White Brazilian

White Brazilians ( pt, brasileiros brancos ) refers to Brazilian citizens who are considered or self-identify as "white", typically because of European or Levantine descent.

The main ancestry of current white Brazilians is Portuguese. Historically, the Portuguese were the Europeans who mostly immigrated to Brazil: it is estimated that, between 1500 and 1808, 500,000 of them went to live in Brazil, and the Portuguese were practically the only European group to have definitively settled in colonial Brazil.

Furthermore, even after independence, the Portuguese were among the nationalities that mostly immigrated to Brazil. Between 1884 and 1959, 4,734,494 immigrants entered Brazil, mostly from Portugal and Italy, but also from Spain, Germany, Poland and other countries and nowadays millions of Brazilians are also descended from these immigrants.

The white Brazilian population is spread throughout Brazil's territory, but its highest percentage is found in the three southernmost states, where 79.8% of the population claims to be White in the censuses, whereas the Southeast region has the largest absolute numbers.

According to the 2010 Census, the states with the highest percentage of white citizens are: Santa Catarina (88.1%), Rio Grande do Sul (82.3%), Paraná (70.06%), and São Paulo (63.65%). Other states with significant rates are: Rio de Janeiro (54.7%), Mato Grosso do Sul (51.78%) and Espírito Santo (50.45%). São Paulo has the largest population in absolute numbers with 29 million whites.

Conception of "white" in Brazil

The conception of "white" in Brazil is similar to other countries yet different to the United States, where historically only people of entirely European ancestry have been considered white, due to the one drop rule. In Brazil and in Latin America in general, this conception does not exist. A 2000 survey conducted in Rio de Janeiro concluded that "racial-purity" is not important for a person to be classified as white in Brazil. The survey asked respondents if they had any ancestors who were European, African or Amerindian. As much as 52% of those whites reported they have some non-European ancestry: 25% reported to have some African ancestry and 14% reported Amerindian ancestry (15% of them reported to have both). Only 48% of those whites did not report any non-white ancestry. Thus, in Brazil, one can self-identify as white and still have African or Amerindian ancestry, and such a person has no problem admitting to having non-white ancestors.

In colonial Brazil, the formation of a white population of exclusive European ancestry was impossible. In the first centuries of colonization, almost only Portuguese men immigrated to Brazil, since Portuguese women were often prevented from migrating. Given such gender imbalance, Portuguese male settlers often had relationships with indigenous or African women, what led to an extremely mixed population.

At the end of the 19th century, when eugenic ideas arrived in Brazil, a severe racial segregation, similar to that of the United States or South Africa, that separated "whites" from "non-whites", was regarded as impractical in Brazil, since this would even exclude many members of the Brazilian elite. Thus, in Brazil, racial classifications are more flexible and based primarily on a person's physical characteristics, such as skin color, hair type and other physical traits, tending to identify as "white" a person with lighter skin color.

In Brazil, social prejudice connected to certain details in the physical appearance of individual is widespread. Those details are related to the concept of "cor". "Cor", Portuguese for "color", denotes the Brazilian rough equivalent of the term "race" in English, but is based on a complex phenotypic evaluation that takes into account skin pigmentation, hair type, nose shape, and lip shape. This concept, unlike the English notion of "race", captures the continuous aspects of phenotypes. Thus, it seems there is no racial descent rule operational in Brazil; it is even possible for two siblings to belong to completely diverse "racial" categories.

An important factor about whiteness in Brazil is the racial stigma of being Amerindian or black, which is undesirable and avoided for a large part of the population. Scientific racism largely influenced race relations in Brazil since the late 19th century. The predominant non-white, mostly Afro-Brazilian population was seen as a problem for Brazil in the eyes of the predominantly white elite of the country. In contrast to some countries, like the United States or South Africa, which tried to avoid miscegenation, even imposing anti-miscegenation laws, in Brazil miscegenation was always legal. What was expected was that miscegenation would eventually turn all Brazilians into whites. However, the most recent census in 2010 showed a shift in mentality, with a growing number of Brazilians identifying themselves as brown or black, accompanied by a decrease in the percentage of whites, with affirmative action and identity valorisation being factors.

