Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (review)

Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. By Jeffrey Lesser. Latin American Studies/Race & Ethnicity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 281 pp. Cloth: $49.95. Paper, $17.95.

A homogenized Brazilian national identity could be achieved by recruiting white immigrants to bleach out the native multiracial masses, eventually creating a modern, Europeanized society; thus spake the eugenics-intoxicated policy planners and the scholars who followed their lead. Now here comes Jeffrey Lesser. Having previously explored the non-white, non-black image imposed upon Jewish immigrants in Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question, Lesser next put his emerging theoretical framework at the service of the pathbreaking comparative study, Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America: Images and Realities. The present work builds on this earlier research, expanding the realm of immigration history into an exploration of the psycho-jungle awaiting those who confuse biology with culture. Categorizing individuals according to their racial origin, with its corollary belief that culture is biologically determined, resulted in some astonishing non-sequiturs: the Portuguese "discovery" of both Brazil and Japan would cause those two countries to develop along similar lines; or a supposed biological link between Arab and Tupí would allow contemporary Syrians and Lebanese to blend effortlessly into a Brazilian identity.

Lesser examines serially the various phases of Brazil's immigration policy. Nineteenth-century plans to import Chinese laborers to replace the soon-to-be-emancipated slaves came to little effect but did establish the grounds for discourse over admission of immigrants who were neither black nor white. An effort by League of Nations representatives to resettle Christian Assyrians in Brazil failed despite initial enthusiasm, as nativists portrayed these refugees from Muslim Iraq as pawns of British imperialism. Meanwhile, successful Arab immigrants to Brazil benefited from the perception of them as "insiders," because outwardly they looked like Brazilians, though they also partook of "outsider" status, being neither black, white, nor yellow. This ideological disjunction, claims Lesser, combined with the immigrants' economic success, allowed them to carve out a hyphenated identity for themselves despite the resistance of native Brazilians to any dilution of national identity that might diminish the cherished vision of themselves as Europeans.

The bulk of the book treats of the immigration of Japanese to Brazil. This migration was sponsored with equal vigor by Brazilian landowners and by the Japanese government, which was interested in offloading its surplus farm population. Utilizing Brazilian government archives, the press in Brazil and in the immigrants' countries of origin, as well as a wide range of secondary sources, Lesser takes us far beyond immigration statistics and the policies that created them, to ransack the political, social, and psychological dimensions of immigration by Japanese and the subsequent appearance of their Brazilian-born nikkei offspring. "Whiteness" remained an important standard for acceptance of immigrant groups and inclusion in the Brazilian "race" well into the twentieth century. But as the Japanese immigrants endeavored to turn themselves into acceptable and accepted Brazilians, Lesser argues, what it means to be "white" changed from a racial to a cultural category. Ethnicity remained a bad word, but mestiçagem led to the creation of "a multiplicity of hyphenated Brazilians" (p. 5). Not only has no distinctive new Brazilian "race" emerged, but Lesser argues that "Brazil remains a country where hyphenated ethnicity is predominant yet unacknowledged." Instead of the elite imposing a homogeneous national identity on immigrants, the immigrants and their descendants altered the notion of what the nation truly was meant to be.

In a final apotheosis, many Brazilians began looking to postwar Japan for the model of a modern nation. Increasing numbers of nikkei began migrating to Japan: between 1950 and 1990, 200,000 nikkei left Brazil for Japan, where at last they became known as Brazilians; while one quarter that number of Japanese settled in...