Sheriff Embracing Race

Embracing Race:Deconstructing Mestigagem in Rio de Janeiro

resumoBaseado num trabalho de campo realizado numa favela do Rio de Janeiro, este

artigo propoe a necessidade de uma reavaliacîo do entendimento convencional dascategorias de rac,a no Brasil. Pesquisadores anteriores haviam assumido que afro-brasileiros se identificam usando multiplas categorias racias. Atrave*s de uma analisedo uso diario de varios termos e das conceptualizac,6es locais de significacô, oargumento e feito que os residentes da favela usam termos de rac,a-cor numa variedadede contextos discursivos que expressam func,6es lingiiisticas distintas. Termosintermediaries como moreno podem ser usados para descrever um grupo espeefficx)de caracterfsticas (em vez de uma "categoria racial") ou, alternamente, podem serusados como termos de cortesia ou como eufemismos. E significante notar que osresidentes da favela conceptualizam ra9a como uma nocô bipolar. Assim, apesar deusarem termos de ra9a—cor, os residentes da favela insistem que todos afro-brasileirossao membros da "ra9a negra". Este fato influencia significativamente os debates sobreas caracten'sticas de consciencia racial e democracia racial no Brasil contemporaneo.

It was a sweltering afternoon when I put aside the field notes I had beenreviewing and remembered that it was something of a holiday, a special daythat I had marked in my research calendar weeks before and then forgotten. Ihad been living in Morro do Sangue Bom, a favela (hillside shantytown), inRio de Janeiro for nearly a year.1 I was studying race and racism—thorny andpainful topics wherever they have a bearing on the shape of people s lives, butthey were especially so in Brazil. I had been interviewing middle-class whiteswho lived close to the shantytown, as well as activists committed to Brazil'ssmall black movement, but my chief concern was with the ways in whichpoor Brazilians of African descent approached the issues of race, racism, andracialized identities. Morro do Sangue Bom was a predominantly black com-munity but no one I knew there had mentioned the significance of the date; itwas November 20, 1991, the anniversary of the death of Zumbf, the militantleader of Palmares, a 17th-century community of escaped slaves.

Unlike the glowing tale of the kind-hearted Princesa Isabel, who is creditedwith single-handedly freeing the slaves, the story of Zumbf—like the historyof Brazilian slave insurrections and rebellions in general—was largely forgotten

The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8(1):86-115 copyright © 2003, American Anthropological Association

86 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

Robin E. SheriffFlorida InternationalUniversity

until the 1980s. At that time, black militants and sympathetic historians madeconcerted efforts to resurrect his name. As a result, some of my informants inMorro do Sangue Bom had begun to hear the name of Zumbi when referenceswere made to him in the carnival lyrics of 1988, the centennial of the abolition ofslavery in Brazil. In 1990, when I began asking people on the hill about Zumbi,they would say, "Oh yes, Zumbi of Palmares. He was a great leader of thenegros [blacks]." Few, however, could tell me more.

It was thus with a sense of keen curiosity that I took one of Morro doSangue Bom's many labyrinthine paths to the home of my friend Joia. Likemost of her coresidents, Joia was a person of color, a woman who sometimesreferred to herself as morena (loosely translated as brown-skinned woman)2

and at other times as a negra—an unambiguously black woman. Joia and herhusband, Daniel, had been born on the hill and between her labor as a domesticservant and his as an air conditioner repairman, they cobbled together a livingand supported two sons in a dilapidated but welcoming home. In commonwith most of the people in her community, Joia had only a glancing awarenessof the existence of a black movement in her country. She knew the name ofZumbi, however, and knew that he was an emergent symbol of black pride.

When I stepped into Joia's house I found her younger son, Tiago, and herfriend and next-door neighbor, Elena, there as well. "You know, I just remem-bered that today is the day of Zumbi," I remarked. After a moment of silence,I added, "But it doesn't seem to be very important."

Tiago, a nine-year-old who like his mother was a person of uncommonwit and intelligence, begged to differ. He squared his slight shoulders, puffedout his chest, and said, "He is important to me because he was a leader of thenegros. And I am a negro."

I was startled by his announcement, but before I could pursue the issuewith him, Elena jumped in: "You are not a negro, Tiago," she corrected him,"You are a mestizo. You are mixed. Isn't that right, Joia?'!

Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestiqagem in Rio de Janeiro 87

Joia, who had been sweeping up the remains of a broken glass, straightenedup briefly, sighed, but then only nodded wordlessly. Tiago looked crestfallenfor a moment, but then he too simply shrugged and left the house to playsoccer with his friends.

My record of this brief conversation seems to lend credence to the view,held by many Latin Americanist scholars, that Brazilians of color tend not toidentify as negros. "Racial mixture," " mesticagem" "cultural hybridity," andthe plethora of race-color terms that describe, inscribe, and invoke such notionsare assumed to decenter racialized opposition such that black consciousnessand politicized forms of negritude are nonsensical in Brazil. The fact thatAfrican Brazilians tend to choose from among a host of intermediate terms—moreno (brown), mulato (mulatto), and mestigo (mixed), for example—is takenas evidence that they seek to eschew unambiguous black identities and do notsee common cause with one another. This view, however, fails to account forthe fact that Tiago did indeed wish to honor his martyred African ancestor; hejustified his wish not on the basis of a mixed heritage that he shared with allBrazilians but on his identity as a negro.

In this article I argue that Tiago was not alone. Many Brazilians of Africandescent do, in fact, identify as negros. The assumption that they do not isbased, to a large degree, on a misinterpretation of what people like Tiago andElena are doing when they use words such as negro (racially black), preto (thecolor black), moreno (brown), mulato (mulatto), pardo (mixed), mestico(mixed), and so on. In places such as Morro do Sangue Bom, race-color termstend not to be used in the way anthropologists usually assume—to classify orcategorize a person as a member of a "racial type." Rather, such words—withthe exception of the term negro—are used to describe cor (color), which is notconflated with race, or even more commonly they are used as polite euphemismsthat avoid stigmatizing references to blackness. In the ordinary contexts oftheir use, race-color terms are less often conceptualized by their speakers astypological signs than as tokens within a system of etiquette. The colloquialexpression, "If you do not pass for white, you are black," is common in Morrodo Sangue Bom and elsewhere in Brazil. This article examines the implications ofthat expression and presents evidence for the existence of bipolar conceptionsof racialized identity in Brazil.3

My argument is not merely a sociolinguistic one; it is situated within alarger debate about the nature of race relations and racism in Brazil. As is wellknown, dominant Brazilian racial ideologies assert the existence of democraciaracial (racial democracy)—the notion that racism is particularly mild or nonex-istent in that country. In the contemporary discourses of democracia racial,discrimination is figured as a result of class identity (and the disadvantagesassociated with poverty) rather than color or concepts of race. Many Brazilians,


especially those of the middle and upper classes, continue to maintain thatwidespread miscegenation and what are assumed to be multiple categories ofrace represent evidence for the racial democracy thesis. Some scholars, more-over, insist on what might be called a "middle ground": while racism exists inBrazil, its forms are attenuated and softened by the existence of multiple racialcategories (Da Matta 1997; Fry 1995, 2000; Harris et al. 1993, 1995). Lack-ing essentialist conceptions of race and leaning always toward fluidity, ambi-guity, and the blurring of racial boundaries, Brazilians, it is asserted, haveneither the ideological conviction nor the stable target necessary to create andmaintain consistently racialized patterns of oppression. My argument alliesitself with the scholarship that critiques the racial democracy thesis from his-torical (Andrews 1991; Butler 1998; Skidmore 1993a), demographic(Hasenbalg 1985; Lovell 2000; Lovell and Dwyer 1988; Silva 1985; Woodand Carvalho 1988), cultural (Burdick 1998; Goldstein 1999; Twine 1998;Sheriff 2001), and political (Hanchard 1994) angles. It does so, however, byexploring a previously unexamined question: What exactly are poor Brazil-ians of African descent doing—in ideological, cultural, and linguistic terms—when they manipulate what is widely regarded as a notoriously complex race-color lexicon? What, in addition, does the manipulation of this lexicon tell usabout the nature of racialized consciousness among poor African Brazilians?More broadly, what does it tell us about how racism is experienced in a coun-try where its existence tends to be publicly denied?

