Legalizing Identities: Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil's Northeast (review)

For years, scholars have argued that racial and ethnic identities are constructed, but few have explored that process as well as Jan Hoffman French in her study of two rural communities in northeastern Brazil over the course of the last four decades. In this important book, Hoffman French follows the transformation of two groups of impoverished mixed-race peasants. One group became legally recognized Xocó Indians; the other, legally recognized remanescentes (remnants) of a quilombo, or community of self-liberated slaves. The study's many strengths derive from Hoffman French's use of the methods and sources of cultural anthropology and social history. Her findings depend upon participant observation, but also on "more than 100 interviews with residents, former landowners, lawyers, anthropologists, activists, politicians and government officials," as well as research in government, ecclesiastical and private archives (p. xiii).

With these methods, the author traces the process through which the members of two neighboring and closely related rural communities in western Sergipe began to self-identify as Indians on the one hand and Afro-Brazilians on the other, and how both groups obtained land and other resources when the Brazilian government legally recognized their claims to descent from historically repressed groups. The book is an intimate portrait of, among other things, the inner workings of a community that successfully used the "Quilombo Clause" of the 1988 Brazilian constitution to obtain land, even though some members of the community were known to be relatives of people recognized as Xocó Indians by the federal government. The discussion of the political and legal history of the Quilombo Clause is particularly enlightening.

The process began in the early 1970s with the arrival of a priest influenced by liberation theology in the backlands of Brazil's northeastern state of Sergipe. At that time, according to Hoffman French, the residents of neither São Pedro Island nor neighboring Mucumbo thought of themselves as Indians or as quilombolas. As they learned that some of their traditions were either indigenous or African and that self-identification as Indian or of African descent would bring benefits rather than harassment, they began to reveal family stories and local traditions. Politically committed anthropologists and priests then interpreted those stories, tying them to the traditions of indigenous or African Brazilians of the past. Over time, the two groups adopted a new public identity, as either Indians or remanescentes.

In a nation like Brazil, which once prided itself on being racially mixed and color blind, these developments are significant. The book is fascinating, but one wonders about one of its basic premises: In the past, the members of the two communities thought of themselves simply as racially mixed peasants. Many of the labels (racially mixed, pardo, mestizo, caboclo, or other) with which we describe such people were developed by elites to describe their poor neighbors, dependents, and slaves. We know relatively little about the ways in which rural poor folk described themselves to each other. Moreover, new research is indicating that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, exslaves as well as the descendents of Indians were encouraged to suppress or denigrate traditions growing out of their past as enslaved Africans or mission Indians. Can it be, however, that everyone did not completely forget where they came from, and that the signal that those traditions could be recovered safely is leading to their re-emergence? The question is an important one, which awaits further research.