Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present examines the immigration to Brazil of millions of Europeans, Asians and Middle Easterners beginning in the nineteenth century. Jeffrey Lesser analyzes how these newcomers and their descendants adapted to their new country and how national identity was formed as they became Brazilians along with their children and grandchildren. Lesser argues that immigration cannot be divorced from broader patterns of Brazilian race relations, as most immigrants settled in the decades surrounding the final abolition of slavery in 1888 and their experiences were deeply conditioned by ideas of race and ethnicity formed long before their arrival. This broad exploration of the relationships between immigration, ethnicity and nation allows for analysis of one of the most vexing areas of Brazilian study: identity.

RESUMO A crise do vírus do zika, como todas as doenças, é um indicador da desigualdade que persiste no Brasil mesmo após décadas de democracia. O zika ilustra disparidade não apenas em termos de classe e com a variedade de questões que se conectam com classe, como gênero e raça. Questões éticas relacionadas ao vírus do zika também têm impactos diferenciais em termos de escolhas reprodutivas, no uso de produtos químicos para a pulverização e no desenvolvimento de mosquitos geneticamente modificados. Ao utilizarem um conjunto multidisciplinar de métodos baseados em história, antropologia e ecoepidemiologia, os autores mostram como a crise atual do zika é parte do histórico de saúde no Brasil com as relações muitas vezes tensas entre atores estatais e população em geral.

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There once was a group of peddlers who sold their wares in the interior of Espírito Santos, going from place to place by mule. One of the peddlers was named Aziz and his wife, Marat, was considered the leader of the women who stayed behind as the men went out to sell their goods. These women went out every day to wash clothes in a place called the “Turkish bath” (bacia das turcas). Over time, the town that grew up around the place where the women washed their clothes came to be called Marataize in honor of the wife (Marat) of Aziz.In Brazil hyphenated identities are very real in spite of the fact that elite culture aggressively rejects such social constructions. Thus, while there are no linguistic categories that acknowledge hyphenated ethnicity (a third generation Brazilian of Japanese descent remains “Japanese” while a fourth generation Brazilian of Lebanese descent may become a “turco,” an “árabe,” a “sírio” or a “sírio-libanese”), in fact immigrant communities aggressively tried to negotiate a status that allowed for both Brazilian nationality and ethnic difference. Immigrant groups in Brazil often did this by claiming a more “original” or “authentic” Brazilianess than members of the European descended elite, often via active constructions of social myths specific to the Brazilian milieu (see “The Legend of the Town of Marataize” above). This is possible since immigrant ethnicity is not some “immutable primordial indentit(ies)” but rather, as Anthony Cohen and others have suggested, a self-conscious and symbolic means by which boundaries were built.