tysontrips

5 November, 2005

What Is A Brazilian?

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."
"OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!"
His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands. Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

Part II: A Brazilian Wax: Waxing Ethnomic
Praia Da Pipa, Brazil - A far more superficial method of classifying Brazilians than by their shining personalities is classifying them by their ethnic or racial background, which often times relates to the region of Brazil in which they can be found. In Brazil, like in most of the rest of the world, these ethnic immigrations were based on the economy of the colony and those opportunists who chose to take advantage of this situation - and those who were forced to move to the colony to work as slaves. Hence the word ethnomic. Such classifications and generalizations are probably not fool-proof or entirely fair but they are surely apparent in Brazil., as you would notice if traveling from region to region as I have. Moreover, I can see many of these ethnic differences even more clearly due to the fact that I am a former professional ethnic profiler. Yes, you read that correctly. This was a job as a bouncer I had at a nightclub on an island in Greece where I was literally paid to keep out certain - according to the management - 'troublesome' ethnicities such as Italians (again, according to the management: they always show up in large groups and scare off the women), Israelis (they are aggressive and combative), Palestinians (they are aggressive and combative...to Israelis), and tragically, Greeks (they don't buy enough drinks). Obviously, one of the results of me doing my job correctly was a brawl with a big groups of Italians. People, especially large groups of drunken men, don't respond kindly when you tell them they can't come in because of their ethnicity. But I also gained a definite compassion for certain oft-discriminated against ethnicites, and, above all, a well-trained eye for noticing the subtle differences between various European and Middle-Eastern cultures and their accompanying physical characteristics. So as a former ethnic profiler, current hasty generalizer and lifetime inadvertent stereotyper, I feel semi-qualified to describe the gamut of Brazilian ethnic types I have come across during my South to North travels in Brazil.

The Southeast:
Being bestowed the nickname 'Gringo' in the Southeast was more shocking to me than insulting, as my skin was darker than many of my peers who called me by it. Immigration by Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Mideastern, and migration of hoards of the impoverished from all over the country make Sao Paulo and Rio the 'melting pot' of Brazil. From Swedish looking blonds to dark Afro-Brazilians, all types can be found in this region of Brazil which makes up 75% of the country's population.

Bahia:
This large, mid-coastal state is said to have a population consisting of 75% of African descent. The residents are the legacy of an era of slavery lasting 300 years. Many blacks migrated from farther North to harvest the cacao fruit after the sugar industry took a tailspin.

The Northeast:
The region in which I am currently traveling is much larger than Bahia and is relatively light-skinned comparatively. But the Northeast seems to be a fairly mixed area (Native, European, African) and the locals have the blended skin tones and facial structures reminiscent of other Latin American countries.

The Amazon:
My next stop has an increasing population of both indigenous tribes and a number of immigrants from other parts of Brazil.

Waxing Ethnomic
So what forces produced such a varied ethnic makeup across the vast Brazilian landscape? Like in most other parts of the world, Brazil's current population stems from massive immigrations, internal migrations, exploitation of natural resources, greed, slavery of certain ethnicities, and world economics - not necessarily in that order. In other words, ethnomics explains why Brazil looks like it does today. For about 300 years Brazil was a Portuguese colony. But the colony was intended to be less a permanent settlement or thriving political unit and more a territory in which to derive profit for Portugal. Unlike the colonization process of North America, where self-sufficient colonies were eventually created, Brazil was designed to be nothing more than a revenue outpost for the Portuguese (although it produced suprisingly little revenue) from its inception. Even the name Brasil comes from an Amazonian hardwood (Pau Brasil) which was a popular wood in Europe and was logged nearly to extinction hundreds of years ago. Since the beginning of this exploitation of natural resources in Brazil, the history of ethnomics - the story of ethnic immigration and migration based on the harvesting of resources for economic gains - has been a repeated history of a boom of sorts for a newly exploited agricultural product, followed by a mas influx of groups of entrepreneurs or forced laborers, followed by a subsequent bust of the market and, finally, another migration of humanity to another locale or onto the newest boom.