As a result of that desire of whitening its own population, the Brazilian ruling classes encouraged the arrival of massive European immigration to the country. In the 1890s 1.2 million European immigrants were added to the country's 5 million whites. Today the Brazilian areas with larger proportions of whites tend to have been destinations of massive European immigration between 1880 and 1930.

The following are the results for the different Brazilian censuses, since 1872:

History

Portuguese colonization

Brazil received more European settlers during its colonial era than any other country in the Americas. Between 1500 and 1760, about 700,000 Europeans immigrated to Brazil.

In the first two centuries of colonization (16th and 17th centuries), it is estimated that no more than 100,000 Portuguese people migrated to Brazil. They were more affluent immigrants, who settled mainly in the captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia, to explore sugar production, which was the most profitable activity in the colony at that time. At the end of the 16th century, the white population (the vast majority Portuguese) was of over 30,000 people, mainly concentrated in the captaincies of Pernambuco, Bahia and São Vicente. The colonization process continued throughout the 17th century and by the end of the century, the white population was of nearly 100,000 people.

It is notable that most Portuguese settlers arrived in Brazil in the 18th century: 600,000 in a period of only sixty years. Initially unattractive during the first two centuries of colonization, as it concentrated sugar production, which required high investments, by the end of the 17th and in the beginning of the 18th centuries, due to the retreat of the Portuguese Empire in Asia and the discoveries of gold in the Brazilian region of Minas Gerais, there were more favorable conditions for the arrival of Portuguese immigrants in Brazil. There was no need for major investments for mining activity. Mining in these regions was a crucial factor in the arrival of this contingent of Portuguese immigrants.

A characteristic of the Portuguese colonization is that it was predominantly male. Portuguese immigration to Brazil in the 16th and 17th centuries was made up almost exclusively of men. The typical Portuguese settler in Brazil was a young man in his late teens or in his early twenties, coming from the provinces of Northern Portugal, most notably Minho and Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, or from the Atlantic islands. White women of marriageable age were rare throughout the Portuguese maritime Empire. The few Portuguese families that immigrated to Brazil tended to stay on the coast, rarely penetrating the interior. The situation changed slightly in the 18th century, when the migration of families and women from the Azores and Madeira islands increased.Escravos e Libertos no Brasil Colonial. A.J.R RUSSEL-WOOD.

In addition to the fact that marriageable Portuguese women who arrived in Brazil were rare, the few remaining white women often remained celibate, as it was a tradition among aristocratic or richer white families to send their daughters to Catholic convents, where they would follow a religious life. Given this absence of white women available for marriage, it was inevitable for Portuguese colonists to take as a lover a woman of African or indigenous origin. The Portuguese Crown's concern about the scarcity of marriages among whites in the colony became evident in 1732, when John V of Portugal prohibited women from leaving Brazil, with some exceptions. In order to curb miscegenation, in a royal decree of 1726, the king demanded that all candidates for positions in the municipal councils of Minas Gerais had to be whites and husbands or widowers of white women. Restrictive measures like this, however, would not be able to restrict the natural tendency to miscegenation in colonial Brazil.

Thus, the "white" population of colonial Brazil was not formed by the multiplication of European families in the colony, as occurred, for example, in the United States, but often by the miscegenation between European men and African or indigenous women, giving rise to a population defined as "white", but which was, to a greater or lesser degree, of mixed-race heritage. This population, speaking Portuguese and completely integrated with the "neo-Brazilian" culture, has assisted the Portuguese colonizers to impose their dominant characteristics in Brazil.

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The impact of the Portuguese colonization