Discourses of Mesticagem, Democracia Racial, and Fluidity

Brazil's celebration of mesticagem, or "racial mixing," is usually attrib-uted to sociologist and historian Gilberto Freyre. Writing in the 1930s, Freyreenjoined Brazilians to embrace the "lubricious union" of the nations foundingracial triad—Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians—and to view miscege-nation not as a weakness but as the creation of a vibrant and sturdy race thatwould populate a "New World in the Tropics" (1986). Freyre credited Portu-guese colonialists with nonracist sensibilities, qualities that permitted thedevelopment of erotic and affectionate relationships between masters and slavesand that paved the way for what would become Brazil's democracia racial.Many Brazilians, particularly those of the middle class, continue to echo Freyre'spronouncements: "How can we be racist when so many of us are mixed?"

Freyre was more a codifier of the discourses of democracia racial thantheir creator, and historical research has demonstrated that elite discoursesabout racial mixture underwent significant and ideologically critical shifts inthe late 19th and early 20th centuries. At first taken in and preoccupied byEuropean discourses about racial degeneration and the dangers of "mongrelism,"elite Brazilians later subscribed to the notion that Brawl's population would

Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mesticagem in Rio de Janeiro 89

gradually be improved by miscegenation, through the process ofembranqueamento (whitening). In genetic and racial terms, it was believedwhiteness would supercede and eventually cancel out blackness (Skidmore 1993a).

Although historians of Brazilian racial ideologies (Skidmore 1993a; Stepan1991) have focused on the elite creation and dissemination of the notion ofwhitening, a similar concept probably developed in a parallel fashion amongslaves, and later African-descended workers. The desire to seek lighter-skinnedmates was and remains a pragmatic strategy, directed toward the hope thatone's children might achieve more favorable positions in what is—despite thespecious claims of democracia racial—a political economy of racial hierarchy(see Burdick 1998; Goldstein 1999; Sheriff 2001; Shapiro 1996). Many ofthe fundamental contradictions within Brazil's contemporary racial politicsstem from the collision of these two discourses—that of democracia racialwhich asserts that Brazilians have avoided the more rigid forms of racializedprejudice and discrimination that plague countries such as the United States,and that of embranqueamento, which asserts that blackness is a problem, astigmatized identity that ought to be erased through miscegenation.

It is generally assumed that it was the process of miscegenation itself, aswell as a tendency to see race as a fluid rather than a bipolar quality, that led tothe development of an enormous number of race-color terms. These race-color terms, anthropologists have asserted, constitute a "system of racialclassification" that while similar to understandings of race in much of thelarger Latin American region, is markedly different from the way North Ameri-cans classify race.4 This interpretation of the cultural function of race—colorterms has been widely accepted and has come to serve, in fact, as a distinct,alternative model of "racial classification." In his textbook for introductorycourses in anthropology, Conrad Kottak has summarized this view of Brazilianconceptualizations of race: "Through their classification system Braziliansrecognize and attempt to describe the phenotypical variation that exists intheir population ... Brazilians have devised a way of describing human biologicaldiversity that is more detailed, fluid, and flexible than the systems used inmost cultures" (2000:147-148). Reference to the notion that Brazilians concep-tualize racial identity as composed of multiple (rather than bipolar) cat-egories is, in fact, requisite in all discussions of race and racism in Brazil; it istaken not merely as received wisdom but as "commonsense."

Our assumptions about this "system of racial classification," and thelanguage used to describe it, stem partly, I believe, from the persistent reificationand naturalization of race itself—whether it is defined as a multiple or a bipolarquality. More specifically, for Latin Americanist scholars these assumptionsreceived their codification in a seminal article published by Marvin Harris in1970. Harris devised a set of 12 drawings—cartoon-like would be an apt


description—depicting "a combination of three skin tones, three hair forms,two lip, two nose, and two sex types" (1970:2). The drawings were presentedto a cross section of 100 Brazilian adults who were asked to provide race-colorterms for the "persons" depicted. In Harris's much-cited conclusion, he collected"492 different categorizations" (1970:5). The following year Roger Sanjekpublished an article based on a similar experimental methodology. He elicited116 terms, "the largest corpus of terms collected in a single locale" (1971:1127).Although Harris and Sanjek argued that racial meanings were highly ambiguousin Brazil—so ambiguous that their informants showed a stunning lack ofconsensus in their attributions—they suggested that the cultural and linguisticfunctions of the terms they collected were not. Such terms were defined as"raciological taxonomies," or "racial categories," and these terms together wereassumed to constitute the "Brazilian system of racial classification" (Harris1970; Sanjek 1971). Although Harris's conclusions about the ambiguity (oftencalled "fluidity") of racial classification in Brazil are often cited in LatinAmericanist literature, the artificiality (and superficiality) of his methodologyare rarely recalled or described.

Harris's and Sanjek's studies, as well as the more generalized tendency toconceptualize Brazilian race-color terms as primarily classificatory or typo-logical in function, beg a number of critical questions. What, in fact, areBrazilians of color doing when they use intermediate terms such as morenoand mestiqo in nonexperimental contexts? How do they themselves articulatethe context-bound meanings of race—color terms and how do they account fortheir ambiguity? How do they conceptualize the relationship of such terms tonotions of specifically racialized identity? What, generally speaking, is theirmetadiscourse—how do they talk about the ways in which they use the languageof race and color?

"Only White and Black Exist": The Discourse on Race

Let me return to Elena, the woman who insisted on the day of Zumbithat Tiago was not a negro but a mestic.o. In an attempt to understand themeaning of race-color terms in Morro do Sangue Bom, I asked my informants toprovide terms for themselves. Elena was one of my first interviewees. She haddark skin and what Brazilians tend to call cabelo bom (good hair)—that is,tresses that do not resist the comb but fall in smooth waves to the shoulders.She described her facial features as fino, a word that means "narrow" whilealso connoting refinement. Elena's configuration of features, she explained,were given by the fact that her mother was white and her father was black.

Jose*, Elena's husband, also had what might be called a "mixed" appearance,but in a rather different way: his lips and nose were fuller than Elena's, and hehad reddish hair, whose texture was what Brazilians call cabelo ruim (bad hair).

Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestigagem in Rio de Janeiro 91

His skin was much lighter than Elena's and freckled. It was precisely this di-versity of phenotypical features, the anthropological literature led me to believe,that represented the raison d'etre for Brazil's complex "system of racial classi-fication."

