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Brazil is often cited as the world's most Catholic country however in reality Brazil is a plethora of religions. While Catholicism is still the primary religion of the majority of Brazilians, there are significant numbers of Brazilians who frequent Protestant Churches, African-derived religions and Buddhist temples. This chapter discusses how the people of African descent involved in Catholic, Evangelical Christian, and Candomblé organizations have engaged in issues concerning Afro-Brazilian identity and struggled against racism in Brazil. Brazil is hailed as a racial democratic country devoid of de jure segregation and racial hostility due to its widespread racial mixture and cultural syncretism however, since the 1970s, there was an increasing recognition of the existence of racial discrimination in the life chances of white and black Brazilians. Racial discrimination was especially prevalent in the state of Bahia where Afro-Brazilian descent involved in the black movement used religious symbols to strengthen their Afro-Brazilian identity and to mobilize people to stand up against racism. This chapter focuses on the poor state of Bahia where the most concentrated Afro-Brazilian community can be found, the Recôncavo.

This chapter discusses the complex and contested ways in which religion is enmeshed with the politics of Afro-Brazilian identity. As shown in the previous chapters of the book, religion and Afro-Brazilian identity shared a complex relationship. Although Candomblé served as an emblem of Afro-Brazilian identity, the relationship between the religion and blackness is more than a simple and straightforward type of connectedness. This chapter attempts to address the issues surrounding the multiplicity and complexity of Afro-Brazilian identity and racial politics wherein a shared common identity and a shared political agenda were foreign concepts to people of African descent. Three major themes are discussed in this chapter that aim to address the issues of the rather varied stand on Afro-Brazilian identity and the approaches to racial politics. This chapter begins with a discussion on the relationship between religion and identity. The succeeding discussion draws on theoretical approaches to provide a better understanding of the connections between collective identities and power relations. The chapter concludes with the macropolitical questions concerning the politics of identity and the black movement in Brazil.

The Nisei [second-generation Japanese Brazilians], who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, received Brazilian primary education in the countryside. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nisei established and participated in their own Nisei clubs in São Paulo City, which were exclusive to Japanese descendants and divided by class, and they practiced ethnic-class endogamy among themselves. With the power of higher education, elite Nisei men quickly moved up on the social ladder. Many college-educated Niseis in this generation tend to position themselves as Brazilians/Westerners over the Japanese and other Asians. Yet, when the time came for their children to choose their marriage partners, some still wanted to keep their families “Japanese,” without having any “Brazilian” in-laws. This is a clear example of one’s multiple identity in conflict. Having distanced themselves from the general Japanese Brazilian population for many years, some of the elite Nisei “returned” to major ethnic Japanese organizations and associations after the turn of the twentieth-first century.

In June 1998 the Japanese immigrants monument was inaugurated in Santos, São Paulo after a decade-long campaign by Japanese Brazilians. Its statue of a young immigrant family (parents and a young boy), divorced from the historical reality, quickly became a political vehicle for state diplomacy, as well as a popular tourist site. Eventually, in 2007, the Japanese government made a public announcement that the design of the statue was adopted for a commemorative 500-yen coin for the centenary in 2008, which was eventually abandoned due to a dispute brought by a Brazilian sculptor who holds its copyright. This episode illustrates that Japanese Brazilians are not completely in control of how their identity is constructed and represented under hegemonic power. The histories of the “Japanese” in Brazil needs ultimately to be re-thought and re-written with closer attention to the multiple, and historically changing, determinations of Japanese Brazilian identity.

This book focuses on Brazilians of African descent. Focus is particularly directed on their Catholicism and their influences from African-derived religions in constructing their racial identities. This book examines the Recôncavo region of Brazil which is home to Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions and to racial consciousness in the country. It examines how the religions of Evangelical Protestantism, Candomblé, and Catholicism have shaped and influenced the discursive struggles on racism and Afro-Brazilian identity. By revealing the multiplicity and sometimes contradictory features of the Afro-Brazilian religious practices and racial identity, the book aims to bring equilibrium to an otherwise polarized and opposing stand on Brazilian racial politics.

The concluding chapter discusses how this exploration of Jewish Brazilian experience is important for understanding both Jewish ethnicity and Brazilian national identity, and the relationship between national and ethnic identity. An examination of Jewish Brazilian identity further illuminates the complex ways that Brazilianness is a nexus of race, class, and culture. While Jews in São Paulo construct their communities and identities in ways that are consistent with local culture, their condition as transnationals limits the extent to which they can be fully national while maintaining ethnic distinction. Each aspect of their identity informs the other: as Jews and as Brazilians they have a dual identity that cannot be separated.

Much of the discourse on Afro-Brazilian identity is pegged on Candomblé although the religion is not evenly practiced in Afro-Brazilian communities. Debates on syncretism, double belonging, and anti-syncretism all pinpoint the existing relationship between Candomblé and Catholicism. Furthermore, emphasis on Candomblé shows a rather religious pluralism within African communities. This chapter discusses the political underpinnings that can be found in the relationship between Candomblé and Catholicism. More than just a religious rivalry, the constrained relationship between these two relationships exhibits a politics of race relations and racism. This chapter focuses on the distinctive ways in which evangelicals of African-descent engage religious discourses and practices as they construct their identities and struggle against racism. Through the black progressive evangelicals' emphasis on electoral politics and cultural approaches to mobilization, they have given much contribution to the debate and discourse about existing racism in Brazil. The chapter also discusses the increasingly blurred lines between Christians and the condomblecistas wherein although evangelical Christian communities generally are conservative and eschew the African-derived religion, a significant number of these evangelicals are reaching religious lines as they mobilize and forward a movement against racism.

The conclusion formulates three arguments. First, it reinserts Afro descendants into Amazonia’s history, especially in the periods immediately before and after the rubber boom. Second, it argues that natural landscapes represented a vehicle for the genesis and the evolution of an Afro-descendant identity among Pará’s black peasants. And finally, it holds that, while Article 68 sparked a process of black ethnic reconfiguration in the 1990s, the emphasis on the novelty of such identities has inadvertently obscured the vitality of black political traditions. In sum, as The People of the River shows, the political actions of the 1990s were just a new iteration of a much older tradition of black peasant politics dating at least from the era of slavery. While discourses defending the rights of citizenship for Afro-descendants were revamped to accommodate to the new era that Article 68 inaugurated, they continued to refer to environmental tropes used in previous conflicts. Black peasants continue to assert their rights as Brazilians through multiple dialogues, but their voice has always found in nature a vehicle to maintain a singular identity along the way.

This chapter presents a historiography of a select group of Brazilian women's independent, alternative film and video production during the 1980s, which contributed to new definitions of citizenship during the last years of the dictatorship and the transition toward democracy. Concomitant to the goal to define new political and cultural identities, Brazilian women's alternative media at the time sought to reclaim and expand citizenship rights by intervening in understandings of brasilidade (Brazilian cultural identity) and shaping debates surrounding issues such as abortion and women's access to healthcare. The chapter then examines works by film and video maker Eunice Gutman, the Lilith Video Collective—a group of three women who dedicated themselves to bringing greater awareness to women's issues as the Brazilian constitution was being rewritten, and the feminist nongovernmental organization SOS-Corpo.

This chapter examines how neorealist techniques consciously employed by the Paraíban documentary school of the Brazilian Northeast served as a building block to construct a particular kind not only of Brazilian cinema but also of Brazilian identity. It recovers the story of this little-known movement that played a significant role in fostering the more famous fiction films of Brazil’s Cinema Novo.