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Race, Resistance, and Regionalism: Perspectives From Brazil and Spanish America

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AFRICAN-AMERICAN REFLECTIONS ON BRAZIL'S RACIAL PARADISE. Edited by HellwigDavid J. (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1992. Pp. 285. $34.95 cloth.)
BLACK INTO WHITE: RACE AND NATIONALISM IN BRAZILIAN THOUGHT By SkidmoreThomas. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Pp. 334. $16.95 paper.)
BLACKNESS AND RACE MIXTURE: THE DYNAMICS OF RACIAL IDENTITY IN COLOMBIA. By WadePeter. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. 424. $58.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Judy Bieber
Judy Bieber*
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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Abstract

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Type
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , 1997 , pp. 152 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Such studies include Race and Class in Rural Brazil, edited by Charles Wagley (Paris: UNESCO, 1952); Roger Bastide, Estudos afro-brasileiros (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1973); Florestan Fernandes, A integração do negro na sociedade de clases (São Paulo: Dominus, 1965); and Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes, Brancos e negros em São Paulo (São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1959).

2. Howard Winant, “Rethinking Race in Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24, pt. 1 (1992):181–92. Winant's bibliography is comprehensive.

3. Some of the notable exceptions highlighted by Skidmore or Stepan are Nina Rodrigues, Artur Ramos, Edison Carneiro, Florestan Fernandes, Machado de Assis, and Manoel Quirino.

4. Such criticism has been especially apparent in the field of family history, where demographic historians have discovered that the extended multiracial household described by Freyre was specific to the elite in the coastal sugar-producing regions. Demographic studies from Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and even Salvador da Bahia have demonstrated that small nuclear households, often headed by single women of color, were the predominant family form. See Arlene J. Díaz and Jeff Stewart, “Occupational Class and Female-Headed Households in Santiago Maior do Iguape, Brazil, 1835,” Journal of Family History 16, no. 3 (1991): 299–314; Donald Ramos, “Single and Married Women in Vila Rica, Brazil, 1754–1838,” Journal of Family History 16, no. 3 (1991):261—82; Alida Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Paraíba, 1500–1822 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); and Elizabeth Kuznesof, Household Economy and Urban Development: São Paulo, 1765–1836 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1986).

5. The theme of racial degeneration has received more specific analysis in Dain Borges, “‘Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, and Inert’: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, pt. 2 (May 1993):235–47.

6. Affonso d'Escragnolle Taunay and Euclides da Cunha both expressed intense ambivalence about the abilities of mestizos, their experience warring with their intellectual presuppositions. See Peter M. Beattie, “National Identity and the Brazilian Folk: The ‘Sertanejo’ in Taunay's A retirada da laguna,” Review of Latin American Studies 4, no. 1 (1991):7-43; Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1944); and Robert Levine's reevaluation of the Canudos campaign in Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

7. The crucial role of the mulatto in the defining of race relations was analyzed earlier by Carl Degler. He posited that racial discrimination existed toward blacks but that mulattos formed a separate category with the possibility of upward racial mobility through marriage to a whiter individual. Thus socioeconomic class could offset race to a certain extent. Degler coined the term the mulatto escape hatch to describe assimilation of blacks into the dominant class through successive generations of whitening. See Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971).

8. George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

9. See Jeffrey H. Lesser, “Are African-Americans African or American? Brazilian Immigration Policy in the 1920s,” Review of Latin American Studies 4, no. 1 (1991):115-37; and Teresa Meade and Gregory Alonso Pirio, “In Search of the Afro-American ‘Dorado’: Attempts by North American Blacks to Enter Brazil in the 1920s,” Luso-Brazilian Review 25, no. 1 (Summer 1988):85–110. On Jewish immigration, see Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

10. Asunción Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma,” in Marriage and Sexuality in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asunción Lavrin, 47–95 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

11. On central Mexico, see Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988). On frontier regions, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Susan M. Socolow, “Acceptable Partners: Marriage Choice in Colonial Argentina, 1778–1810,” in Lavrin, Marriage and Sexuality in Colonial Latin America, 209–51.

12. For a discussion of the effects of public-health legislation on poor women and prostitutes in early-twentieth-century Argentina, see Donna Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

13. See Meade and Pirio, “In Search of the Afro-American ‘Dorado.‘”

14. For more on Degler's thesis, see note 1.

15. Such works include Sidney Chaloub, Trabalho, lar e botequim: O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Epoque (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986); and Chaloub, Visões da liberdade: Uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na corte (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990); Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Thomas Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistatice in a Nineteenth-Century City (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, A negregada instituição: Os capoeiras no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1993).

16. A different version of this book has been published in Brazil as Cindcrela negra: A saga de Carolina Maria de Jesus (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1994).

17. See James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

18. Michael R. Trochim, “The Brazilian Black Guard: Racial Conflict in Post-Abolition Brazil,” The Americas 44, no. 3 (Jan. 1988):285–301.

19. Quintard Taylor, “Frente Negra Brasileira: The Afro-Brazilian Civil Rights Movement, 1924–1937,” Umoja, a Scholarly Journal of Black Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring 1978):25-40; Kim D. Butler, “Up from Slavery: Afro-Brazilian Activism in São Paulo, 1888–1938,” The Americas 49, no. 2 (Oct. 1992):179-206; and George Reid Andrews, “Black Political Protest in São Paulo, 1888–1988,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24, pt. 1 (Feb. 1992):147–71.

20. Similar calls have been issued by scholars employing postmodern paradigms, especially within the framework of subaltern studies. See Patricia Seed, “Colonial and Post-colonial Discourse,” LARR 26, no. 3 (1991):181-200; “Founding Statement: Latin American Subaltern Studies Group,” boundary 2 20, no. 3 (1993):110-21; and Florencia E. Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review (Dec. 1994):1491–1515. See also Amaryll Chanady, “Latin American Imagined Communities and the Postmodern Challenge,” in Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference, edited by Amaryll Chanady (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), ix–xlvi. I would like to thank Suzanne Schadl for drawing my attention to these references.