According to estimates of Brazil's ethnic composition in 1835 (excluding the indigenous peoples), just over half of the Brazilian population was black (51.4%), followed by whites (24.4%) and brown people (18.2%). About four decades later, in 1872, the census registered significant changes in the ethnic composition: blacks dropped to 19.7%, while whites increased their proportion to 38.1% and brown people became the most numerous, at 42.2%.FACT AND MYTH:DISCOVERING A RACIAL PROBLEM IN BRAZIL
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The proportional reduction of blacks and the increase of whites and brown people, between 1835 and 1872, had little or nothing to do with a recent European immigration: between 1822 and 1872, only 268,000 European immigrants entered Brazil, and these immigrants and their descendants did not exceed 6% of the Brazilian population in 1872. What explains this change is that the Portuguese colonizers and their descendants managed to reproduce much more quickly than Africans and their descendants. During the three centuries of African slavery in Brazil, the growth of the black population was basically due to the importation of new slaves from Africa, given that the natural reproduction of slaves was very slow and even little stimulated (it was more economical to buy new slaves than to take care of slave children). Moreover, life expectancy of slaves in Brazil was very low. In the words of Augustin Saint-Hilaire: "An infinity of blacks died without leaving any descendants". In 1850, with the prohibition of the entry of new slaves in Brazil, the proportional growth of the black population not only stagnated, but also decreased substantially, as can be seen.

On the other hand, the Portuguese and their descendants managed to increase their numbers, year after year, not by the entry of new immigrants, but by their remarkable reproductive capacity, particularly through miscegenation with indigenous and black women, which explains the continuous growth of “whites” and mainly of "brown people" in the 19th century. Genetic studies show that, even in Brazilian regions that received little or virtually no European immigration after independence from Portugal (such as the North and Northeast), European genetic ancestry predominates in the population. European ancestry is greater than the African or Amerindian ones in all regions of Brazil.

This does not mean that the majority of the population in these regions is "white"; on the contrary, due to the high degree of miscegenation between Europeans, Africans and Amerindians, in the North and Northeast regions of Brazil only a minority is white, and the majority identify themselves as “brown” in the censuses; however, the genetic composition of these regions, with a predominance of European ancestry, particularly Portuguese, highlights the genetic legacy inherited from Portuguese colonization and the complex miscegenation that occurred back then.

Non-Portuguese presence in colonial Brazil

Before the 19th century, the French invaded twice, establishing brief and minor settlements (Rio de Janeiro, 1555–60; Maranhão, 1612–15).Paul Louis Jacques Gaffarel, ''Histoire du Brésil français au seizième siècle'' (Paris: Maison Neuve, 1878). In 1630, the Dutch made the most significant attempt to seize Brazil from Portuguese control. At the time, Portugal was in a dynastic union with Spain, and the Dutch hostility against Spain was transferred to Portugal. The Dutch were able to control most of the Brazilian Northeast then the most dynamic part of Brazil for about a quarter century, but were unable to change the ethnic makeup of the colonizing population, which remained overwhelmingly Portuguese by origin and culture. Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin moved from Amsterdam to New Holland; but in 1654, when the Portuguese regained control of Brazil, most of them were expelled, as well as most of the Dutch settlers. A group of Dutch and Portuguese Jews then moved to North America, forming a Jewish community in New Amsterdam, today's New York city, while a few of the Dutch colonists settled in the highlands in the countryside of Pernambuco known as Borborema Plateau, a region part of the ecosystem known as '' agreste'' between the coastal forest '' zona da mata'' and the semiarid '' sertão'' in the Northeast.

Aside these military attempts, a very small number of non-Portuguese people appear to have managed to enter Brazil from European countries other than Portugal.

However, in the Southern Brazilian areas disputed between Portugal and Spain, Spanish colonists largely contributed for the ethnic formation of the local population, denominated Gaúchos. A genetic research conducted by FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) on Gaúchos from Bagé and Alegrete, in Rio Grande do Sul, Southern Brazil, revealed that they are mostly descended from Portuguese and Spanish ancestors, with 52% of them having Amerindian MtDNA (similar to that found in people who live in the area of the Amazon rainforest, and significantly higher than the national average 33% among Brazilian whites) and 11% African MtDNA. Another study also concluded that for the formation of the Gaúcho there was a predominance of Iberians, particularly Spaniards. To evaluate the extension of Gaucho genetic diversity of the Gauchos, and retrieve part of their history, a study with 547 individuals, of which 278 were Native Americans (Guarani and Kaingang) and 269 admixed from the state of Rio Grande do Sul, was carried out. The genetic finding matches with the explanation of sociologist Darcy Ribeiro about the ethnic formation of the Brazilian Gaúchos: they are mostly the result of the miscegenation of Spanish and Portuguese males with Amerindian females.RIBEIRO, Darcy. O Povo Brasileiro, Companhia de Bolso, fourth reprint, 2008 (2008).

