This text is an analysis of the process through which black/white mixing ceased to be limited by the boundaries of nineteenth-century racial categories. This emerged in news commentary and studies of Brazilian culture. Based on those categories, this would correspond to a lower status for the white element, and it would lead to the development of a specific national identity. As is pointed out here, for writers such as Sílvio Romero, Euclides da Cunha and Nina Rodrigues, mixing races with blacks expressed the social reality of that historic moment. This was completely different from the prior Romantic time in which only mixing between whites and Natives could be addressed in the social sphere, taking into account the epistemological boundary imposed by slavery. It was only after the turn of the century that the myth of “the three races” developed consistency, giving rise to an ideology that fostered the establishment of the modern Brazilian state (republic). However, it becomes clear in this essay that the concrete realization of that myth remained out of reach, and operated only on a symbolic level. The text also investigates the situation that arose in the 1930s, when Gilberto Freyre was seen as the culmination of a whole line of Brazil scholars that went back to the nineteenth century. Therefore, Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, and Caio Prado Jr. represented a new trend, one that came to be associated with university education. Yet Freyre, while addressing the same problems as his predecessors, distanced himself as much as possible from the prior “biological determinism.” His stance on this issue transformed miscegenation into something completely positive. It also fostered the widespread dissemination of the myth of the three races throughout the mainstream, stifling racial conflicts and creating the conditions for everyone to identify with nationality. 

The general purpose of this book by Renato Ortiz was to analyze the different visions that have arisen about national identity and Brazilian culture. In his essay on racial mixing, the writer reviews the history of the problems inherent in Brazilian sociological thinking. He highlights different periods in the debate on this issue and discusses the ongoing persistence of the myth of the three races.

Renato Ortiz (b. 1947), the Brazilian anthropologist and sociologist, is a sociology professor at the Universidade de Campinas (UNICamp). The themes he has studied center on issues of “globalism” (“mundialização”, to use his own term) and other forms of cultural crossbreeding, Brazilian culture, and the culture industry. He was a professor at the Université de Louvain (Belgium, 1974–75) and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (1977–84). In the United States, he performed research at both the Latin American Institute (University of California) and the Kellogg Institute (University of Notre Dame). In Mexico, in turn, Ortiz served as a visiting professor at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. He has published essays in numerous Brazilian journals, and his best-known books are: A consciência fragmentada (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1985); A moderna tradição brasileira (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988); Cultura Brasileira e Identidade Nacional (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985); and Um Outro Territorio (São Paulo: Olho d’Água, 1999). 

For another article written by the same author, see “Modernidade-mundo e identidades” [1111333].