However, when I asked Elena to provide a term for herself, she said withouthesitation, "Preta [black]." "And Jose?" I asked, trying to conceal my surprise."Preto also," she said and continued, "Only branco and preto [white and black]exist. The rest of those things don't exist."

Later in our conversation, she explained, "That's right, only preto andbranco exist. The rest of those things don't exist, no. We've mixed it all up,right? Branco, moreno, mulato—I don't know what all—but they don't exist,no.

Other informants echoed Elena's pronouncements. My landlady, DonaJanete, for example, ceded that the term mulato might refer, like black andwhite, to a real category, but she insisted that all other terms, no matter howcommonly used, were an "an invention of the people."

As my interviews continued, I began to elaborate on my questions aboutrace-color terms. I asked many informants to list all of the words they couldthink of that referred to race or color, to define those terms for me, and todescribe the contexts of their usage. Moving away from my initial assumptionthat such terms are typically used in a simple dassificatory sense, I began toelicit metalinguistic data: I asked informants to speak about how they usedthe terms and understood their meanings.

Rosa, a dark-skinned woman in her forties, responded to my request forcolor terms and their definitions:

Rosa: Preto, moreno, mulato, pardo, russo.5 If the hair isn't straight, they'renegro, right?

Robin Sheriff: And what else?

R: There are Japanese, for example, but they're white.

RS: Okay, what does "preto"mean?

R: Preto is preto, right? [We laugh.]

RS: What does "moreno" mean?

R: It's preto also, right? It's the same thing.

RS: What does "mulato" mean?


R: For me, that's preto also.

RS: What does "pardo" mean?

R: Light-colored people with hard hair; I think its preto.

As we were talking, Rosas friend Carla dropped in for a visit and beganreheating coffee at the stove. A woman in her twenties, Carla had very lightskin. Her hair was covered by a scarf. "Like her, like her color," Rosa said,gesturing toward Carla. "But the hair—show her your hair, Carla—it's hard."(The expression "hard hair" is used to describe hair that is extremely curly ortightly kinked; it is synonymous with the expression "bad hair," but it is morepolite.)

Carla obligingly removed her scarf. "So, a light person with hard hairis " "Is negra," Rosa finished for me, using a term that unambiguouslyrefers to blackness. "Aren't you?" Rosa pointedly asked Carla. "Are you white?"

"No," Carla responded. As I will illustrate in the following section, theterm negra is often thought to be offensive and, quite aside from that fact, Iwas startled that Rosa had presented Carla with a simple, bipolar choice. Ifshe was not white, Rosa implied, she must be a negra. Carla did not balk atthe choice and went on to tell me about an employer she had worked for as adomestic servant. "He didn't like my color," she said; he had "found it hor-rible." Her relatively light skin was not fundamentally significant to her racialidentity, Carla implied. She was seen as and saw herself as a negra regardless.

Rosa's view that most or all race-color terms (excepting those that con-note whiteness) signify racial blackness was echoed by other informants. Forexample, Susana, a woman in her thirties, provided a similar set of responses.I asked her to list all the terms she could think of and she began: "Preto,negro, right? Preto, negro, and [pause] moreno. They say that. There's a guyhere, he's a mulato from Paraiba [a state in Brazil's Northeast], He calls memorena,' you know? He doesn't call me 'preta' or 'pretinha [diminutive of

preta}. He says it like, 'Hey morena!'"

In my interviews with her, Susana tended to refer to herself as a preta or asa negra, but as she pointed out, others might, in calling out to her, use theterm morena. (I had observed this sort of usage many times in quotidian,conversational contexts in Morro do Sangue Bom.) As Susana seemed to imply,the use of this term might have more to do with social context—with etiquette, inother words—than with what Susana (or others) perceived to be her racialidentity. As our interview continued, she provided five of the most commoncolor terms: mulato, moreno, pardo, neguinho (diminutive of negro), and preto.As had Rosa, Susana told me that all these terms meant negro. She offered noqualifications.


I took a slightly different tack with Yvonne, a woman in her late twenties.After she had provided a number of race-color terms, I asked her, in morespecific terms, to tell me about appearance. She began with preto:

Robin Sheriff: What does a preto look like?

Yvonne: A preto? Oh, for me a preto is one who didn't pass for white,[Preto i aquek que nao passou de branco],

RS: What? I don't understand.

Y: If one is not white, one is black,

Nestor, a man in his thirties, clarified this simplified notion of racial bi-polarity. For him, as for so many of my informants, it was a mistake to assumethat a "racially mixed" person—one who might be called "mestico" or "moreno,"for example—occupied a category that was different and separate from negroor preto. If one was mixed, Nestor explained, one was, ipso facto, a negro:

Robin Sheriff: So, a question. You said in the other interview that we didthat you are a negro. Didn't you say that? [He nods,] So, I'm confusedbecause you could be moreno, or pardo, or negro, or whatever—

Nestor: It is because of the color, it passes. For example, the definition isthe following: "Passou de branco, preto e," I define it this way,6

RS: But this expression, "passed by white is preto"

N: It defines—"passed by white is preto"—it defines everything. Onewho doesn't have light skin is a negro, in general. Everyone, In Brazil thisis so. It's hard in Brazil to find a person with really light skin,

RS: So, you can say, in this other sense, in this sense that we are speakingnow, that most of these people [morenos, pardos, etc] are negros also? Isthat right? Because they aren't white?

N: In Brazil, yeah. The majority, I will tell you the following: 98 percent is allnegro. It's a mixture. Passed by white is preto. There are very few purewhites here in Brazil, right? Because there is a great deal of racial mixture,

RS: But a mixed person also has this idea that he is a negro?

N: That's right.


In one of our interviews, my landlady, Dona Janete, also suggested that"mixed" people were, by definition, negros. In the same conversation, shereferred to her son Jacinto as a negro and as a mestico. "So, mulato, moreno,jambo7—all these people can be of the black race?" I asked her. "Of the blackrace, yes," Dona Janete replied unequivocally. Referring to both of her sons,neither of whom had very dark skin (their father was white), she added, "Be-cause isn't the mother negra? Am I not negra? I am negra! That's what I think."8

In all these cases, my informants in Morro do Sangue Bom interpretedmy queries as questions about the "real" meaning of race—color terms and asquestions about what they evidently conceived as a bipolar system of racialclassification that was thought to underlie a deceptively complex terminology."Look, there are two colors," one informant said as though she were reiteratingwhat ought to be perfectly obvious, "white and black."9

If poor Brazilians of African descent such as those in Morro do SangueBom embrace a bipolar conception of racial identity, why do they, as manyBrazilians and Brazilianist scholars have observed, overwhelmingly prefer otherterms—morenoy mestifo, mulato, and so on—when they speak of themselvesand others? I argue that this preference has far less to do with how AfricanBrazilians actually think of themselves in terms of racial identity than with theways in which they negotiate and manage the complex social etiquette inwhich race-color terms are embedded. This point will be clarified by examiningthe semantics and linguistic functions of the term negro.

"What the Masters Called the Slaves": The Word Negro andPragmatic Speech

During one of my first visits to an organization associated with the blackmovement, I asked one of the activists there, "Why is that people don't likebeing called 'negro'?" With considerable invective, she leaned over me andreplied, "How would you like it if someone called you a worthless, ugly thing,shit, dirt, less than a dog?"

