Ziraldo's A Turma Do Pererê: Representations of Race in a Brazilian Children's Comic

Elements of visual culture from the past are evidence of ideologies that were widespread in their period. Visual representations of race and gender are particularly potent when aimed at a child audience, communicating ideas about social constructs to a particularly receptive population. This article examines racial representations in several stories from the Brazilian children's comic book A turma do Perere, published by Ziraldo Alves Pinto between 1960 and 1964. Based upon a popular figure from Brazilian folklore, Ziraldo's Perere was a boy residing in a mythical and rural Brazilian landscape, and the comic's stories followed the adventures he had with his turma, or gang of friends, an assortment of anthropomorphized animals and indigenous children. Through the drawings and narratives of his comic stories, Ziraldo portrayed race in an ambiguous and contradictory fashion that was in line with the ideology that was embraced by the white elite in early 1960s Brazil.Brazilian race relations have been the topic of significant study by international scholars, particularly as they relate and compare to race relations in the United States. However, visual representations of race in comics have gone largely unexplored. Produced during a period of social transformation on the eve of a military dictatorship that would endure for twenty-one years, A turma do Perere provides valuable insight into the racial ideologies that were circulating at the time. In this publication, Ziraldo incorporated racial representations that were ambiguous and often contradictory. The comic's central characters are distinguished by the color of their skin, but the social implications of these racial differences are rarely mentioned in the text. In avoiding the narrative of race while explicitly engaging it as a visual tool, Ziraldo produced a comic that reflected the white elite's reluctance to discuss a difficult topic in its desire to avoid social conflict.Brazilian Racial Ideology in the Early 1960sDegrees of blackness in Brazil are notoriously difficult to delineate due to the long history of racial mixing and the plurality of racial terminology. In the 1960 census, the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatisticas reported that 38% of Brazilians declared themselves to be of a race other than white, divided between preta, parda, amarela, and india. Those who referred to themselves as pardos (of mixed African, indigenous, and European heritage) were a significant majority of the nonwhite population (29%), while the preta (black) population was only 8.7% and the india (indigenous) population measured at 0.2%. Thus, Brazilians identifying themselves as "non-white" were in the statistical minority at the time of the original publication of A turma do Perere, with those identifying simply as "black" constituting an even smaller set within this minority.Ziraldo created the Turma do Perere series during a period of change in racial thought in Brazilian culture. Ideas about the function and significance of race that had previously been widely accepted were revisited and reevaluated on both academic and popular levels. In the 1930s and 1940s under the Vargas regime, the idea of Brazil as a nation free of racial conflict was introduced and then popularized, promoting a national vision in which a history of miscegenation allowed whites, blacks, and people of mixed race to operate within a hierarchical and highly integrated social system. In such a system, all Brazilians share a common cultural heritage of mesticagem despite socially stratified boundaries between the races.This concept was revealed as myth by a series of sociological studies sponsored by UNESCO, initially published in the 1950s. Howard Winant stresses the role that these studies played in the understanding of race relations in Brazil by "dismantling the myth of a non-racist national culture" ("Rethinking" 174). UNESCO approached race relations in Brazil from an egalitarian and universalistic perspective, and the projects that it funded there "stimulated scientific inquiry into racism that would address motivations, effect, and possible ways of overcoming it" through the collection of considerable empirical data that indicated high levels of race-based discrimination (Chor Maio 119). …