Before the end of slavery in the 1880's, these booms always meant that groups of the indigenous population and/or slaves were brought in to do the lion's share of the physical labor. The first major cash crop for the Brazil colony was sugar. From 1530 up even until now sugar is a huge revenue producer here. Sugarcane is primarily grown in the NE where I am now. This area being fertile for sugarcane and also strategically positioned as the closest point to Africa in the Western hemisphere (The Easternmost point of Brazil is even closer to West Africa then to Southern Brazil!), naturally tens of thousands of slaves were brought in, land was cleared, and some in Northeast Brazil prospered even up to today. But when the West Indies began to compete in the sugar market, the bubble burst and the economy stagnated, leaving thousands to battle for the waning flow of money or to migrate to a larger city to find work (this is how Brazil's favelas were formed) or to seek out the next boom and bust.

Above: Sugarcane fields......forever?

Similar market booms and busts, some much smaller and some even briefly larger, occurred around the country throughout the next few hundred years. In Minas Gerais there was a gold rush in the 18th century. In the Northeast tobacco was also grown in large quantities. In Bahia, just south on the coast below the Northeast, the cacao fruit was exported to Europe to make chocolate. But in the 1990's disease struck and killed off many of the cacao trees. The market crashed and only a few were able to share the small profits. I asked my friend from Ilhéus, the cacao capital of the world, what all these thousands of people do now that they can no longer subsist in cacao. "They just sit around and wonder why they are poor," she answered.

Coffee had and still has widespread success in Brazil from North to South - making up two-thirds of the exports in the 1880's. In the mid-1800's the possibility of wealth from the coffee-growing industry lured hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Japan, Eastern Europe, Lebanon, and others to the State of Sao Paulo and the surrounding states, where they worked on fazendas (farms or plantations) to produce coffee and other agricultural products. The results of this immigrations can be seen in the faces of the people who walk the streets of Sao Paulo today, many having a foreign or European look. Sao Paulo also boasts the largest Japanese population in the world outside of Japan. Unfortunately, when drought or bust strikes without warning, the poor masses are always forced to converge upon the cities, creating favelas and millions of homeless (Sao Paulo city is thought to have more than 20 million inhabitants living in its sprawling suburbs).

Another boom occurred in the Amazon with the discovery of the rubber tree in 1912 - used to make automobile tires. The city at the mouth of the Amazon river, Belem, thrived in the monopolistic wealth created until some opportunists stole a few rubber tree seeds and cultivated them in Asia, creating a competing market. Prices plummeted and the boom went to bust. And, of course, there was also the diamond boom in Chapada Dimantina. Currently, one of the big Brazilian exports is the soy bean. More Amazon is destroyed to make soy bean fields than for anything else. Conveniently, the wood from the Amazon is also coveted around the world, so these two destructive markets compliment each other. The trafficking of drugs, guns and cheap electronics across the border and into Brazil are all popular booms at the moment as well.

[Sidenote: Gun trafficking may become less poplular, as the Brailian population just overwhelmly killed a national proposition which would have outlawed firearms, which means many more guns will likely be produced inside the country instead. I believe Brazil, as the firearm mortality capital of the world, with more than 36,00 killed by guns last year alone (a number which is steadily rising) may have proverbally shot itself in the foot by voting to keep guns around. Brazil has a higher homicide rate than some African countries mired in civil war at the moment. The gun lobby - armed with a powerful television campaign aimed squarely at the poor - claimed that more guns will mean more protection and more safety. They also made the argument that "It's your right to own a gun" (does this sound familiar, USA?). In my mind, flooding the market with guns isn't going to 'protect' anyone. But that's just my opinion. But for now I will wait for the ensuing river of blood to arrive and sweep me and my opinions away for good.]

Back to the Brazilian wax. So what does a Brazilian look like? It is really impossible to say due to immigration from Europe, Africa and Asia. Certainly the facial charicteristics of the people living in various parts of Brazil have been dictated first by massive immigration and later by rampant migration within the country itself. From Brazil's modest beginning as a small colony to it's maturation into one of the world's largest economies, internal and external economic forces have given impetus to the myriad ethnic groups moving throughout the country. Ethnomics might be the best way to understand why a Brazilian looks the way he does today. Questions, comments?