Another genetic study found possible relics of the 17th-century Dutch invasion in Northeastern Brazil.

Mass European immigration

The main immigrant group to arrive in Brazil from the end of the 19th century onwards were the Italians, and they went mainly to São Paulo. In the early days, immigrants from northern Italy predominated, especially from Veneto, however, at the end of the century, the southern presence grew, especially from Campania and Calabria. The Italians, pressured by the poverty that plagued Italy, headed for rural settlements in southern Brazil, where they became small farmers, as well as for coffee farms in the southeast, where they replaced slave labor. Others, especially the southern ones, went straight to urban centers.Angelo Trento. Do outro lado do Atlântico: um século de imigração italiana no Brasil. Studio Nobel

The second main group were the Portuguese who, added to the colonizing population of the earlier centuries, form the most important European group in Brazil. The fragmentation and disappearance of small properties in northern Portugal at the end of the 19th century stimulated a growing emigration to Brazil, which was seen by the Portuguese as a land of abundance and opportunities for enrichment. Of those who arrived, most headed for the city of Rio de Janeiro. Young immigrants who arrived supported by a pre-existing solidarity network represented 8 to 11% of immigrants; those qualified or possessing capital to invest in Brazil constituted about 10% of the total, while immigrants without any type of qualification made up no less than 80% of the Portuguese who arrived in Rio at the end of the 19th century.

The third most numerous group came from Spain. Spaniards, often forgotten by Brazilian historiography, went mainly to São Paulo, to work in the coffee plantations. They were mainly from southern Spain, from the Andalusia region, although the flow from Galicia was also important.Marília Dalva Klaumann Cánovas. Imigrantes espanhóis na Pauliceia. EDUSP

The fourth most relevant group were the Germans. The promotion of German immigration to Brazil was old, dating back to 1824, with the presence of immigrants who had a great importance in the occupation of southern Brazil. They founded rural communities, which later became prosperous cities, such as São Leopoldo, Joinville and Blumenau.

It was only in 1818 that the Portuguese rulers abandoned the principle of restricting settling in Brazil to Portuguese nationals. In that year over two thousand Swiss migrants from the Canton of Fribourg arrived to settle in an inhospitable area near Rio de Janeiro that would later be renamed Nova Friburgo.

The end of the slave trade (1850) and the abolition of slavery (1888) prompted the Brazilian State to promote European immigration to Brazil. The production of coffee, the main product of Brazil at the time, began to suffer a shortage of workers due to the slave emancipation process. In one hundred years (1872-1972) at least 5,350,889 immigrants came to Brazil, of whom 31.06% were Portuguese, 30.32% Italians, 13.38% Spaniards, 4.63% Japanese, 4.18% Germans and 16.42% of other unspecified nationalities. These immigrants settled mostly in the South and Southeast regions of Brazil.

Brazilian scientific thought at the time, which was strongly marked by positivism, adopted "scientific theses" of social Darwinism and eugenics to defend the "whitening" of the population as a necessary factor for the development of Brazil. The Brazilian social and political elite, which was mostly white, took it for granted that the country did not develop because its population was largely composed of black and mixed-race people. Immigration was not only considered a means of supplying the necessary labor in the fields, or of colonizing the national territory covered by virgin forests, but also as a means of "improving" the Brazilian population by increasing the number of whites. Hence, Brazilian immigration policies were strongly influenced by the racial whitening ideology that permeated the Brazilian social and political imaginary during the first half of the 20th century.

South American oligarchies, which remained predominantly of European origin, believed in syntony with the racialist theories then widespread in Europe that the large numbers of blacks, Amerindians and mixed-race people who made up the majority of the population were a handicap to the development of their countries. As a result, countries such as Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil started to encourage the arrival of European immigrants, in order to make the white population grow and to dilute the African and Amerindian blood in their population. Argentina even had an article in its Constitution prohibiting any attempt to prevent the entry of European immigrants in the country. In the case of Brazil, the immigrants started arriving in huge numbers during the 1880s. From 1886 to 1900, almost 1.4 million Europeans arrived, of whom over 900,000 were Italians. During this period of 14 years, Brazil received more Europeans than during the over 300 years of colonization.

