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Negotiating National Identity

Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil

Duke University Press

The Hidden Hyphen

Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, Italians, Arabs– Don't Miss The Most Brazilian Soap Opera on Television

–Advertisement for the Bandeirantes Television Network telenovela Os imigrantes (1981)

At the end of an escalator that only goes up, I have a vision of Brazil's ethnic world. The escalator is in a nondescript building in São Paulo's traditional immigrant neighborhood of Bom Retiro. On the ground floor are tiny storefronts, one after another, selling clothes, cloth, handbags, and belts. Pushing through this teeming gallery, I reach the escalator. As I step off, there is a crowd negotiating their identities as Brazilians. In front of me is the little lanchonete serving "typical" Brazilian bar food like esfiha or kibe that might be recognized in the Middle East, or the suggestively named "Beirute" sandwich that would not. To the right is Malcha's, a falafel shop, owned by a woman who left Yemen to settle first in Israel and then in Brazil. Her menu reveals her clientele: it is written in Portuguese, Hebrew, and Korean. On the left side are a group of tiny Korean restaurants that share the rest of the floor with sweatshops that I glimpse through cracked boards. A peek inside suggests that most of the laborers are Bolivian and that most of the owners are Korean. The lingua franca is Portuguese, and home is a Brazil where shared culture revolves around social and economic opportunity.

Bom Retiro has long been viewed as an "ethnic" neighborhood. When Italians and Portuguese settled there in the nineteenth century, they saw the luxurious country homes that dominated the neighborhood along with the nearby Jardim da Luz, founded as São Paulo's botanical garden. Later, as Greeks and East European Jews entered, they mixed uncomfortably with students from elite educational institutions like the Escola Politécnica and Escola de Farmácia e Odontologia, both later incorporated into the University of São Paulo. Immigrants may then have seen the world of the elite up close, but it was still far away. Recently, however, things have changed. Today, every corner in Bom Retiro has a newsstand full of glossy magazines with titles like Japão Aqui (Japan Here) and Raça Negra (Black Race). The ostensibly African religion of candomblé has exploded while practice of the syncretic umbanda has diminished noticeably. The music shops sell compact discs by thesertanejo group Nissei/Sansei, who proclaim that Brazilian country-western music, when sung in Japanese, achieves a "particularly artistic melody." To the consternation of some Jewish residents, Bom Retiro's Renascençe school has a number of Brazilian children of Korean immigrants who do not seem to mind studying Hebrew as part of their educational program.

Ethnicity, it seems, has become a popular motif in modern Brazil. While such open expressions may be new, ethnicity has been critical to the negotiation of Brazilian national identity over the last 150 years. This haggling undoubtedly happened at all levels of society, but my focus is on how and why immigrants and their descendants entered into public discussion with Brazil's political and intellectual leaders. These real-life strangers were, as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, "relevant whether ... friend or foe." They werediferente in a country where the popular definition of the word describes something that straddles the border between acceptable and unacceptable. What the newcomers understood, however, was that an apparently static elite discourse was in fact ambiguous. Unlike Eric Hobsbawn's peasants who "work[ed] the system ... to their minimum disadvantage," these immigrants both manipulated and changed the system, rapidly becoming an integral part of the modern Brazilian nation even as they challenged how that nation would be imagined and constructed.

The sense of being different yet similar was particularly noticeable among the non-Europeans who stood to gain the most by embracing both an imagined uniform Brazilian nationality and their new postmigratory ethnicities. These identities were multiple and often contradictory, and the symbols available to draw upon and rework were in constant flux. Throughout the twentieth century, members of a growing immigrant elite (university students, directors of farming colonies, small and large business owners, journalists, and intellectuals) engaged actively in a public discourse about what it meant to be Brazilian–via newspapers, books, the political arena, and frequently in mass action–with influential state and federal politicians, intellectuals, and business leaders. They created written and oral genres where ethnic distinction was reformulated to appropriate Brazilian identity. Some insisted that they were "white" and thus fit neatly into a traditional society that ran along a bipolar black/white continuum. Others, however, refused to categorize themselves with those terms. These immigrants (and their descendants) insisted that new hyphenated categories be created under the rubric "Brazilian." This was not an easy or smooth process, and attempts to legislate or enforce brasilidade (Brazilianness) were never successful. As the millennium approaches, Brazil remains a country where hyphenated ethnicity is predominant yet unacknowledged.