As my quotation of people in Morro do Sangue Bom suggests, the termnegro is sometimes used as a neutral reference for one who is said to belong tothe raga negra (black race). Most black militants insist that the term negroought to be reappropriated and embraced with pride. As my activist informantmade dear, however, this is more easily said than done. In everyday speech,the word negro is commonly used as an epithet, as a racist slur. This fact wasabundantly confirmed by my informants in Morro do Sangue Bom.

As Tiago, Joia's son, told me on one occasion, "Negro is a name that thewhites gave to the blacks." To explain, he described a scene he had seen ontelevision in which a white man was whipping a black man and calling him


"negro." The word, Tiago intended to suggest, was the linguistic equivalent ofbeating someone with a whip. "The word negro is offensive because it's whatthe masters called the slaves," Rosa similarly explained. "The word negro isprejudiced," a 12-year-old girl told me, "It is generally used by racist people."Another informant explained, "That is a word used to criticize. It means youwant to humiliate someone." "You can't call someone a negro," Joia's friendElena told me. "That will start a fight!"

My landlady, Dona Janete, explained, "Negra is a very dirty word. I thinkthat people should avoid calling others 'negro.' I feel offended when I amcalled 'that negra over there.' I don't want to be called that.. .In my conscious-ness—well, you know that I am a negra, but no one talks like that ... Evenwhen the person is lighter than the one who says this, they feel offended ... Ithink, generally here, no one likes it." Although she insisted that intermediateterms were "an invention of the people" and assured me that she and her sonswere, racially speaking, negros, Dona Janete followed the local etiquette inavoiding the word in everyday speech.

The term negro is firmly anchored within a set of racist associations thatare common throughout the Americas. As a cultural trope, the figure of thenegro was familiar to everyone in Morro do Sangue Bom: the negro is thoughtto be dirty, stupid, ugly, sexually promiscuous, given to thievery, drunkenness,and immorality. "A white man running is in a footrace," goes the old Braziliansaying, "and a negro running is a thief." Similarly, a very well-known sayingthat I heard repeated among my middle-class white informants states: "If thenegro doesn't shit on entering, he shits while leaving."

Writing about the urban context of Sao Paulo in 1969, Brazilian anthro-pologist Florestan Fernandez noted, "The word negro becomes interchangeablewith words such as drunkard or boozer, carouser and thief; and negro womanbecomes interchangeable with streetwalker" (1969:176). (Needless to say, whitedrunkards, boozers, thieves, and so on are never called "negros," nor by anyother term that associates social deviance with concepts of race!) Despite theobvious degree of ideological contradiction involved, such associations andthe discourses that articulate them continue to thrive alongside the platitudesof democracia racial.

The connotations of the word negro have certainly been noted, at leastanecdotally, in the literature on race and racism in Brazil, but their implicationsfor our understanding of the relationships among race-color terminology,racial classification, and racial identity have not been fully explored. What Iwant to emphasize is not merely the fact that the term negro and others like itare associated with negative qualities—and that they thus bespeak the realityof racism in Brazil—but that such words have a power that extends well beyondthat of mere reference.


As John Austin (1962) pointed out in his seminal analysis of linguisticfunctions, utterances often have a performative function. Linguistic and culturalanthropologists (for example, Crapanzano 1992; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990;Silverstein 1979) have drawn our attention to what is called the indexical orpragmatic function of speech. A pragmatic utterance is both context-specificand context-creative in the sense that it can and often does mark or enact aparticular kind of relationship between speakers. The power of pragmaticspeech, in other words, lies in what it does, as well as in what it says.

R. Brown and A. Gillman's (1960) classic analysis of second-person pro-nouns illustrates this point. Latinate languages (Brown and Gilman provideexamples from French) allow one to address ones interlocutor with the formalsecond-person pronoun "vous" or the informal pronoun "tu." In the formercase, a speaker communicates deference, respect, and possibly social distancevis-a-vis one's interlocutor. In the latter case, one signals familiarity or intimacy(or possibly condescension) with one's interlocutor. The function of the termsis not that of simple reference—both address the same interlocutor. Rather,they mark or indeed even create the tenor of the relationship between speakers.

An additional, more directly analogous illustration serves to underscorethe difference between referential and pragmatic utterances. In the UnitedStates, as we know, negative associations are attached to aging and the aged.Particularly when speaking about or to an older woman, we often engage in asubtle but nonetheless conventional etiquette. While waiting in a checkoutline at a drug store in Florida, for example, I observed a woman in her sixtiesrequest assistance from the cashier. He turned to a coworker and said, "Wouldyou help this young lady here?" Neither the customer nor the cashier wouldsuggest that he was using the term as an age classification; he was engaging ina form of polite flattery, a common function of pragmatic speech. If this samewoman were to drive well under the speed limit on a two-lane highway, adriver might, if sufficiently rude, shout, "Old bag!" out the window whilepassing her. Again, the intent would be less to classify her by age than to insulther. Both of the terms—young lady and old bag—incorporate a reference toage, of course, but their chief social and linguistic functions are not to categorizein a neutral or nominal sense but to flatter or demean. As they are used inthese contexts, the words have a distinctly performative dimension. We wouldnot argue, on the basis of the existence of many ambiguous "age terms" inAmerican English that we truly perceive age categories to be fluid, shifting, ornegotiable. Nor would we argue (if we were honest!) that age is not a significantfeature of social identity in our culture. We would, rather, recognize that ageand other characteristics (such as body weight) for which we have manyeuphemisms and insults are fraught and delicate subjects that represent thefocus of considerable cultural preoccupation and tension.


I offer these illustrations because as a number of linguistically-orientedscholars have pointed out (Crapanzano 1992; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990;Silverstein 1979), we tend to assume that language is always and everywherereferential (and in the case of Brazilian race-color terms, classificatory) in itsfunction when it is often pragmatic, (The error is compounded when translatingfrom one language to another.) This is precisely the point that so many of myinformants in Morro do Sangue Bom made when I asked them to deconstructtheir usage of race-color terms, "It depends," as so many informants told me, "onhow it is said," Such terms were often, I was told, "a way of treating someone,"

Neusa, a woman in her late twenties, was one of many informants whourged me to read between the lines of race—color terms and to recognize thatthey were typically pragmatic rather than referential or typological in theirfunction. As Neusa suggested, it was the overwhelming pragmatic power ofthe word negro—its capacity to wound, to humiliate, to insult—that offeredthe key to understanding the way in which all race—color terms could be, andso often were, uttered in the pragmatic mode. Like Rosa and Susana, Neusatold me, "Only preto and white exist," As our conversation continued, I askedher to tell me which of the words she had listed might be considered offensivein everyday speech:

Robin Sheriff: Is negro offensive?

Neusa: Negro. Look, it's like this: It depends on the sense in which theperson is speaking, you see? Sometimes the word negro is used to discrimi-nate. It is not valorizing, you see? It is discriminating. But it depends on howyou put it,

RS: And mulato—can it be offensive?

