“We’re no longer the senzala”: Race, space, and difference in the Ethnic Capital of Brazil

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ijuí, a small rural city in Rio Grande do Sul, this work examines how history, race, and power over space articulate in the construction of a multiethnic heritage tourism festival. Ijuí has recently garnered significant national and international heritage recognition based on its unique history of multiethnic European colonization and the metanarrative that this produced an exceptionally tolerant and harmonious society. Contrasting with this narrative, the reality for the city’s Black, indigenous, and mixed residents reveals how tourism is often situated within a zone of ambivalence, serving both as an enduring source of precarity and a critical site of hope. Drawing from Michel De Certeau’s theories of strategies and tactics, along with Susan Gal and Judith Irvine’s work on rhematization, this article aims to (1) trace the precarity involved when colorblind multiethnic tourism operates within contexts of marked racial inequality, (2) interrogate the ideological, material, and semiotic processes by which these precarities become recursively inscribed within the space of tourism, and (3) show how the space of tourism can be reappropriated and utilized through tactics that defy categorization as tourism, serving ends that threaten the very basis of the precarities themselves. Thus, even as the multiethnic tourism landscape has been a source of ongoing marginalization, I argue in this work that it can also be reimagined as a space of potential where new communities, relations, visibilities, and histories can circulate and take root.