What does it mean to be a public "Brazilian," and how is "Brazilianness" contested? From the mid-nineteenth century on, both terms, and the notions behind them, were increasingly arbitrary, creating the space needed by newcomers to insert themselves into, or to change, paradigms about national identity. A single or static national identity never existed: the very fluidity of the concept made it open to pushes and pulls from below and above. While a relatively coherent elite discourse asserting ethnicity as treasonous was intended to constrain and coerce new residents into accepting a Europeanized and homogeneous national identity, this should not be confused with the actual ways in which it was perceived at either the elite or the popular level. Indeed, immigrants and their descendants developed sophisticated and successful ways of becoming Brazilian by altering the notion of nation as proposed by those in dominant positions. The thesis that elite conceptions of national identity were predicated on the elimination of ethnic distinctions thus must be modified to include the challenges progressively incorporated into notions of Brazilianness.

The shifting sands of nationality and ethnicity were frequently revealed in discussions over the desirability of certain immigrant groups. Much of the language stemmed from Lamarckian eugenics, which theorized that traits, and thus culture, were acquired via local human and climatic environments. The eugenic proposition that a single "national race" was biologically possible provided a convenient ideological scaffold for national and immigrant elite support of policies to promote the entry of "desirable" immigrants who would "whiten" the country. Eugenics-influenced policy initially favored the entry of German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian workers as braços para a lavoura (agricultural labor). Yet a fear of social and labor activism, and concerns about whether even Central Europeans would assimilate (Sílvio Romero's 1906 attack on the "dangers [of] Germanism" was the most famous) encouraged a look at non-European groups. This necessitated a modification in the language that linked desirability to Europeanness. The elite craving to make immigrants "white," regardless of their ostensible biological race, matched neatly with immigrant hopes to be included in the desirable category. "Whiteness" remained one important component for inclusion in the Brazilian "race," but what it meant to be "white" shifted markedly between 1850 and 1950.

The experiences of Syrian, Lebanese, and Japanese immigrants and their descendants (known respectively as "Syrian-Lebanese" and nikkei) shows the transformation of whiteness as a cultural category. Three very flexible strategies emerged that, while at some times in competition and at others intertwined, crossed group, spatial, and temporal lines. Some immigrant elites argued that their own group was ethnically "white," proposing to render their premigratory identities harmless in return for inclusion in the pantheon of traditionally desirable groups. Others proposed that "whiteness" was not a necessary component of Brazilianness. Instead, they promoted the idea that Brazil would improve by becoming more "Japanese" or "Arab," terms constructed to mean "economically productive" and/or "supernationalist." These immigrants sought to interpret class status as a marker of Brazilian identity, allowing ethnicity to be maintained even as its importance was dismissed. They also proposed that a presumed blind loyalty to rulers prior to migration would be turned into modern Brazilian nationalism. Finally, many immigrants and their descendants seemed to reject all forms of inclusion by creating ultranationalist groups that, at least on the surface, sought to maintain political and cultural loyalty to the countries of origin.

The subjects of this book constructed and used multiple ethnicities that operated in both parallel and intersecting planes. Assimilation (in which a person's premigratory culture disappears entirely) was a rare phenomenon while acculturation (the modification of one culture as the result of contact with another) was common, even among those who ostensibly rejected majority society by remaining in closed communities. While the "special sorrow" (to borrow Matthew Frye Jacobson's term) of immigrants and their descendants was to create a vision of an unreal national past, hyphenated Brazilians incorporated many elements of majority culture even as they endured as distinct. Acculturation, not surprisingly, often went unrecognized by both outsiders and insiders.

Members of the Brazilian elite were as bewildered as immigrants about the relationship between ethnicity and national identity. Some saw desirability as geographically based and urged prohibitions on immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. Others saw the granting of the full legal and social rights of citizenship to Syrian-Lebanese and nikkei as a reasonable price for economic growth. Still others wavered, wondering if the Brazilian state might insist on the disappearance of immigrant ethnicity and garner the benefits of immigrant labor. My analysis of these disparate positions suggests that mestiçagem, which many scholars have taken to mean the emergence of a new and uniform Brazilian "race" out of the mixing of peoples, was often understood as a joining (rather than mixing) of different identities, as the creation of a multiplicity of hyphenated Brazilians rather than a single, uniform one.

I have constructed a research model that explores public immigrant ethnicity as expressed in the language of the majority. While much of this discourse has been ignored by scholars both in Brazil and abroad, this is not a story of "hidden transcripts." Rather, the written, oral, and visual texts I have used were openly expressed and understood by immigrants, their descendants, and members of the majority society whose public positions reveal much about private strategies of inclusion and cultural maintenance. Much of the documentation was created in Portuguese, and I have had the good fortune to find translations of materials ranging from Arabic-language poetry to Japanese-language haiku and government documents. Taken together, this material shows how attitudes about ethnicity are both constructed by, and construct, notions of national identity.