N: [Sighs with slight exasperation,] No! Look, so many [words] exist exacdyso that one is not of a totally negro color. So they use the mulata color, theparda color, the morena color, to treat the person in a sense [like they are]a little lighter, a little, like, less discriminated against,

Neusa was describing an etiquette—well-known and consciously practicedin Morro do Sangue Bom—in which the term negro was strenuously avoided.The other terms she listed—mulata, parda, morena—were not intended to"classify" people but to "treat the person" in a particular way There were nottruly solid referents for the terms, Neusa suggested. Rather, their meaningmust be sought in an understanding of "how you put it"—the pragmaticmode, that is, in which they were spoken. The point that such terms were notused in a classificatory sense was borne out, as Neusa argued further, by the


cultural notion that, at bottom, racial identity was a simple bipolar affair: "So,these things do not exist. One is white, or one is negro. But people feel sohumiliated to be negro. The negro was a slave. The negro suffered. The negrowas treated like an animal. All that. But here it is truly correct to say that oneis white or one is preto. No one can be anything else."

As was the case with her neighbors in Morro do Sangue Bom, Neusacould not bring herself to abide by what she viewed as "truly correct"; when Iasked her what term she might use for herself, she said "mulata." Such is thewounding force of the term negro and the pervasive power of the etiquettethat insists on other "softer" (or, in Neusa's words, "lighter") terms.

Tiago's folk etymology of the term negro ("a nickname that the whitesgave to the blacks") and Rosa's ("what the masters called the slaves") are, infact, correct. In a cogent and meticulously documented account of the historicaldevelopment of race-color terms in the Americas, Jack D. Forbes argues thatthe term negro came to stand less for a person of particularly dark skin colorthan for anyone who was not white. The usage of the term, moreover, wastypically pragmatic and deeply insulting in intent:

In so far as the term negro in the Portuguese Empire became synonymouswith "slave" or with servile status, it, of course, lost any mandatory colorreference and became a general term of abuse...Unfortunately, manyEnglish-speaking authors tend to translate negro as "black" rather than as"nigger" or "slave" and have failed to see the implications for Brazilianhistory of the above distinctions.10 [Forbes 1988:75]

I fully concur with Forbes's point and my research suggests that the impli-cations he refers to are broad indeed. The term negro is not merely an exampleof a race-color term that tends to be used pragmatically (and often viciously);it is also the central signifier around which the semantic parameters and linguisticfunctions of other race-color terms are culturally organized. The term pretocan be a neutral descriptor of the color black, but because it is closely associatedwith the term negro, it too can be construed as an insult—although as Joiapointed out, "it hurts less than negro." It is precisely because such terms "hurt"and "humiliate" that polite speech requires their avoidance and stipulates asubstitution.

My informants in Morro do Sangue Bom, it is clear, engaged in a form ofmetadiscursive logic that deconstructed the notion that the many terms theyuse served primarily as "categories" within a "system of racial classification."Within this logic, it is asserted, all people of color were negros—that is, mem-bers of the ra9a negra; however, because the term negro and others like it slipso easily and dangerously from neutral referents into epithets and insults, aplethora of other terms are used in their place. Depending on context, these

Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestiqagem in Rio de Janeiro 99

other terms might refer to or describe color-^a quality my informants con-ceptualized as related to but distinct from race—or more commonly theywere employed pragmatically, as euphemisms.

Race-Color Terms as Euphemisms and Descriptions

My informants in Morro do Sangue Bom were masterful in their attemptsto coach me toward an understanding of their use of race-color terms andthey were well aware of the distinction between the referential and pragmaticfunctions of speech. In addition, they often emphasized the difference betweencolor and local conceptions of race. For example, Jose, Joia's stepfather (andElena's husband), spelled out the distinction: "Now, Joia is preta. But peoplecall her morena. Why? Because of her color. She isn't preta like the color ofyour clothes. So, she's morena ... But deep down, everyone is preta. Lookthere [gestures toward the people going about their business on the hillside].Some are lighter, some are darker, but they're all negros."

As Jose and others suggested, one might refer to Joia as morena in describingher color. As both a linguistic utterance and a conceptual act, this was distinctfrom classifying her in racial terms. The term morena^ in this sense, was notunderstood as a distinct category but as a provisional description of herappearance, the medium-brown color of her skin; its use was adjectival ratherthan nominal. This distinction between color and race was not the only, noreven the central one I needed to grasp, however. Jose went on to illustrate thedifference between pragmatic and referential usage—the distinction, in thiscase, between a concept of racial identity and the polite euphemisms of every-day speech. He referred to a woman whom we both knew: "She's preta also.People say mulatinha [little mulata, or a little bit mulata] so as not to say'preta.' Isn't that so? But all this is preto. They're all macacos [monkeys]! But noone is going to say that, right?"

Jose's use of the term macaco—an egregious racial insult—was ironic; hisintention was pedagogical. He was playing with the delicacy with which peopleavoided stigmatized terms and substituted them with softening diminutivesand euphemisms. Mulatinhay Jose suggested, was not to be construed as anobjective classification, nor even as a description of the woman's appearance—her skin was dark—but as a pragmatically employed, polite term whose usewas predicated on the culturally elaborated rules of etiquette. In saying "Butthis is all preto," Jose was speaking in a straightforward referential fashion andhe referred in this instance to the woman's ra$a.

Many of my informants explained that terms such as moreno, mulato,mestico, and pardo were preferred precisely because they were polite.11 Suchterms could be and were used for any person of color, regardless of skin tone."Moreno and pardo are words that people like," an 11-year-old girl explained,


"They are good words." Coming straight to the point, another informant, awoman in her thirties, said, "Moreno is used so as not to call someone 'negro.'"

In addition to the ubiquitous, pragmatic use of vague intermediate terms,diminutives are also a favored way of politely addressing or referring to aperson of African descent. As Jose* noted in the same conversation I quoteabove, "Instead of saying 'preto,' it is better to call a person escurinho [a littlebit dark]." A woman in her twenties told me that such diminutives—whichinclude pretinho, neguinho, and escurinho, as well as the ultrapolite moreninho,mulatinho, and so on—are generally regarded as "affectionate" and bem delicada(quite delicate). Jose's wife, Elena, suggested an even more polite (and com-mon) substitution. "It is not good to call a person 'negro,'" she explained, "sowe call him a 'man of color' [homen de cor]."

All euphemisms, of course, have a double-edged quality. They soften orobscure their original referent—in this case the wounding associations of theterms negro and preto—at the same time that they invoke that referent. Thevery notion that a euphemism is called for suggests that shame, distaste, ordiscomfort is attached to that which is being euphonized. Susana, for example,pointed out what she perceived as the condescending nature of the term morena:"It offends because people who are pretinha are called 'morena.' They say I ammorena because I am preta. You see?"

As is so frequently the case with euphemisms, people in Morro do SangueBom felt compelled to use them, even while recognizing their double-edgedquality. Even in the context of describing the condescending implications ofdiminutives, Susana could not resist using the expression "people who arepretinha."12

Thus far, I have emphasized the distinction between those instances inwhich race-color terms are used in a referential sense to refer to a notion ofrace and those instances in which such terms are used in a pragmatic sense toconvey politeness, to flatter, or, alternatively, to insult or humiliate. I mustfurther complicate my analysis of the linguistic functions of race-color termsby noting an additional register that is both referential and descriptive. Despitemy informants' insistence that "there are only two races," differences in colorare indeed recognized in Brazil.

