ways to
contend with their power and influence. This book traces the emergence,
maturation, and then (partial) decline of this Freyrean vision of mestiço
nationalism, this imagined community of mestiçagem, of racial mixture
and cultural convergence, from the 1930s to the 1990s. This book is
a brief history of the most powerful narrative of Brazilian identity in the
twentieth century.
Decades of sustained and devastating critiques of Freyre’s notion of
“racial democracy” offer paradoxical testimony to his continuing power
and influence on Brazilian identity.14 The vast literature attacking racial
democracy has rarely been accompanied by a rejection of Freyre’s most
important assertion – that the essence of Brazil and Brazilians is this
mixture of races and cultures.15 In the decades following the publication
of Casa-grande e senzala, Freyre gradually made stronger and more
sweeping claims that the widespread mixing of races and cultures had
provided Brazil with a form of racial democracy, a society without the
racial prejudice and discrimination sanctioned by law and custom in the
United States and South Africa (for example).16 Ironically, Freyre did
not create the term “racial democracy,” and it apparently does not even
come into use until the late 1940s and the 1950s.17 Since the 1950s, this
Freyrean view of racial democracy has been repeatedly attacked by
scholars in multiple fields of study. While many have argued that racial
democracy is some sort of false consciousness or a smoke screen fabri-
cated by the elite to hide the racism in Brazilian society, I agree with
those who have shown that few Brazilians (especially those who are
darker and poorer) believe that Brazil is a racial democracy. They are
fully aware of the racism they confront in their own lives, but cling to
racial democracy as an ideal to aspire to – for all Brazilians.18 At the
same time, the most sophisticated sociological surveys demonstrate that
 Introduction: Creating a People and a Nation 5

a majority of Brazilians cling to the Freyrean vision of mestiçagem.19

While Freyre’s vision of mestiçagem and racial democracy are intercon-
nected, the former does not inevitably lead to the latter (although
many, many writers conflate the two in their critiques of Freyre). One
may fully embrace the notion of mixing without believing it produces
racial democracy.20 I agree with Hermano Vianna’s observation:
“I never believed that to value mestiçagem was synonymous with
defending the idea that we live in a racial democracy.”21 This book is
not about what I see as Freyre’s naïve and untenable claims about racial
democracy in Brazil, but rather about how the “fable of three races”
becomes so deeply embedded in popular culture and the imaginário
nacional.22 The myth of mestiçagem has been more powerful, wide-
spread, and enduring than the myth of racial democracy.
Mestiçagem, however, is a protean concept.23 It allows those who wish
to emphasize the cultural and racial diversity of Brazilian identity to
highlight the contributions of the African and Indian to Brazilian culture.
Brazilian music, cuisine, arts, language, and even sports offer for them
daily evidence of the importance of non-European peoples and cultures to
the formation of Brazilian society. At the same time, mestiçagem can also
provide a means for those who wish to de-emphasize the African and
Indian heritage of Brazilians by highlighting the waves of European immi-
grants as an even more powerful contributor to the cultural and racial mix
that is Brazil today. In this version, mixing becomes the means for whiten-
ing (embranquecimento) Brazilian culture and biology. This vision of
mestiçagem, combined with racial democracy, has been a powerful alter-
native to the blatant expressions of white supremacist ideology that
became so potent in other societies such as the United States.24
In a sense, these two very different visions are two sides of the same coin
of mestiçagem. As the following chapters show, these two very different
visions, both accepting mestiçagem as central to the national narrative,
are reshaped by different regions of Brazil for their own purposes.
In effect, one sees mestiçagem as whitening while the other sees it as
darkening Brazil.
In the following chapters, I analyze how and why the tens of millions
living within the political boundaries of Brazil (and many more residing
beyond those borders) in the twentieth century gradually come to see
themselves not only as brasileiros, but brasileiros a la Freyre.25 I argue
that only in recent decades has Brazil finally become a nation, that is,
a people within a defined set of political borders bound together by their
attachment to a common set of myths, rituals, and symbols.26 For much of
6 Becoming Brazilians

