XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Unraveling (Luso)Latinidad: Children of Brazilian Immigrants' Racial(ized) Experiences in the United States

• In Event: Land of opportunities? The lives and fates of Brazilian migrants to the US

Abstract

The United States is home to the largest Brazilian community outside of Brazil. As this diasporic group grows, it becomes important to understand how its later generations are conceptualizing race and negotiating racial identification as they navigate U.S. society. Centering the narratives of ten children of Brazilian immigrants, the present study sought to address the following questions: (1) How do they navigate their racial identification within a U.S. context in which there is no consolidated category to account for mixed racial ancestry and Latinidad is racialized? More specifically, if they identify as Latine, (2) how do they conceptualize and justify their belongingness to this identity given their non-Hispanic Brazilianness? Participants in this study were found to experience an asterisked identification process in the United States: regardless of how they chose to negotiate their racial identification within a U.S. context, their claims to their asserted identities were prone to contestation. This occurred because the dominant U.S. racial system not only fails to accommodate Brazilian Brownness but also marginalizes Brazilian Whiteness, Blackness, and Latinidad. The United States' inability to account for Brazilianness ultimately placed the participants in this study in an identification limbo — too South American to be White or Black, too Lusophone to be Latine.

Author

• Luísa Bridi Dacroce, UT Austin