While people in Morro do Sangue Bom point out that words such asmoreno are often used pragmatically—"so as not to call someone negro"—they can also be used to describe a person of a particular appearance. A moreno,as some of my informants noted while speaking directly in this descriptiveregister, is one who is "neither dark nor light." The term moreno is a particularlyvague and polysemic one—this fact is given largely by its favored use in prag-matic speech—but there are others of a more obviously adjectival function.One may be said to be achocalatada (literally "chocalated"), canela (cinnamon),


avermelhado (reddened), and so on. Differences in appearance, that is, skincolor, hair texture, and facial features, are the focus of cultural standards ofbeauty as many Latin Americanist scholars have noted. In a world in whichblackness is denigrated and whiteness is valorized, these differences may besignificant in a variety of contexts, most notably, courtship and marriage(Burdick 1998; Sheriff 2001). The idea of embranqueamento (whitening), aswell as the more generalized assumptions associated with racism, have indeedcontributed to a cultural preoccupation with differences in skin tone, haircolor and texture, and facial features. Although the distinction between thedescriptive and pragmatic uses of terms such as moreno may be difficult foroutsiders to perceive—and while it might occasionally be blurred even fornative speakers—people in Morro do Sangue Bom readily recognize and ma-nipulate the distinction. "I know I'm a negra, but I'm really morena, right?"Joia once asked me and her family. An unpacking of the question would readsomething like: "In strictly racial terms I am black, and in polite terms I wouldbe called 'morena,' but I really and truly am, in my appearance, light brown."

What must be emphasized in understanding the use of the descriptiveregister is that the terms are understood (by virtue of conversational context)to refer to color—a person's unique configuration of features—rather than tocategories of racial classification or racial identity, as has been conventionallyassumed. This distinction between classification and description and its inter-section with the distinction between race and color clarifies the puzzle thatHarris (1970) presented in his seminal article on the "referential ambiguity"of Brazilian race—color terms. The puzzle—the fact that Brazilian informantsdemonstrate such a marked lack of consensus in their attribution of terms—should be no more surprising than the common scenario in which a husbandand wife cannot agree on the appropriate usage of terms such as mauve, lightpurple•, antique rose, or pink. Color perception is notoriously subjective, aswell as culturally conditioned, and color does indeed exist on a continuum.The puzzle, in other words, disappears if we assume that informants are notspeaking about racial typologies but about relative and necessarily subjectivejudgements of color.

"Racial classification," "raciological taxonomies," "racial identity," and soon are, as my informants in Morro do Sangue Bom assert, a different matter.The expression "If you do not pass for white, you are black" reveals that despiteperceived differences in color, ra$a is conceptualized as both a different and"deeper" quality, as well as a simple, bipolar category.

Racial Bipolarity: A Structural Reality

The notion that Brazilians conceptualize race as composed of multiple orfluid categories has had a significant bearing, of course, on debates about the


extent to which Brazil's characterization as a "racial democracy" is justified.Earlier scholars of Brazil's race relations have argued that the permeability ofracial boundaries, as well as the existence of multiple racial categories haveprecluded the more rigid, oppositional, and antagonistic racial politics observedin countries such as the United States (see Wagley 1963). Stated in the simplest(and more popularized) terms, the assumption has often been that the lack ofdistinct racial boundaries has made systemic forms of racism virtually impossible."As far as actual behavior is concerned," Marvin Harris has tellingly insisted,"races do not exist for the Brazilians" (1964:64). This argument was forcefullyarticulated by Carl N. Degler in Neither Black nor White: Slavery and RaceRelations in Brazil and the United States (1971). Basing his analysis on theextant literature rather than on ethnographic research, Degler argued thatlight-skinned Brazilians of African descent, unlike those in the United States,are able to strategically pursue what he called a "mulatto escape hatch," wherebythey are permitted to climb the socioeconomic ladder and thus achieve a positionintermediate between those of blacks and whites.

More recendy, researchers have challenged the notion that light-skinnedBrazilians of African descent occupy positions of greater economic and culturaladvantage vis-a-vis darker-skinned African Brazilians. Basing his argument ona detailed analysis of 1976 census data, Nelson do Valle Silva has concludedthat mulatos and negros constitute, in socioeconomic terms, a "homogeneousgroup" (1985:49). There is little difference in income between them: both arevery disadvantaged vis-a-vis whites, even when the variable of educationalachievement is controlled. Silva concluded,"The joint analysis of Blacks andmulattoes constitutes a sensible approach to the analysis of racial discriminationin Brazil" (1985:49). Other researchers who have pursued a demographicapproach to the analysis of specifically racialized forms of discrimination,such as Carlos Hasenbalg (1985), have joined with Silva in reworking thelanguage through which racialized discrimination is discussed. Rather thanspeaking of three or more categories, or emphasizing the supposed fluidity ofracial categories, he and others have argued that the structurally significantcategories are "white" and "nonwhite."

Two historians of Brazilian race relations, Thomas Skidmore (1993b) andGeorge Reid Andrews (1991) have also urged a rethinking of Brazilian racialcategories and have questioned the assumption that there are significantdifferences between the socioeconomic location of light-skinned Brazilians ofAfrican descent and those who are unambiguously black. Citing both Silva'swork and the discourse of the black movement, Skidmore argues that theconclusions drawn from research on racial classification may have been under-informed and premature. He suggests that Brazil may be much closer to a"biracial model" than has previously been assumed. Andrews also argues against

Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mesti^agem in Rio de Janeiro 103

the assumption of significant differences between light- and dark-skinnedBrazilians of African descent. "I have chosen," he writes in his meticulouslyresearched history of race relations in Sao Paulo, "to emphasize the commonali-ties between the two groups as well as the black-white racial dichotomy, whichI believe accurately describes twentieth century Brazilian society" (1991:254[cf. Burdick 1998]).13

My analysis of both everyday speech and metadiscourse in Morro doSangue Bom confirms these observations and analyses from distinctly ethno-graphic and sociolinguistic angles. In concluding, I will briefly discuss what Ibelieve to be the ideological implications of the distinctive registers in whichmy informants use race-color terms.

When people in Morro do Sangue Bom assert that "there are only tworaces"—and additionally, when they sometimes speak of sangue negro (blackblood)—they certainly seem to be engaging an essentialist concept of race.This point requires qualification. In eliciting, recording, and analyzing narra-tives of racism in Morro do Sangue Bom, my research demonstrates that myinformants reject the racial democracy thesis. Specifically racialized forms ofprejudice and discrimination are rife in their country, they believe, and theyhave no shortage of stories by which they describe their personal encounterswith it. Significantly, light-skinned people of color felt that they were subjectto the same racialized vulnerability—rejections during job searches, ill-treatmentwhile on the job, occupational limitations, police harassment, and racist name-calling, for example—as their darker-skinned neighbors (Sheriff 2001). Theirexperience, of course, fits the statistical picture I refer to above. If it can besaid that my informants' understanding of race bears the shadows of essentialism,it is an essentialism that it is historically produced—traceable, in fact, to thefetishization of whiteness and pureza de sangue (purity of blood) that preoccupiedthe Portuguese colonial empire (Boxer 1969).

