Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945 by Jerry Dávila (review)

Book Reviews 105 ente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others, as well as the production of prints by these and other artists. For revolutionary Cuba, the author considers music, film, painting and poster art as the representative forms. In the chapter on Nicaragua, consideration is given to revolutionary sculpture, painting, poster art and literature. The Sandinistas evidently adopted and built on the canon of Latin American revolutionary art established by the Mexican and Cuban revolutions. The book also includes, as appendices, three seminal texts on art in these revolutions-Diego Rivera’s “New Plan of Study, Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas de MCxico,” Gerard0 Mosquera ’s “The Social Function ofArt in Cuba since the Revolutions of 1959” and Ernesto Cardenal’s “The Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979: A Culture that is Revolutionary, Popular, National and Anti-imperialist"-as well as interviews with Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli, and several artists of the Unidn Nacional deArtes Plasticas (of Nicaragua). Craven has brought together and addressed the major artistic expressions of the three Latin American social revolutions of the twentieth century. There is, perhaps, too much nostalgia in his perspective on this political art and its state sponsors. As Julio Valle-Castillo noted above, utopian social projects, like all human enterprises, are fraught with contradictions and conflicts. The achievements as well as the failures of the Mexican, Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions are still being assessed. Endnotes I “Literatura y revolucidn en Nicaragua: entrevista con Julio Valle-Castillo”. SELA XXXV1.3: p. 3 Ibid. Edward Hood Northern Arizona University Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 19171945 . By Jerry Davila. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 292, $21.95. Darcy Ribeiro, in his seminal work 0 Povo Brasileiro: A Fonna@o e o Srntido do Brad 2”“ed. (2002), has characterized Brazil as “one national ethnicity ... the Brazilian people are integrated into one national ethnicity, constituting therefore one people incorporated into one unified nation, one uni-ethnic state” 106 The Latin Arnericanist Spring 2005 (p. 22),while others have characterized Brazil as a “laboratory of civilization.” Either way, race-relations in Brazil have been a complex and sometimes conflictual reality. As T. L. Smith has pointed out in his book Brazil, People and Insriturions (1963), under the “veritable cult of racial equality” it is unacceptable to admit that racial discrimination exists in Brazil and any expression of racial discrimination is attacked as un-Brazilian (p. 66). In Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945, Jerry DBvila explores how the idea of race underwent a dramatic shift in the first half of the twentieth century by examining the history of the Rio de Janeiro school system between 1917 and 1945. Dkila succinctly demonstrates how in the interwar period the dramatic proliferation of social policy initiatives in Brazil was subtly but powerfully shaped by beliefs that racially mixed and nonwhite Brazilians could be symbolically, if not physically, whitened through changes in culture, habits, and health. To analyze the racial politics of that time, the author in Diploma of Whiteness shows how public schools, often considered one of the most important agents of political socialization in Latin America, promoted the idea that whites were inherently fit and people of African and mixed ancestry were necessarily in need of remedial attention. Remedial attention to the “sickness” of Brazil’s racial composition was to be provided by eugenics, the practice of improving the human race physically and mentally by manipulating genetic traits, primarily through controls on the act and context of procreation (p. 24). According to Divila, there were two reasons for the unique public role of eugenics in Brazil. First, it provided the emerging scientific, medical, and social scientific authorities with a shorthand for explaining ideas of racial inferiority and defining strategies for managing or ameliorating that inferiority. Second, eugenics armed this group (Brazilian eugenicists) with a scientific solution to what was basically a social problem (p. 26). Since their arrival in Brazil, African descendants have been fighting for a position of respect in order to escape their position of inferiority , which was imposed upon them by their slave-owners. Since the African descendants’ failure of accomplishments was blamed on...