The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil

Abstract

Stanley Blake’s discussion of the construction of northeastern racial identity is a valuable addition to a field that tends to privilege the history of Brazil’s economically dominant center-south. Given the centrality of Gilberto Freyre’s work in establishing the parameters from which most studies of race in Brazil begin, a history of racial identities focusing on Freyre’s home state of Pernambuco seems, if anything, long overdue. Blake’s thesis — that the northeast and nordestinos became symbols of racial mixture and regional backwardness in contradistinction to the whiter and more economically developed center-south — comes as no surprise. What is new is the historic specificity that Blake brings to this topic, demonstrating the variable impact of both rapidly evolving intellectual trends and the political and economic exigencies of the time. He also asks questions that are seemingly obvious yet have hitherto gone unanswered: How did the nordestino come to replace the coastal European as the quintessential Brazilian type by the 1920s and 1930s? And why did this happen when the northeast was suffering political and economic decline?To answer these questions, Blake covers key political and intellectual developments such as the abolition of slavery and the emergence of the fields of legal medicine, criminal anthropology, psychiatry, eugenics, and public health; structural economic inequities that intensified under the First Republic (1889 – 1930); and the rising corporatist tendencies of the Vargas era (1930 – 45). Blake documents multiple instances of how medical researchers struggled to reconcile data that did not support their preconceived notions about the relationship of race to disease. Public health practitioners and researchers typically linked malnutrition and endemic disease to the ignorance of the poor. They highlighted structural inequalities at their own peril. For example, Ulysses Pernambu-cano, a physician and bureaucrat who ran the state’s mental asylum, was dismissed from public employment due to a combination of leftist political tendencies and research that increasingly favored class-based explanations for mental illness over race-based ones. Gilberto Freyre, who was Pernambucano’s cousin, experienced a similar intellectual and political trajectory from his apologist stance on slavery in Casa grande e senzala (1933) to his more pointed critique of sugar monoculture and associated socioeconomic inequities in Nordeste (1937).Blake also argues convincingly that Pernambucan intellectuals were not simply peripheral and passive consumers of mainstream ideas about racial science. Rather, they transformed these concepts to meet local needs, for example, in translating the Stanford-Binet IQ test for regional use. Despite limited public funds, Pernambucan researchers compiled extensive biotypological data sets and employed standardized testing of all sorts on populations who had little choice in the matter — students, soldiers, and prisoners. Some of these research projects yielded tangible improvements in the form of effec tive public health outreach and education. Other studies merely reinforced elite prejudices by confirming that nordestino bodily proportions made them especially “adept at laboring in a stooped position” (p. 211). Additionally, many state-run initiatives arguably were more concerned with surveillance of poor nonwhites than health delivery. A case in point was the mandate that obliged Afro-Brazilian religious sects to register with the state’s Mental Hygiene Service in order to practice their faith free from police repression. In exchange, they had to submit to the intrusive gaze of the scientific observer who then made pronouncements about their subnormal intelligence and racial primitivism.While this book is superb in the details, Blake’s overarching thesis that the nordes-tino became a distinct racial category by the 1930s remains more suggestive than conclusive. This may derive, in part, from Blake’s explicit refusal to define nordestino, a legitimate intellectual choice made due to the multiple meanings the term assumed over time. However, this choice contributed to lack of clarity about how the category of the purportedly stoic, backward, ignorant sertanejo of the interior (imagined as white or mestiço) could come to coexist with the coastal Afro-Brazilian candomblé practitioner within the single racial category of nordestino. While corporatist statesmen like Agamemnon Magalhães sought to erase racial difference as a means to achieve social harmony, this was accomplished by actively repressing Afro-Brazilian sects to the point of insisting that the state’s population was 100 percent Catholic. Rather than incorporating Afro-Brazilians as nordestinos, they were systematically erased as a formal category, much in the same way that ideologies of mestizaje in Mexico and elsewhere in Spanish America destabilized the category of Indian. The Pernambucan case, therefore, seems more like a conflation of the categories of sertanejo and nordestino than the creation of a new overarching category. These conceptual reservations aside, this book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of how regional and national identity formation intersects with the process of state building. Blake also provides a nuanced intellectual, cultural, and political history of a region understudied within twentieth-century Brazilian history.