Transnational Desires: Brazilian Erotic Dancers in New York

2. Representing the Nation: Class, Race, and Sexuality

45 Chapter 2 Representing the Nation: Class, Race, and Sexuality In Brazil, the construction of national identity came with the reappropriation of two central categories of the colonial discourse: race and sexuality.1 Brazil—a country that received more African slaves than any other in the world—never had an official policy of racial segregation . Mixing was encouraged by the state in various periods of history, and Brazil has a significant racially mixed population. Particularly when slavery was abolished and when European evolutionist theories of race became prevalent, Brazilian thinkers and the state had to come to terms with the country’s perceived unique racial makeup, as compared to Europe’s and North America’s. What became known as “racial democracy” in Brazil resulted from an effort to transform what European thinkers defined as a mixed, mongrel race into a source of national strength. While in earlier writings racial mixture was a source of degeneracy , in the seminal work of Gilberto Freyre it became a source of national pride: Brazil lived a “racial democracy” in comparison to racist German Nazism and the racial segregation of North America. However, the discourse of “racial democracy” not only left un­ resolved but also may have aggravated social inequality in Brazil, to the disadvantage of the African-descent population. In Brazil, the lighter shades of skin color still correspond to the more politically and economically privileged groups, while the darker shades correspond to the less advantaged. Nevertheless, racial mixture discourses are crucial to Brazilians’ sense of self and ways of experiencing the body (Parker 1991; Correa 1996; Pinho 2004). They are embedded in the ways Brazilians think of themselves and their relationship to others, relation- 46 Transnational Desires ships that increasingly cross the borders of nation-states. In fact, it is an argument of this book that it is through a particular language of mixture that Brazilian women articulate a discourse about modern sexuality , a malleable body, and a particular manipulation of racial relationships by which they envision their migration to the United States, yet at the same time reproduce Brazil’s structures of inequality. Brazil’s elite and middle class have always wrestled with their identities vis-à-vis the elite and middle class of European and North American centers. The formation and historical development of Brazil as a colonized country has been tied to a world of goods and values located outside Brazil. During the first few centuries of colonization, the Brazilian economy was based on sugar cane plantations and cattle farming, organized in an oligarchic structure of large farms and plantations serviced by slave labor (Viotti da Costa 1985). Production was directed to the export of raw material and the import of manufacturing goods. Although a middle stratum of the populace participated in the service sector, not until the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the transformation of the oligarchic social structure did a middle class develop in a more significant way. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Brazilian state had expanded and the industrial subsidiaries of coffee production burgeoned. The transformations introduced by industrialization, urbanization, new forms of technology, transportation and communication, and the growth of the educational system came hand in hand with a discourse about modernization and an increasing concern with the racial makeup of the country. As Brazil was grappling with its economic inferiority vis-à-vis industrialized nations of the Northern Hemisphere, Brazilian thinkers were trying to find paths that would lead Brazil toward a place among other modern nations. The eugenics theories prevalent in Europe in the late 1800s argued that centuries of racial mixing were responsible for the creation of a mongrel race that, left to its own devices, would forever impair the development of a nation. Preoccupied with the “racial degeneration” of its population, the Brazilian government and intellectuals saw a need to “whiten” it (Hofbauer 2006; Skidmore 1993). After the abolition of slavery in 1888, government laws forbade Africans to enter the country, while European migrants were recruited in their countries of origin and given subsidies to settle in Brazil. Ac- Representing the Nation 47 cording to Lesser (1999), between 1872 and 1949, four and a half million foreigners entered Brazil (particularly Portuguese, Italians, Spanish , and Germans, but also Japanese and Middle Easterners), settling mainly in the South. In the process of whitening the Brazilian population and importing a supposedly more skilled labor force, the Brazilian state and elite failed...