Yet in a fuller and more immediate sense, I believe my informants' under-standing of racial bipolarity is given less by received notions of biological racethan by their accurate perception of the oppression to which they are subject,and which they share, as people of color—people of color, that is, who livewithin a racially bifurcated political economy whose reality speaks louder thanthe platitudes of democracia racial. My informants' belief that racial identityis bipolar in nature is thus largely determined by the bedrock of experience inthe world, as well as by a rather self-conscious stance of solidarity and communalunderstanding about the deceptions of democracia racial.

It is nevertheless true that what I would call the discourse on race—thatis, the insistence that "there are only two races"—is not a dominant one ineveryday speech. Discourses of racialized opposition tend to be muffled or


muted in Brazil and as I argue elsewhere (Sheriff 2000), the open discussionof racism is constrained by the pervasive practices of cultural censorship. More-over, as Natasha Pravaz (this volume) argues in her analysis of the symbolicconstruction of the mulata (women who dance the samba in various enter-tainment venues, including carnival) there is a persistent tension betweennotions of racial hybridity, bipolar constructions of identity, and nationalistrepresentation. Although many of Pravaz's informants self-identified as negras(racially "black" rather than "mixed") their performance of mulatice (mulataness)reflected, reproduced, embodied, and celebrated the mythology of a thoroughlyhybridized and racially democratic Brazil. The ideological tensions Pravaz socogendy illustrates are central features of Brazilian public discourses on themeanings of race and nation. Thus, I do not mean to suggest that poor AfricanBrazilians such as those in Morro do Sangue Bom consistently resist dominantracial ideologies, but rather that they struggle with the contradictions of thoseideologies in complicated and often ambivalent ways. It is thus pragmaticspeech, an indirect and "double-voiced" mode (Bakhtin 1981), that most fullyfills the cultural space that exists between the ideology of racial democracyand the structural realities of racism.

As I have argued, the euphemistic register permits the avoidance of thehurtful associations attached to words such as negro. In larger terms, however,a degree of ideological resistance can and should be read into both pragmaticspeech and the descriptive discourse of color. The descriptive discourse, infocusing attention on the uniqueness of an individual's appearance (ratherthan membership in one of a set of mutually exclusive categories), stretchestoward a de-essentializing of race (that is, a recognition of its politically con-structed character), and its insidious significance. The pragmatic discourse,which insists that all people of color be referred to with an ambiguous andintermediate term, stretches toward a democratic leveling of color distinctions.Ideologically speaking, these registers resist the cultural hierarchies of bothrace and color and all that they suggest about invidious distinctions, aestheticbeauty, and moral worth. Although people in Morro do Sangue Bom rejectthe claims of democracia racial, their use of the pragmatic, polite register is, ina sense, a rhetorical attempt to support its prescriptive values: neither race norcolor should matter.

In this article I have insisted that it is not racial identity that poor Braziliansof African descent manipulate when they choose a word from the race-colorlexicon but rather language itself. "Well, you know that we Brazilians, weadore slang, right?" one informant said when I asked why people in hiscommunity had so many words for race and color. "Here in Rio, there arepeople from all over the country, so it's an exchange of slang." What this


informant emphasized was not the notion of multiple categories of racial beingthat require separate terms, but rather the point that the words of race andcolor are situated within a space of rhetorical play, a space of self-consciouslinguistic agency.

There is, however, a paradox underlying the ideological implications Idescribe above. Even when the intention of speakers is to level difference—tosuggest for example, that everyone is moreno and that distinctions do notmatter—all of the words in the lexicon are anchored, semantically speaking,within a vision of value and hierarchy. Because there is a constant interplay ofreferencing, indexing, connoting, and evasion that occurs in the minds ofinterlocutors and in the rapid shifting of the registers of everyday speech, trueescape from that hierarchy seems close to impossible. When Susana hearsherself called "morena," she also hears an echo, an implication behind it: she isbeing condescended to precisely because her darkness is noticed and consideredunfortunate. Thus, while the language of race and color is articulated fromwithin a space of linguistic play, it is also circumscribed within a space ofcultural and ideological entrapment.

What did Elena intend when she told Tiago in the encounter that I describein the beginning of this article that he was not a negro but a mestico? (It was,after all, Elena who first told me that "only white and black exist.") As some-times happens when the rules of a complex and largely unspoken etiquettebecome tangled, Tiago and Elena were speaking at cross purposes. They spokein separate registers, and their registers embodied different sociolinguisticfunctions and called upon different levels of cultural, political, and historicalunderstanding about the meanings of race and blackness.

Elena turned 50 that year. She was childless and she adored Tiago. Herhusband, Jose, was Joia's stepfather and so Tiago was to her, something like agrandson. She took a hand in supporting him through a childhood spent inpoverty and the vulnerabilities—both material and psychological—to whichchildren of color were exposed. Like others in Morro do Sangue Bom, Elenaknew that when Tiago became a teenager, he would often be regarded withsuspicion, fear, and contempt when he left the community and went to seekwork or entertainment in the public spaces of Rio de Janeiro. She knew thatyoung black men were trailed in shops, eyed with distaste on city buses, andsubjected to arbitrary harassment by cops, who often called them nego safado(no-account nigger) as though the use of racial slurs were a routine part ofpolice work. Elena knew, as Tiago did, that "negro was a name that the whitesgave to the blacks."

When Elena told Tiago that he was not a negro but a mestico, she spokeautomatically, pragmatically, reassuringly, politely, and lovingly. She spoke notto deny his budding racial pride but in defense of his character. She heard a


different meaning of the word negro from the one Tiago intended—a meaningthat was closer to the surface (despite its deep roots in history) and that had, onmany occasions, hurt her and the people she loved.

As she swept the shards of glass from the floor, Joia, I am sure, took it allin: her sons appropriation of the term negro to signify pride in identity, heritage,and struggle; Elena's intent to remove Tiago from the wounding reverberationsheard behind the word; and the embarrassed puzzlement of the foreign an-thropologist. It was too messy, too tangled, and too painful to get into on ahot and fatiguing afternoon, so Joia let it pass. She no doubt understood—asI later did—that Tiago was capable of recognizing the nature of the misunder-standing, of recognizing that he was, without contradiction, both a negro anda mestico, and of appreciating, if perhaps ambivalently, the warmth of Elena'sintent.

There was, besides, a slight stir in the air, the breath of change that blewthrough the open door when Tiago spoke so proudly and directly in his child'svoice. He had cut through the complexity, the paradoxes, and the entrapmentof which I have written. He had claimed Zumbi—a symbol of the dream of areal, rather than merely rhetorical, equality among all Brazilians—as his own.He called himself a negro and did so in a register I have not described here: anunfettered one of belonging and community, one that offered no qualification,no apology, no shame. Perhaps Tiago's generation—teenagers now who experi-ment with symbols of black pride and who watch, listen, and speak up as theirnation debates new proposals for affirmative action—will redefine what itmeans to be a negro in Brazil.14

Notes

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Aisha Khan, organizer of the session"Mestizaje and Other Mixes: Identity Politics in the Age of 'Hybridity,'" forinviting me to present an abbreviated version of this paper at the Latin AmericanStudies Association International Congress in 1997. I also extend my thanksto Jean Muteba Rahier, guest editor, for inviting this submission, as well asMary Weismantel, editor of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology.Maureen O'Dougherty and the anonymous reviewers of this article providedmany insightful comments. My analysis has been honed by fruitful discussionswith the anthropologists associated with the Programa Ra$a e Etnicidade ofthe Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where I was a visiting fellow in 1995:Peter Fry, Vincent Crapanzano, Yvonnie Maggie, Olivia Maria Gomes daCunha, Guy Mussart, Claudia Rezende, and Livio Sansone. The research onwhich this article is based was supported by a grant from the Wenner-GrenFoundation for Anthropological Research.


