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Title: Coming to Grips with Race: Second-Generation Brazilians in the United States

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2004

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Abstract: How do Brazilian immigrant youths notions of race and racial identities mutate as they spend more time in the United States, and more importantly, as the first generation becomes the second generation? How do the children of Brazilian immigrants (both foreign-born and U.S.-born) come to understand their racial identities and the significance of race in the United States, versus in Brazil? What do these generational identity mutations mean for the Brazilian American community at large, as well as the interplay between Brazilian and American ideas of race? How does the later-generation Brazilian experience compare with those of other latergeneration Latin American-origin immigrant groups in the United States?I use results from 1990 and 2000 U.S. census data, as well as 22 semi-structured interviews with Brazilian immigrant youth in Boston, to show how Brazilians are becoming racialized into the black-white binary of American society, and how over time they manage to escape the downward mobility of Hispanic/Latino categorization by becoming (mostly white and some black) Americans and playing off U.S. natives Spanish-centered understanding ofHispanics/Latinos. I highlight an important part of this trend, showing how and why some second-generation Brazilians come to look back on their first-generation immigrant counterparts as non-whites or Latinos. I conclude by highlighting some key comparisons between thisgenerational trend and those of the descendants of other Latin American-origin immigrants, and by exploring Brazilians place in and contributions to the changing racial order in the United States today. The later-generation Brazilian case may help advance the case of black exceptionalism, where in the midst of a reshuffling of the American racial hierarchy, not being black may become a more central feature of identity formation and understanding in the United States than not being white, and where in the collective several Latin American-origin immigrant groups (including Brazilians) may become whiter over time by virtue of identifying increasingly as non-black as well as non-Hispanic/Latino.

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Authors: Morrow, Helen B.

Conference Name: BRASA Congresso Internacional VII

Publisher Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity

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