the twentieth century, Brazilians forged “a culture in search of nation.”27

The rise of the new technologies of radio, film, and television – the
emergence of new visual and aural cultures – made possible the creation
of this “imagined community” in twentieth-century Brazil (and in other
nations as well). The following chapters dissect the ongoing and con-
stantly evolving process of “becoming Brazilians” in the twentieth cen-
tury. At the heart of this analysis is the very notion of what it means to be
“Brazilian” and how that identity evolves and shifts across most of the
twentieth century – and continues to shift in the twenty-first. Gilberto
Freyre’s work provides the framework for the conceptualization of the
Brazilians as a singular people who compose their own nation.
I do not pretend to demonstrate definitively the many ways in
which the technologies of mass communication have fostered the
enormous reach and power of the myth of mestiçagem. In this
long, interpretive essay, I lay out what I believe are the key features
and processes in the creation, diffusion, success, and eventual decline
of this vision of Brazilian identity. The principal goals of this essay
are to offer an interpretation of twentieth-century Brazil and stimu-
late others to discuss, debate, challenge, and engage in much more
detailed studies of the many facets of the historical trajectory
I describe in this book. I am certainly not the first to notice the
importance of the new technologies for the emergence of popular
culture in twentieth-century societies. Latin Americans, especially
Brazilians, have not only created dynamic music, art, literature,
film, and television, but they also generated a very stimulating and
innovative body of work about popular culture. Scholars in many
countries over the past thirty years have produced a large literature
on nationalism and national identity, and a seemingly endless num-
ber of books and articles have discussed Brazilian identity in the
twentieth century. In more recent decades, a vibrant group of writers
have shown how central citizenship, in its many facets, is to con-
temporary societies and to efforts to cultivate democratic politics –
in Brazil, or elsewhere in the world. In this book, I bring these
diverse stories together to show how the consolidation of a vibrant
cultural nationalism constructed around the myth of mestiçagem
from the 1930s to the 1980s set the stage for the rise of a dynamic
civic nationalism that has fostered among tens of millions of
Brazilians a vital conversation about their origins, who they are
today, what they would like to become, and where they will go in
the twenty-first century.
 Introduction: Creating a People and a Nation 7

constructing myths, rituals, and symbols

Brazilians built an extraordinary narrative unity around an exceptionally
flexible sense of identity. The construction of this narrative took place
over many decades across two centuries. In 1822, Pedro I’s famous “Cry
of Ipiranga” announced the creation of an independent Brazil free of
Portuguese colonial rule. Much of the story of Brazilian history – and
the Brazilian people – in the nearly two centuries after Pedro’s cry (grito) is
the long (and never-ending) struggle to create a people and a nation out of
an idea – to make real the newly proclaimed nation in that cry for
independence.28 The great challenge for the State in constructing the
Brazilian nation from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth
century was in many ways geographical and technological – how to reach
all those peoples living within the enormous, fluid, and ill-defined political
boundaries of Brazil.29 Before becoming Brazilian, one must first become
aware of the very notion of something called Brazil. The challenge for all
Brazilian nationalists was not only to create myths, rituals, and symbols,
but also to make the millions of peoples of African, Native American, and
European descent – and their descendants – aware of those myths, rituals,
and symbols. In the terminology of Ernest Gellner, the State had to foster
the nationalism that precedes the creation of the nation. Even more so
than most nations, Brazil faced the daunting challenge of scale in
a country of truly continental dimensions.30 I believe that the process of
the creation of this set of shared myths, rituals, and symbols does not
reach full fruition until the second half of the twentieth century after the
emergence and expansion of the technologies of mass communication –
radio, film, and television. As Eric Hobsbawm once observed,
“The common culture of any late twentieth-century urbanized country
was based on the mass entertainment industry – cinema, radio, television,
pop music.”31
The 1930s have long been seen as a critical turning point in modern
Brazilian history with the rise of Getúlio Vargas and the increasing ability
of the Brazilian State to extend its power into the vast interior of the
country. At the same time, the central government begins systematically to
create school curricula, museums, holidays, and national symbols to over-
come the long history of regionalism and fragmentation that had char-
acterized Brazilian society, culture, and politics since (at least)
independence.32 The rise of radio in the 1930s, and then film in the
1940s and 1950s, produces a powerful shift with the emergence of pop-
ular culture, especially popular music (samba, in particular), carnaval,
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