The mass European immigration to Brazil only started in the second half of the 19th century, from 1850 to 1970 over 5 million Europeans arrived, because of three main reasons:

*to "whiten" Brazil, since the Amerindian and African elements were very strong in the population, a fact that was considered a problem by the local elite, that considered these races inferior. Bringing European immigrants was seen as a way to "improve" the racial composition of the local population;
*to populate inhospitable areas of Brazil, mostly the Southern provinces;
*to replace African manpower, since the Atlantic slave trade was effectively suppressed in 1850 and coffee plantations were spreading in the region of São Paulo.

Brazilian coffee producers, fearful of the crisis in the labor force, began to put pressure on the Legislative Branch to facilitate the entry of foreign workers to be inserted as manpower in the coffee plantations. To this end, laws were enforced to facilitate the entry of immigrants and the Brazilian government started to spend public money paying the passage of immigrants from Europe. The state of São Paulo, in the first decade of the Republican Regime, allocated about 9% of its revenue to cover spending on promoting immigration.

European immigrants were brought to Brazil mostly to replace the slave labor in coffee plantations. Brazilian landowners, who were used to deal with slaves, began to deal with free and paid European workers. These immigrants were often mistreated by Brazilian farmers and subjected to conditions of semi-slavery. The conditions were so harsh that, in 1902, the Italian government issued Prinetti Decree, which restricted the emigration of Italian citizens to Brazil, prohibiting travel subsidies. In 1910, Spain banned subsidized immigration to Brazil, after complaints that Spanish citizens were living in conditions of semi-slavery in coffee plantations of Brazil.

Immigration to Brazil, by nationality, decenal periods from 1884–1893, 1924-1933 and 1945-1949
Source: Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE)

Nationality	Decade
	1884-1893	1894-1903	1904-1913	1914-1923	1924-1933	1945-1949	1950-1954	1955-1959
Germans	22,778	6,698	33,859	29,339	61,723	5,188	12,204	4,633
Spaniards	113,116	102,142	224,672	94,779	52,405	4,092	53,357	38,819
Italians	510,533	537,784	196,521	86,320	70,177	15,312	59,785	31,263
Japanese	-	-	11,868	20,398	110,191	12	5,447	28,819
Portuguese	170,621	155,542	384,672	201,252	233,650	26,268	123,082	96,811
Middle Easterners	96	7,124	45,803	20,400	20,400	N/A	N/A	N/A
Other	66,524	42,820	109,222	51,493	164,586	29,552	84,851	47,599
Total	883,668	852,110	1,006,617	503,981	717,223	80,424	338,726	247,944

Impact of mass immigration

The immigration of millions of Europeans to Brazil, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, contributed to bring greater diversity to the Brazilian population. It is estimated that about 20% of the Brazilian population is descended from people who immigrated to the country in that period, and, in certain regions of the South and Southeast, this percentage is much higher. In the regions where they concentrated most, these immigrants created Europeanized landscapes and bequeathed a dominantly "white" population, creating a human panorama different from the relative Portuguese-Brazilian uniformity of the country, but where it is possible to distinguish the sub-areas where each ethnic group was concentrated, whether German, Italian, Polish or Russian.

The process of acculturation of these immigrants in the Brazilian society was highly variable from nationality to nationality. Portuguese, Italians and Spaniards assimilated more easily; Russians, Poles and Austrians occupied an intermediate position, while Germans were more resistant.O Talian entre o italiano-padrão e o português brasileiro.
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The influence of the environment cannot be underestimated: immigrants who went to coffee farms or urban centers assimilated more easily, as there was daily contact with Brazilians, generating common interests, friendships and mixed marriages. In these regions, the Portuguese language quickly supplanted the languages of the immigrants, facilitating their process of acculturation.