1. Morro do Sangue Bom is a pseudonym as are all of the names I use forinformants. Morro do Sangue bom translates literally as "Hill of Good Blood.""Sangue bom" is a slang expression used to describe a person who can betrusted, who does not put on airs, and who communicates in a warm, easy-going manner. For some, it is also a favorable reference to people of color, oralternatively, to working-class people.

2. Morena is a particularly ambiguous term as I argue later in this article.It can sometimes refer to a white person and is, in such cases, similar to theEnglish term brunette. When used for a person of color, it may refer to light ormedium brown skin, or alternatively, it can be used as a polite term for a dark-skinned person.

3. For a more detailed analysis of the sociolinguistlcs of race-color termsin Morro do Sangue Bom, see Sheriff 2001.

4. Distinctions of color clearly represent a focus of cultural preoccupation inother Latin American and Caribbean nations as well. See, for example, Godreau1994, 1995; Khan 1993; Lancaster 1991; Martinez 1974; Rahier 1999; Segal1993; Stutzman 1981; and Wade 1993. See, especially, Mary Weismantels(2001) recent analysis of racial constructions in the Andean region. She arguesthat contrary to public ideology, everyday speech there is rife with derogatoryracial references and, furthermore, that a plethora of euphemisms are used inan attempt to conceal what are, at root, distinctly racialized, indeed binarized,oppositions. As with the majority of anthropologists, I view race as a thoroughlycultural and ideological rather than natural or biological category.

5. Russo literally translates as "Russian." It is not a particularly commonterm but several informants told me it refers to a person with reddish coloring. Itmay be a corruption of ruivo (redhead), or indeed, a play on the reference toRussian communists as "reds."

6. This expression has a number of local variants. Nestor's variant, "Passoude branco, preto e," could be more literally translated as "past white, is black."The meaning of these expressions, however, is best summarized as "anyonewho is not white is black."

J.Jambo (alternatively spelled jambu) is considered a slang term. It refersto the reddish color of the tropical fruit eugenia malaccensis.

8. Marvin Harris and others (see especially Harris and Kottak 1963) haveargued that the "Brazilian system of racial classification" differs from theAmerican one in that North Americans subscribe to the notion of"hypodescent"—a classificatory rule wherein the children of "mixed race"parents are automatically classified as belonging to the racial category of thelower-status parent. Hypodescent does not operate in Brazil, according toHarris, where not only parents and children, but also siblings may belong to


what Harris conceptualizes as (emically) separate racial categories. My researchin Morro do Sangue Bom does not support this contention. Siblings mayindeed be described with different color terms, but they tend to be classified,as Dona's Janete's comments suggest, as racially negro. Another informant,whom I would have described as white, insisted that she and her children werenegro because she had "negro in the family." As I argue in this article, Harris'sassertion is based on the conflation of color description with racial classification,which are, in the view of my informants, distinct.

9. As my quotations suggest, the terms cor (color) and raca (race) tend tobe used interchangeably in everyday speech. This is not because the terms aresynonymous but because the word raca (which also refers to the concept of"breed" when speaking of dogs, for example) is often considered impolite.The term cor is, therefore, often preferred, even when the speaker refers tospecifically racial concepts. The distinction between race and color was alsoarticulated when I asked informants to explain the difference between theterms negro andpreto. Most told me that "negro is race, preto is color." Dictio-naries of Brazilian Portuguese confirm the distinction.

10. Modern dictionaries of Brazilian Portuguese support Forbes's and myinformants' contention. The 15th edition of the Novo Dicionario Aurelio (astandard and widely used dictionary), for example, gives the first definition ofnegra as "a woman of the black color," and the second definition as "a slave, acaptive."

11. Roger Lancaster (1991) and Isar Godreau (1994, 1995) have madesimilar claims for Nicaragua and Puerto Rico respectively. They both urge arecognition of the significant role that etiquette plays in the use of race-colorterms.

12. Debates about census terms and their meanings are ongoing. Theissue is a critical one because our interpretations will necessarily skew ourunderstanding of the demography of racial identity in Brazil, and the analysisof census data has been one of the best means of demonstrating the structuralconsequences of racism in Brazil. Space considerations prevent me from engagingin this debate directly, but my data certainly suggest that Brazilians such asthose in Morro do Sangue Bom often respond to census queries not withterms that reflect their sense of racial identity but with those that refer todifferences in color or with terms that are considered polite. Neusa's insistencethat one must be either black or white and her subsequent choice of the termmulata for herself is a case in point. It was Neusa herself who in 1991 wasresponsible for conducting federal census information in Morro do SangueBom. Census workers were instructed to allow interviewees to choose fromamong four census terms, but Neusa told me that she herself chose the terms.


I have little doubt that she chose pardo for most of her neighbors—those Ispoke with in Morro do Sangue Bom agreed that this was the preferred categoryon all government documents—despite her assertion that one must be eitherblack or white. For recent contributions to this debate, see Harris et al. 1993,1995; Silva 1996; Telles 1995. Thomas Skidmore (1992) notes that Brazilianinstitutions, particularly those involved with censuses, have been and remainreluctant to collect data related to race. (In the 1991 federal census, for example,only one in ten respondents were asked to provide information on "race.")This reluctance, Skidmore argues convincingly, is closely related to the tenaciousideological constraints imposed by democracia racial—that is, the denial thatracism is a significant social problem in Brazil.

13. It is likely that the concept of intermediate racial categories once hadmore structural significance than it does now. In the 19th century, forexample, the existence of mulato brotherhoods and even of a mulato presssuggests the existence of an intermediate category for free people of colorliving in the context of slavery. The institutionalization of such distinctionshad waned, however, by the early 20th century (Andrews 1991; Russell-Wood1982). Harris (1964) has also argued that mulatos—free people of color whowere likely to be the offspring of slave women and their masters—filledspecific occupational and economic niches during Brazil's colonial era. Again,however, contemporary class structures have eroded these distinctions. I wouldspeculate that the subsidization of European immigrants in the post-abolitionera led to a displacement of those mulatos occupying intermediate nichesand, furthermore, with the end of slavery, they no longer had a legal basis bywhich to assert an identity separate from that of other Brazilians of color.

14. A number of indications suggest the recent emergence of more publicand explicit debates about negritude and racism in Brazil. See Roth Gordon1999 for a discussion of Brazilian hip hop and black consciousness; Sansone1993 for a discussion of the preference for the term negro among youth inBahia; and Hanchard 1998 and Winant 1999 on governmental efforts to addressthe issue of racism. Most significantly, of course, the Brazilian governmenthas recendy proposed the institution of racial quotas in universities, civil servicejobs, and television. See Rohter 2001 (writing for the New York Times) andFry 2000 for discussions of debates surrounding the issue. Predictably, some(including university professors) have protested the proposal on the basis ofthe notion that multiple racial categories not only make affirmative actiondifficult to implement, but also absurd within the Brazilian cultural context.Speaking from within the logic of democracia racial, moreover, it has beenargued that affirmative action measures would introduce racism where it hadnot existed before.


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