“…To understand modern prejudice against nordestinos, it is fundamental to recognize the historical implications of the development of the Northeast. To begin, the Northeast must be located in the context of a broader international discourse over issues such as progress, modernization, miscegenation, degeneration, etc., and the way these processes influenced Brazil during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Gomes, Wegner, and Souza, 2017) European ideological and “scientific” paradigms such as positivism and eugenics came to be widely used by Brazilian elites to interpret social reality and to justify political moves that affected the nation’s social fabric.…”