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Brazilian Americans

Immigrants from Brazil began arriving in the United States in large numbers in the mid-1980s as Brazil began suffering a series of economic crises. The term Brazilian American is used here to include not only individuals of Brazilian parentage who were born and raised in the United States but also Brazilian immigrants who came to this country as children or adults. Their immigration and current situation are described in this entry.

Demographics

The most problematic feature of the Brazilian American population in the United States is its size. It is impossible to accurately gauge how many Brazilian Americans live in any region of the United States or in the country as a whole. The problem can be illustrated with the following figures. In 2004, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated that about 1.1 million Brazilians were living in the United States, while the 2003 American Community Survey counted only 237,000 Brazilians in the entire country. One reason for this discrepancy is that a significant but unknown number of Brazilian Americans are undocumented, making them less likely to participate in census counts.

Brazilian Americans are not very representative of their homeland in terms of social class, in that far more of them belong to the middle and lower-middle classes than their compatriots in Brazil, where a majority of the population is either working class or poor. Nor are Brazilian Americans typical of their homeland in terms of race, since most cluster at the lighter end of the color spectrum. Blacks and other “people of color,” to use the Brazilian phrase, account for perhaps 20% of the Brazilian American community, a fraction of the nearly 45% reported in the 2000 census for Brazil as a whole.

The racial makeup of Brazilian Americans is tied to their social class because Brazilian racial types are not randomly distributed across the nation's social strata. People of color are overrepresented in the lower ranks of Brazilian society, underrepresented in the middle sectors, and nearly absent among the nation's tiny elite. Thus, if Brazilian immigration is mostly a middle- and lower-middle-class phenomenon, it is not surprising that the Brazilian American population is lighter-skinned than the Brazilian population as a whole.

Brazilian Differences

To understand the place of Brazilian Americans in U.S. racial and ethnic hierarchies, one must be aware of the way Brazilians perceive race and ethnicity in their homeland. Brazilians have a strong national ideology that their land is a “racial democracy,” one without prejudice toward its darker-skinned citizens. The ideology, although untrue, nevertheless shapes the contours of interracial behavior and discourse in Brazil, smoothing its edges. While racial prejudice and discrimination do, indeed, exist in Brazil, their expression is more subtle than in the United States.

Unlike the United States, there is no “one-drop rule” in Brazil, the custom that defines anyone with any known or suspected African ancestry as being Black. The Brazilian system of racial classification is far more complex. First, Brazil has never had two discrete racial categories, Black and White, and Brazilians recognize and have words to describe a wide variety of racial types. Moreover, how individuals are classified racially does not depend solely on their physical appearance—their skin color, hair type, and facial features or those of their relatives. Social class, education, and manner of dress all come into play in assigning someone to a racial category. As Brazilians put it, “Money Whitens”; that is, the higher the social class, the lighter the racial category to which an individual belongs.

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