Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil

Despite great ethnic and racial diversity, ethnicity in Brazil is often portrayed as a simple matter of black or white, a distinction reinforced by the ruling elite’s effort to craft the nation’s identity in its own image - white, Christian and European. In Negotiating National Identity Jeffrey Lesser explores the role ethnic minorities from China, Japan, North Africa and the Middle East have played in constructing a national identity, thereby challenging dominant notions of Brazilian nationality and citizenship. Seeking to realize their vision of a white Brazil, the ruling classes welcomed desirable European immigrants yet did not anticipate the potential threat of social and labour activism. In reaction, Brazilian elites recruited migrant labour from Asia and the Middle East, then expanded the definition of whiteness , encouraging the new arrivals to consider themselves white regardless of their actual race or ethnicity. Believing, however, that their ethnic heritage was too high a price to pay for the privilege of being white, many of these immigrants have created alternative categories for themselves, such as Syrian-Brazilian, Korean Brazilian and so on. By examining how acculturating minority groups have represented themselves, Lesser reenvisions what it means to be Brazilian. Based on extensive research, Negotiating National Identity should be valuable to scholars and students in Brazilian and Latin American studies, as well as those in the fields of immigrant history, ethnic studies and race relations.