As private identities were interpreted for the public sphere, a tug-of- war took place between the leaders of non-European immigrant communities seeking to define social spaces, and politicians, intellectuals, and the press attempting to create the boundaries of Brazilianness. The tension was often expressed as racism, but this is not exclusively a study of bigotry. Rather, prejudice and the stereotypes that emerge from it were one way that identity was contested as negotiating positions were expounded and then revised as different publics responded. This cultural, economic, and political bargaining left neither side unchanged, keeping Brazilian majority society and postmigratory identities in a constant state of flux. In the end, a homogenization of national or cultural identity simply never took place.

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Since the mid-nineteenth century, the world of non-European immigrant ethnicity could be found in large and small cities throughout Brazil, from Porto Alegre in the south to Belém near the mouth of the Amazon. It could be found in agricultural colonies in São Paulo, Paraná, and Rio Grande do Sul. It could be found in the hinterlands of Goiás and Minas Gerais. While non-European immigrants came from the Middle East and Asia, they were not of any single national, racial, or religious group. Tying them together was social and economic opportunity in a country so consumed with notions of race and ethnicity that even futebol players were believed to have the "qualities" of a "people," and the scoring of four goals in one game by seventeen-year-old Pelé made him "racially perfect."

The relationship between race and Brazilian identity, however, is not one of color alone. Indeed, the concept of race is far more complex, and perhaps debased, than the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European dictionary definition of a "population ... of human beings who through inheritance possessed common characteristics." Cultural presumptions about racial hierarchy and categories formalized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reflected and promoted a sense of European superiority, and many Brazilian thinkers were monogenesists who saw race as biologically and environmentally linked. The German anatomist and naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, author of the influential De generis humani varietate nativa (1775/1776), was one of the most frequently cited of the early scientific racialists. He believed that the area around the Caucasus Mountains produced "the most beautiful race of men," and he placed the "Caucasian race" at the top of his racial hierarchy. Such ideastouched the core of Brazil's elite, desperate to derive legitimacy through tentative connections to distant places and cultures. By asserting that geography (i.e., nature) was the basis of race, "white" immigrants in Brazil would create a European-like national identity that would smother the native and African populations with its superiority. Even the wordraça was fluid: it could refer to people (the human race) or animals (breeds) or, even more generally, species. The same words could describe a person's cultural identity or dehumanize him/her as a "half-breed." Race was an elusive category, and the language of race shows a visceral concern with defining the "other."

Nothing allowed social chemists to see their country as a "racial laboratory"–that ubiquitous metaphor for Brazil–more than immigrants. Immigration played a central role in policy from at least 1850, when it became clear that slavery would not exist long into the future. Although most elites did not seek to use immigrants as a replacement for an eliminated native population (as was the case in Argentina), they did assume a high correlation between immigrant entry and social change. An influential nineteenth-century book on colonization viewed immigrants as the "seed" of municipal life from which would spring the "powerful force of homogeneity and cohesion that will pull together and assimilate" the population at large. In 1888, the literary critic Sílvio Romero used the language of chemistry in asserting that immigration was a social reagent to be handled with the greatest of care since Brazil had "a singular ethnic composition." In the 1930s the anthropologist and Brazilian National Museum director Edgard Roquette-Pinto made the same point as he tried to distinguish between those who "created" wealth and those who "consumed" it. More recently both Brazilian scholars and international observers have looked to Brazilian culture for its "unique" power of assimilation. Ethnicity, then, was never only about social culture, it was about economic culture as well.

Immigrants challenged simplistic notions of race by adding a new element–ethnicity–to the mix. All of the 4.55 million immigrants who entered Brazil between 1872 and 1949 brought premigratory culture with them and created new ethnic identities. Yet it was the 400,000 Asians, Arabs, and Jews, deemed both nonwhite and nonblack, who most challenged elite notions of national identity. Double assimilation was the key to creating a clear national identity: as colonists became Brazilian, Brazil would become European. Thus, as ideology metamorphosed into policy, who was denied entry became as important as who entered. Words like imigrante and brasileiro came to have much of the same fluidity as "raça," applicable to present residents or potential ones, to those born inside and outside of Brazil.

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Excerpted from Negotiating National Identity by Jeffrey Lesser. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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