Lesser, Jeffrey. Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808-Present

Lesser, Jeffrey. Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808-Present. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. 208 pp. ISBN: 978-0-521-14535-0. Jeffrey Lesser's approachable and readable text is a masterful introduction to the critical role of immigration in the construction of the modern Brazilian state. He details the migrations of groups originating from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia; the expectations of Brazilian landowners eager to replace their labor force of enslaved and later emancipated men and women of African descent; and the reception of the Brazilian public upon the arrival of the migrants. In addition, he includes photographs, graphs, and figures, and ends each chapter with primary documents such as government reports, police reports, and letters from immigrants to their families. Finally, he includes footnotes rather than endnotes throughout his analysis, facilitating the impulse to conduct further research on the many interesting historical episodes that comprise his fascinating study. In his first chapter, "Creating Brazilians," Lesser highlights how for Brazilian officials, immigration was seen, and continues to be seen, as a way of "improving an imperfect nation that has been tainted by the history of Portuguese colonialism and African slavery" (2). After offering a concise overview of the first two centuries of Brazilian history, he masterfully presents issues of race facing Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, juxtaposing the desire for cheap labor and civilization as facilitated by whiteness campaigns with international perceptions of the nation as barbaric due to prolonged African enslavement. With the next chapter, "From Central Europe and Asia: Immigration Schemes, 1822-1870," he traces the journeys of early groups to arrive in large numbers in Imperial Brazil. Germans who settled in Rio Grande do Sul received plots of land (picadas) as incentives to develop agriculture. They were joined by U.S. Confederates, Chinese, and Muckers, all of whom were expected to develop the frontier land of the nation. Lesser explains how these attempts were met with varied degrees of success due to the mistreatment of the immigrant by slave-owning fazendeiros. The emancipation of slavery spurred great changes to immigration policies which are detailed in the third chapter, "Mass Migrations, 1880-1920." Facing steep competition for workers from Argentina, Brazilian elites offered strong incentives to workers as the coffee economy boomed, leading to the arrival of millions from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Lesser explores the routines of the new arrivals, from their processing at the Ilha das Flores Hospedaria dos Imigrantes, their settling in Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and most prominently, Sao Paulo, and the cultural forms they established such as newspapers and cinema. In the fourth chapter, "The Creation of Euro-Brazilian Identities," he writes how Southern European Catholic immigrants claimed this new country as their own, navigating tensions between themselves, their superiors, and the existing population of Afro-Brazilians. He explores how assertions of whiteness became primary in affirmations of belonging to the nation. …