The tan from Ipanema: Freyre, Morenidade, and the cult of the body in Rio De Janeiro
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
October 2009
Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Art
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
She says she has brown skin, and a feverish body
And inside the chest, love of Brazil
“I am Brazilian, my body reveals
That my flag is green and yellow”
—Carmen Miranda
In a felicitous turn of phrase, Barbara Babcock once asserted that “what is socially marginal is often symbolically central” (1978, 38). There is no better way to describe the figure of the mulata (a light-skinned black woman) in Rio de Janeiro. As evidenced in popular culture, artistic productions, tourist brochures and TV programs, the mulata is an idealized icon in the contemporary Brazilian imagination. A polysemic category, “mulata” in the Brazilian context can refer to “a woman of mixed racial descent,” but it also connotes the voluptuosity and sensuality characteristic of women who dance the samba onstage. I use the local term mulata in order to make reference to these multiple meanings. The fascination with this local figure is inscribed within the discourse of mesticagem, a dominant narrative emphasizing the process of cultural and biological fusion of the “races,” white and black in particular, as symbol of Brazilianness. I take racial and colour categories such as “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “mestico” to be ideological products with material effects vis-a-vis the structuring of power relations across society. These categories acquire different symbolic value within the context of Brazilian “pigmentocracy,” where instead of a colour line, shadism permeates race relations: The lighter the skin, the greater the social value. To a point, that is.
In this article I argue that the most valued bodies in Rio de Janeiro are those of white Brazilians that are able to embody the qualities of mulattoes. In particular, I focus on the characteristics associated with mulatto women in the context of carnival, and look at how in recent years white women have progressively come to occupy the spotlight in this setting. The article explores the Brazilian fascination with the mulata in terms of stereotypes that organize images of social difference and convey specific longings and desire. It situates the emergence of this fascination within the context of colonial gender and race relations and later, the development of a national ideology focused on the value of whitening through “mixing.” I examine the discourse on mesticagem in the work of anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, the most influential thinker in the history of Brazil (Schwartzman 2000). Exploring Freyre’s glorification of the mulata, I look at how women’s bodies have become surfaces upon which masculinist and nationalist desires are deployed. I then move on to argue that morenidade (brownness), while commonly thought of as interchangeable with mulatice (mulatto-ness) as a central value and self-concept in Brazilian society, is in fact the preferred social type. I explore how morenidade is one aspect of the idealized “perfect body” in Rio’s society, and look at how local people invest their physiques with numerous techniques in order to obtain such an ideal for themselves. Woven through the article is an exploration of how these issues are expressed in the narratives of my research participants. In resonance with Malysse (2002), I conclude that Rio’s culture has become obsessed with the image bodies project as expressions of personhood, and bring to bear my reflections on morenidade upon the Carioca (from Rio) perfect body.
National Identity and the “Whitening” Strategy
Why has the mulata become the central object of desire in the Brazilian imagination? How did she become a symbol of national identity, given the generalized denigration of mulattoes in colonial times, and the debased sexual role that women of colour were subjected to? Brazilian intellectual debates over race have become central to understandings of nationhood at least since the beginning of the 20th century. Contemporary gender stereotypes are deeply imbricated with larger narratives on the role of biracial peoples in the formation of Brazil as a modern nation.
The debate over national identity and the future of the nation in Brazil was not a product of independence from Portugal. It actually began to take place at the onset of the abolition of slavery and the institution of the republic in 1889. Racism took a very particular shape in Brazilian intellectual production. It was recast under the native category of branqueamento (whitening). Late-19th and early-20th-century sociological writings in Brazil reflect the ideological supremacy of the white world. Brazilian intellectuals, however, were faced with the following theoretical problem: How to treat national identity vis-a-vis racial inequalities. The solution was to emphasize the mestico element (Ortiz 1985, 20). For the 19th-century intelligentsia the mestico was—more than a concrete reality—a category through which a sociological need was expressed: the elaboration of a national identity. According to these writers, moral and ethnic miscegenation allowed for the environmental adaptation of the European civilization to the tropics. Moreover, the result of this experience permitted the characterization of Brazilian culture as different from the European. In the local appropriation of theories of hybridization, Brazilian intellectuals posited that miscegenation would ultimately derive in a process of branqueamento, through which the gradual predominance of white traits over black ones could be ensured, in both the body and the spirit of mulattoes (see Araujo 1994, 29; Skidmore 1993). As Ortiz states, the social sciences of the time reproduced, at the level of discourse, the contradictions of Brazilian society. Whilst the notion of “racial inferiority” was used to explain Brazilian “backwardness,” the notion of mesticagem also pointed toward a possible national unity. The identity thus produced was ambiguous, integrating both the negative and the positive elements of the races in question (Ortiz 1985, 34). The emphasis placed on the ideology of whitening of the Brazilian population was articulated with the particular interests of the coffee bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo state, which achieved its political hegemony with the rise of the First Republic. State immigration policies in the last quarter of the 19th century initiated programs that attracted millions of Europeans (see Skidmore and Smith 1992). These policies tackled the scarcity of labour power (defined strictly as unavailability of slaves) and established a clear association between mesticagem, whitening, and social progress. Massive immigration programs were seen not only as a solution to the lack of labourers, “but also as part of a long-term modernizing project, in which the whitening of the national population was seen as one of the most desired consequences” (Hasenbalg 1979, 128-129).
With the emphasis on whitening as a Brazilian solution for the “problem” of the races, Brazilian intellectuals such as Joao Batista de Lacerda and Oliveira Vianna shifted away from negative views of hybridity. From thinking of miscegenation as the production of a mongrel group making up a “raceless chaos,” a degraded corruption of the originals, Brazilian intellectuals reconceptualized ideas of amalgamation using elements already present in racist theories, such as the claim that all humans can interbreed prolifically and in an unlimited way, sometimes accompanied by the melting-pot notion that the mixing of people produces a new mixed race, with merged but distinct new physical and moral characteristics (see Da Matta 1981; Skidmore 1993; Stepan 1991; Young 1995). The ideal of whitening was consistently appropriated by Brazilian intellectuals from 1880 to 1920 and became consolidated, albeit transformed, with Gilberto Freyre’s culturalism in the 1930s. Nancy Leys Stepan calls this a shift to “constructive miscegenation” that overtly challenged the notion of mulatto degeneracy and reminded the country that “we are all mestizos” (Stepan 1991, 161). This particular ideology began to play a more “positive” part in Brazilian understandings of the nation…
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