For a faster whitenning: identity and racism in the album’s narratives of the fiftieth anniversary of Italian immigration in southern Brazil

Abstract

The ethnic and racial questions are present transversally in the entire Brazilian history, especially from the independence process, when we observe the first tentative to build a national identity. The first auto-image elaborated by the country [Brazil], in the nineteenth Century, is about a nation without blacks, formed by the union between the “noble savage” and the “noble Portuguese”. The slave/black figure remains as a important problematic of the Twentieth Century, permitting the creation of a idealistic vision of the Brazilian racial democracy, crossed by miscegenation critics and by a polyphony of medical and anthropological knowledge. In this sense, in the fifty-years commemorative album of the Italian immigration in Rio Grande do Sul, printed in 1925, the Italians immigrants ethnic positivity is contrasted with the black and mestizos inferiority, in a lecture that mix the “whiten” idea and the miscegenation critic. While the colonization method in the south of Brazil marked by the exclusion of the black population is glorified, the race miscegenation's politic is criticized, because its perception as a slow strategy to purify the national blood.