Brazilian Americans

Migration History

Less than 30,000 Brazilian Americans lived in the United States in 1960. Immigration from Brazil substantially increased following the Immigration Act of 1965, which abolished national origins quotas and diversified immigration to the United States by increasing the portion of immigrants from non-European nations. Approximately 2,000 Brazilian immigrants entered the United States each year from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, after which economic crises in Brazil produced a dramatic surge in migration. More than 21,000 Brazilians migrated to the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Whereas Brazilian immigrants before the 1970s tended to be middle class and college educated, more recent migrants have come from a working-class background and have taken up manual labor occupations, particularly in the restaurant and cleaning industries. Many immigrants send portions of their earnings to relatives in their homeland; Brazil ranks second to Mexico in remittances from the United States.

Racial-Ethnic Identity

Academics, pundits, and Brazilian Americans themselves debate whether Brazilians should be considered a Latino population. One side of this debate relies on an inclusive interpretation of latinidad, which argues that the designation Latino is shorthand for persons with heritage from Latin America; using that definition, Brazilians do constitute a Latino ethnic population like Puerto Ricans or Dominicans.

Others contend that the label Latino is virtually synonymous with the term Hispanic, thereby implying ancestry from a Spanish-speaking society. Under this more rigid and exclusionary definition, Brazilians (whose heritage derives from a Portuguese-speaking nation) do not count as Latinos. Popular opinions vary considerably on this subject, although the U.S. federal government officially defines the ethnic category Hispanic or Latino as “a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.” As such, the U.S. government does not consider Brazilian Americans a Latino population.

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