Becoming Brazuca: Brazilian Immigration to the United States (review)

No one knows for sure, but there are probably more than a million Brazilian immigrants living in the United States today. They are largely concentrated in the Greater Boston area; the New York-New Jersey metropolitan region; southern Florida; Houston, Texas; southern California, and the San Francisco Bay area. The trend indicates that they are migrating in larger and larger numbers to other urban centers, such as Atlanta and Chicago. In small towns throughout New England one can also usually spot a Brazilian flag on a tiny downtown storefront window, indicating that a shop sends international money orders to Brazil and also sells goods, such as farinha, carne seca, and guaraná.

Four decades ago, one barely noticed the presence of Brazilians in the United States. Other than the stream of tourists from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and other cities seeking bargain deals at a string of shops on 46th Street in Manhattan, handfuls of graduate students on Brazilian government fellowships studying at prestigious universities across the country, or the enthusiastic chatter of overly excited middle-class Portuguese-speaking kids waiting in line for a ride at Disney World, anyone seeking a Brazilian would be hard put to find one. Immigrants did exist, but they remained scattered in urban centers largely on the East and West Coast, without a strong demographic concentration, business presence, or other visible signs of a coherent community. That has changed in the last two decades, and the volume under consideration offers an outstanding interdisciplinary overview of the complexities of this recent migration to the United States.

With the flood of European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese immigrants to Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, Brazil, like the United States, offered people from other countries new homes and chances to better their lives. Although that flow declined in the 1930s and during World War II, picking up only slightly in the 1950s, relatively few Brazilians left their country for opportunities abroad. The economic crises of the 1980s marked a new trend of outmigration to the United States, Europe, and Japan, with the largest number of expatriots seeking their fortunes in the colossal to the north.

Ever since Maxine L. Margolis published her pioneering ethnographic study, Little Brazil: Brazilian Immigrant in New York City (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), there has been a mini-boom in studies by Brazilian and U.S. scholars about this intriguing recent phenomenon. While the first scholars studying Brazilians in the United States considered them to be an “invisible” minority because there seemed to be few patterns of concentrated residency in specific neighborhoods or communities and few noticeable social and civic organizations springing up, most scholars now would probably agree that Brazilians are indeed quite in evidence.

There are many explanations for why Brazilian immigrants didn’t immediately coalesce into a coherent and obvious social group. Notions of Brazilian linguist, cultural, and historical uniqueness vis-à-vis other Latin Americans left them at first somewhat distant from the much larger immigrant groups from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. The reluctance to assume a “Latino” identity and a slightly higher educational background of many Brazilian immigrants led them to disperse into neighborhoods and areas where they might blend in with mainstream Americans. Moreover, mutable Brazilian notions of racial categorization conflicted sharply with the ways that people in the United States still largely understand race in binary terms, leading many lighter-skinned Brazilians to claim whiteness and distance themselves from Latino “otherness.” Yet, as this edited collection clearly demonstrates, Brazilians of all social classes and racial backgrounds have coped with the challenges of migration in ways similar to and at times different from other groups that have arrived in the United States to seek their fortunes and improve their lives and those of their children.

This volume is derived from the First National Conference on Brazilian Immigration to the United States...