Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3161580

1527-1900

T.B. Holloway,

Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

In 1933, Gilberto Freyre published his magnum opus, Casa-grande e senzala. The title of the English translation, The Masters and the Slaves, even more starkly evoked the main theme of that sweeping overview of social history: Brazil was the land of an elite white few who dominated a mass of subservient Africans and their collective descendants. A major irony is that in the half century leading up to Freyre's work, Brazilian society was transformed by a massive influx of immigrants, and the ethnic composition of the southern third of Brazil's territory became more pluralistic and diverse.Freyre's figurative vantage point was the veranda of a plantation house in Pernambuco, the heart of the old Northeast. The analogous point for Jeffrey Lesser is a busy intersection in the megalopolis of São Paulo, heart of the booming Southeast, and his purview is strangely selective. He sees ethnicity in soccer club fandom and street food. Thus esfiha and yakisoba noodles denote Middle Eastern and Japanese ethnicity, respectively, while polenta, pasta, pizza, and the ubiquitous holiday panettone, all brought by Italians, go unnoted. The experience of a few hundred Moroccan Jews who arrived in the late nineteenth century is explored, but there is no mention of similar numbers in that era of polacas — Jewish women who were victims of sex trafficking from eastern Europe. We get a lesson in the symbolism of a public monument to the Levantine diaspora, while the bustling complex of the Syrian Lebanese Hospital goes unnoted, as do the Arabic surnames of recent paulista governors, mayors, and presidential candidates: Maluf, Alckmin, Haddad, Kassab. We get details on the few hundred fanatics of Shindo Renmei who refused to believe that Japan lost World War II but not a word on the several thousand German Brazilians who joined the Nazi Party in the mid-1930s, complete with brown shirts and swastikas. The supposed ethnicity of a relative handful of Confederados — whites from the post–American Civil War South — is explored in some detail, while 150,000 Polish immigrants disappear into Paraná, only to be noticed again when the Polish pope pays them a visit in 1980. Since the ethnicity of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fades away entirely, one might suppose that they assimilated, but assimilation, as a concept or a process, is hardly broached in this book. A chapter ostensibly on Jews and Arabs leads to general policy debates in the 1930s and then concludes with a detailed treatment of failed attempts by blacks in the United States to emigrate to Brazil — in the 1920s.An underlying problem with this book is that what the author means by ethnicity and national identity is not developed or applied in a sustained way. Without a consistent analytical framework or overall argument, what emerges is a collection of incidents and anecdotes. Much of the discussion focuses on economic issues or race (or the trope of whiteness or whitening). It is not even clear whether the national identity in question is that of the various immigrant groups or Brazil's own. The documents at the end of each chapter show that the book is meant for classroom use, but undergraduates new to the history of Brazil will find many textual references and sweeping generalizations puzzling, and others misleading.Of the parts of this book's title, immigration is the most straightforward, and the general contours of the immigration stream are fairly clear. Before the 1880s, a sporadic trickle of mostly German speakers went to colonization projects, especially in the far south. From the mid-1880s to the 1930s, more than three million immigrants arrived, predominantly from Italy, Portugal, and Spain, with significant numbers of Japanese, Syrian-Lebanese Christians, and European Jews in the mix. Recent immigration has been more diverse, but it is small in numbers relative to the receiving population.The most important destination for new arrivals, particularly relative to the preimmigration population, was the coffee sector of São Paulo. While the contractual burden of a few hundred sharecroppers in the 1850s is explored in repetitive detail, the economic situation of several hundred thousand colono families in the postslavery era is subsumed in the baseless assertion that wages were higher in Argentina. Here, Lesser revives the tired mythology that immigrant coffee colonos everywhere and always suffered unmitigated exploitation, degradation, and misery in a persistently monolithic plantation complex, from which they fled at the first opportunity. One tabloid-worthy murder of a Brazilian plantation owner by an Italian worker in a case involving the honor of the killer's sister is discussed in detail, as if to suggest that it is representative of the Italian immigrant experience.Instead of an interpretive conclusion, the book ends with a discussion of recent emigration from Brazil, again with no clear understanding of how such phenomena relate to ethnicity or national identity. The reader is left wondering how it all fits together.