Becoming White Ethnics: German-Brazilian voluntary organizations in 1950s and 60s Brazil

• In Event: Hyphenated Identities in Postwar Latin America I: Constructing ethnic belonging in Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Argentina

Abstract

Mythologies of “racial democracy” that informed Getúlio Vargas’s social policy during the Estado Novo (1937-1945) reached their greatest social influence in the post-WWII period. Within this elite conception, the Brazilian nation could not be spliced into constituent parts: Brazilians were the product of an ongoing process of biological and cultural mixing that rendered forms of racial or ethnic identification undesirable, if not impossible. At the same time, intellectuals from Brazil and abroad began to recognize and study the persistent—even expanding—inequalities between perceived ends of the black/white color spectrum.

The cavernous divide between the difference-denying discourse of racial democracy and contemporary social realities has been studied through the dual lenses of race and class. The establishment and flourishing of ethnic voluntary associations during the 1950s and 60s, however, demonstrates that the century of migration prior to WWII plays a role in this story as well. My paper identifies continuities and divergences with pre-Vargas era ethnic voluntary institutions to argue that in the post-war Brazilian context, belonging to such institutions was as much a claim to whiteness (especially as a marker of belonging to an emerging middle class) as about diasporic identities.

My paper draws on the vast institutional archive of the most important post-war German-Brazilian voluntary organization: the 25th of July Cultural Center in Porto Alegre. Demographic data on the first three hundred members, as well as information on the Center’s activities and internal debates, shed light on the motivations of individual members and the group as a whole.

Author

• Glen S Goodman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign