Brazil National Identity Analysis

Jeffery Lesser’s Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil is a motivated, praiseworthy effort to describe the complex, evolving relationships between immigration, ethnicity, and national identity in Brazil since 1808. Brazil declared its independence from Portugal in 1822. But their connection to Portugal lead to many of the problems it had after its independence. Brazil has been always, even from the times it was a part of Portugal, a slave state. It was its national identity, along with being a state of immigrants. Brazil’s act of striving for a “white” Brazil was used as an immigration tactic. They had to do this as their economic system was based on slavery and modeled it after that of the US. It was deeply rooted in the society …show more content…
Brazil was a growing economy that beckoned for many new types of immigrants. This growing population went to work in the vacant plantations and later the newly industrialized factories popping up across the country. “With mass immigration also came discontent among those unwilling to endue terrible treatment on plantations and in factories.” (77) This terrible treatment echoed the treatment of the slaves however not as gruesome but just as strenuous. The growing diversity brought about for the massive influx of immigrants brought with it a sense of racial consciousness, where the newly immigrated population insisted on their “whiteness”. They distanced themselves from the Afro-Brazilians to not be linked to slavery and to seem in contrast better. Afro-Brazilians after being oppressed through the entire history in Brazil, now shared their tribulations along with the people that were supposed to fix up Brazil by “whitening” it. “Italian Immigrants and Afro-Brazilians were associated with crime, and an independent study found that Italians, Portuguese and Afro-Brazilians to be overrepresented in accusation of violence…” (77) If you stop and think about those statistics it may not seem clear, but the fact is, that if a subset of immigrants were more associated with crime, then that other means that they were not all alike. When the leaders of an infant Brazil wanted a …show more content…
“The immigrants…did not fulfill all those expectations. They were no more likely than slaves to be productive on plantation when poorly treated.” (116) With the aforementioned growing tensions between natives and the Europeans over exploding into violence; the ambition for personal success as well as success for community were at odds with the previously mentioned exploitative labor and these two things combined forced Brazil to look for another group of immigrants to abuse. This group being the Arbs and the Jews. Both groups challenged the elite’s belief that immigration policy alone would create a new kind of Brazil. “Members of the Portuguese-descend elite linked Jews and Arabs for historical reasons…Brazilians believed that Arab and Jewish ‘blood,’ for better or worse was a component of Portugal’s and thus Brazil’s national character” (117) It is a very outdated sense of ethnicity but this is what Brazilians believed and therefore were able to easily state that they could infuse them into their society in place of the stubborn Europeans. There were other that claimed crazy thing such as Brazil being a lost tribe of Israel. Arabs and Jews did meet the elites’ goals being successive. Religion was an important component of the migration of the Arabs and Jews. Brazil primarily being a Catholic country, they had to change