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Sex, Color, and Geography: Racialized Relations in Brazil and Its Predicaments

2012; American Association of Geographers; Volume: 103; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00045608.2012.700605

1467-8306

Alan P. Marcus,

Sex work and related issues

Abstract Sex and race have significantly affected the trajectories of Brazil's historical geographies and its contemporary racialized relations. Interpretations of gender, race, and color in Brazil have produced distinct racialized relations and diverse color categories in contrast to the rigid binary racial categories (i.e., black–white) traditionally used in the United States. In Brazil, racialized relations have traditionally remained cordial, giving life to the so-called myth of racial democracy, and were not shaped by formal legal boundaries as in the United States; however, racialized relations in Brazil were forged by deeply embedded informal borders—physical and sociocultural—coupled with historical processes, which continue to appear in today's data on social inequality. Sexo y raza son dos cuestiones que han afectado significativamente las trayectorias de las geografías históricas del Brasil y sus relaciones raciales contemporáneas. Las interpretaciones de género, raza y color han producido en ese país distintas relaciones pertinentes al tema racial y diversas categorías de color, en contraste con las rígidas categorías raciales binarias (esto es, negro–blanco) que tradicionalmente se han usado en los Estados Unidos. En Brasil, las relaciones raciales tradicionalmente se han mantenido cordiales—dando vida al así llamado mito de la democracia racial—y no se configuraron mediante límites legales formales como en los Estados Unidos; sin embargo, debe notarse que en Brasil las relaciones raciales fueron determinadas por fronteras informales profundamente arraigadas—físicas y socioculturales—asociadas a procesos históricos, que siguen apareciendo en los datos actuales sobre desigualdad social. Key Words: Brazilhuman geographyracesexsocial inequality.关键词: 巴西人文地理种族性别社会不平等Palabras clave: Brasilgeografía humanarazasexodesigualdad social Acknowledgments I want to thank Richard Wilkie for his encouragement and for helping me in developing visual thinking; Audrey Kobayashi and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments that have helped me strengthen this article; Charles Schmitz for his helpful comments on an early draft; and Paporn Thebpanya for producing the figures. Notes 1. For the purpose of clarity and to avoid the implication of essentialism, I use the term sex when I refer to sexual intercourse, and I use the term gender to refer to cultural and socioeconomic differences within power structures (implied or overt) between men and women. 2. I use the term race here as it is commonly used in the parlance of U.S. Census Bureau categories, academics, and public discussions; that is, race is a common reference to an individual's (perceived) "biological" or physical appearance. For clarity, I use racialized relations to refer to the cultural and sociolinguistic relationship between population groups. 3. Brazil was a Portuguese colony from 1500 to 1822, abolished slavery in 1888, and became a federal republic in 1889. 4. In the English-speaking geographical literature. 5. The Hispanic/Latino idea becomes an obstacle for clarity within Latin American studies, particularly for Latin American geography (Marcus Citation2011a), as these terms tend to refer to specific Spanish-speaking populations within a specific context of the U.S. immigrant experience (i.e., highly politicized and, by extension, monolithically racialized). Furthermore, the U.S. Census Bureau does not consider Brazilians residing in the United States to be "Hispanic" or "Latino" because they speak Portuguese (Office of Management and Budget 2002). 6. See Livingstone (Citation1992, Citation2003) on the subjectivity and geographies of science (as a social enterprise) and Nobles (Citation2000) on the fluidity of U.S. and Brazilian race categories. 7. Slave-trading expeditions, which relied on mamelucos as interpreters into the Northeast's sertão region to capture Indians in the sixteenth century. 8. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. 9. See Perz, Warren, and Kennedy (2008) for a recent discussion on the Brazilian indigenous population. 10. They were "invisible" because of their fear of detection by the infamous Inquisition of that time (Stern Citation1955), a fear that might have transferred from the Old World. Many Jews in Brazil converted to Christianity ("new Christian," maranos) but secretly maintained Jewish traditions. 11. Jim Crow laws were used in all public facilities, public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks—"separate but equal" status for blacks, ending in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education , and any remaining state laws with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 12. For example, as a popular Brazilian saying goes, "There is no racism in Brazil as there exists in the United States—here we only have classism." 13. The wars of Cabanagem or Canudos during the nineteenth century resulted from discontent within regional and classist instability, whereas, for example, one of the major driving factors in the social and violent unrest in the U.S. South during the 1960s civil rights period was explicit friction about racialized relations (i.e., clear-cut tensions along the white–black polarities).