In turn, the immigrants who went to the rural settlements (colonies) were gathered in isolated groups, maintaining little contact with the rest of the Brazilian society, which allowed the maintenance of language and ethnic identity for generations. Until the 1940s, in the colonies, few descendants of immigrants knew how to speak Portuguese, even though some of them had been living in Brazil for generations. The big blow came through the nationalization campaign, implemented during Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship, starting in 1937. The Brazilian government started to see the immigrant colonies as a “national problem”, which threatened the uniformity of Brazilian identity, and their inhabitants were subject to great repression. Vargas ordered all schools associated with foreign cultures to be closed, forcing all schools to teach exclusively in Portuguese, and the use of foreign languages, including orally, in public or in private, was banned in Brazil, with people being arrested and beaten.

Even with the repression of Vargas Estado Novo dictatorship, minority languages of European origin still survive in certain communities concentrated in southern Brazil, mainly of German, Italian and Slavic origin. However, their use has been decreasing in recent generations. The break with the isolation of these communities, with the improvement of highways and infrastructure, the need to learn Portuguese to enter the job market, as well as the diffusion of the media (press, radio, television, internet), has led to the growing use of the Portuguese language in these communities.

File:Rainha e Princesas da Festa da Uva em 1934.jpg, Italian Brazilian girls in Caxias do Sul, 1934.
File:Ukrainians in Brazil.jpg, Ukrainian family in Brazil, 1891.
File:Afot3602.jpg, Portuguese immigrant in Rio de Janeiro, 1895.
File:Familia-Oppelt-Costamilan-1.jpg, Italian family in Southern Brazil, 1901.
File:Passaporte português de 1927.jpg, Passport of a Portuguese immigrant, 1927.
File:Imigrantes.jpg, Group of Italians arriving in São Paulo.
File:Picking coffee in Brazil.jpg, European immigrants working in a coffee plantation in the State of São Paulo.

Immigrants

Most of the 4,431,000 immigrants that entered the country between 1821 and 1932 settled in São Paulo (state) and other Southeastern states: São Paulo received most of the Italians (Veneto, Lombardy, Campania, Tuscany, Calabria, Liguria, Piedmont, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna, Abruzzi e Molise and Basilicata) and Spaniards (Galicians, Castilians and Catalans) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and from the 1910s on most of the Lithuanians, Dutch, French, Hungarians, Baltic Finns, Ashkenazi Jews (from diaspora communities in Poland, Romania, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia and Czechoslovakia), Latvians, Greeks, Armenians, Czech, Croatians, Slovenians, Bulgarians, Albanians and Georgians; Rio de Janeiro (state) received most of the Portuguese immigrants followed by SP, as well as most of the Swiss and Belgians. Together with São Paulo and Santa Catarina, RJ was one of the main destinations for Swedes, Norwegians, Danes but also French and received the second largest number of Jews after SP. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro followed by Paraná also received most of the English-Welsh and Scots; The countryside of Espírito Santo was mainly populated by people arriving from Germany, especially Pomeranians (Prussia), Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Luxembourg, France, Romania, Slovakia and Iberia, comprising chiefly Catalans but including Basques and Andorrans. Minas Gerais received generally Italians, looking for arable acreage in the 19th century, and Portugueses early in the 18th during the Gold and Diamond Rush. Minas Gerais was also destination for Germans, Czech, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Ashkenazi Jews, Spaniards, Serbians, Greeks, Armenians, and Lebanese who settled the country.

However, the impact of the White immigration was larger in Southern Brazil, because even though it got a lesser migration, since it had a very small population, the immigration's impact was greater to its demography when compared to other Brazilian regions. The main concentrations in Rio Grande do Sul were Venetian Italians where their dialect is still spoken and Germans from the Hunsrück region of Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate) who also kept their Hunsrückisch dialect known as ''Riograndensisch'', followed by Poles. Their arriving numbers supplanted the previous Iberian population, founding cities like Novo Hamburgo and Garibaldi. German immigrants first arrived in 1824 settling in the Sinos River Valley, where one of the first colonies to take an urbanized figure was Hamburger Berg, future Novo Hamburgo, dismembered from or spun out of São Leopoldo, dubbed the cradle of German culture in Brazil. Its capital, Porto Alegre, has the third largest Jewish population in the nation.
The vast majority of Slavs is concentrated in Paraná, mainly Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians, followed by German and Italian dwellers in the countryside who also arrived to populate the sparsely inhabited South. Some localities like Mallet, a 19th-century settlement founded by Poles from Austrian Galicia (Eastern Europe)