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...