The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil (review)

The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality is a well-researched study that brings new perspective to the study of Brazilian regionalism by engaging with the construction by regional and national elites (politicians, intellectuals and artists) of a distinct racial and ethnic identity for the population of Brazil's nordeste, a region characterized by poverty, drought, centuries of slavery, and subsistence agriculture.

This approach to the study of both regionalism and of Brazil's northeast is welcome, as well as new. Previous work, which Blake engages historiographically, has focused on political and economic regionalism, religious movements, or social conflict. These approaches have tended to emphasize the political and cultural conservatism of the region and focus on its rigid social hierarchies, thus lending to a reading of the northeast as less dynamic than other parts of the country, particularly in the twentieth century. By examining the emergence of the northeast as a distinct region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the influence and application of ideas drawn from scientific racism and climatological determinism, Blake brings into focus a regional elite that is much more dynamic in both intellectual influence and policy making than has heretofore been shown. This regional elite provided local interpretations of broad transnational currents in medicine, eugenics, anthropology, and economic development. Blake's treatment of this intellectual milieu both broadens and deepens our understanding of twentieth-century Brazilian social thought.

Blake has produced the most engaging kind of regional history—he examines both how national and international currents, such as the emergence of scientific racism, or the growing national political centralization of the Vargas era (1930-1945), influenced local histories. Second—and this is both a more difficult and more significant task—he makes a persuasive case for how the construction of a regional identity shaped national currents of thought and policy. Here we see something of a counterpoint to the trend toward transnational studies, particularly those with diasporic focus; just as historians have increasingly situated global currents (particularly in the sciences, medicine, and racial thought) in national contexts, Blake shows us how the national interpretations of these currents are ultimately adapted to regional contexts and come to serve local interests.

Blake makes use of extensive primary research, conducted predominantly in Recife, Pernambuco. He focuses on state records and on the papers and publications of a small elite, but it is important to bear in mind that for the period under study, the population of Brazil's northeast was overwhelmingly illiterate, making it very difficult to engage systematically with popular perspectives. Blake shows a refined historian's instincts in the interpretation and contextualization of his material. In particular, he does an effective job of integrating his study within multiple historiographical contexts, bringing to bear broader studies about ethnicity and immigration to Brazil, as well as those treating race and regionalism in other Latin American countries, such as Nancy Appelbaum's and Peter Wade's work on Colombia. And he engages the U.S. literature on eugenics, the social sciences, and the history of psychology.

In short, this is a well-crafted and carefully executed study that brings a new approach to understanding the construction of an important Brazilian regional identity, using the lens of racial thought. Blake's study will be influential in shaping the historiography of Brazil by diversifying our understandings of racial thought in a local and regional context, and in bringing to bear the importance of racial and ethnic identity on our understanding of regionalism. His work would provide valuable insight in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on race and ethnicity in Latin America and the history of Brazil.