Origins

Brazilians in Canada come from a country characterized by great diversity. Brazil is the largest country in South America, with over 150 million people (1991) of various origins ranging from indigenous Indian groups (primarily of the Tupi and Guaraní linguistic families) to immigrants and their descendants from Europe (in particular, Portugal, Italy, and Germany), Africa, the Middle East (Syria and Lebanon), and Japan. Administratively, the country is a federation comprised of twenty-three states, three territories, and a federal capital district (Brasília). Within Brazil’s borders are tribal peoples in the Amazon region, a large agrarian sector with millions of peasant farmers in the northeast, vibrant ports along the Atlantic coast within some of the world’s largest urban conglomerations (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), and South America’s most advanced industrial park located in the southeastern state of São Paulo.

Portugal “discovered” the eastern, Atlantic coast of South America in 1500 following an agreement with Spain (1494) to share the early conquest of the Americas. At first the Portuguese, actively expanding their maritime empire to India and the Far East, had little interest in the New World domains. By 1550, however, the Portuguese had found sugar, a tropical product which offered great profits on European markets. Soon plantations were being founded all along the coast, especially in the northeastern provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco. The native peoples, Tupi-Guaran² and Gê speakers, were unable to provide the kind of labour which sugar planting demanded, and those who did not die of the diseases brought by the Europeans fled inland to escape enslavement. To replace them, the Portuguese, with their considerable seagoing skills, turned to Africa. For the next four centuries, Brazil became the major destination of forced immigration from West Africa and Angola. Over four million people were transported across the Atlantic to supply labour for the plantations and mines of the Portuguese. Brazil is thus unusual among the Latin American states in having a significantly African cultural base, and nowhere are the African influences more evident than in the country’s religion and art.

The dominance of sugar plantations in the Brazilian economy gave way to gold mining in the eighteenth century and to coffee plantations in the nineteenth. In effect, Brazil functioned as a producer of raw materials for European consumption, one whose economy until nearly the end of the nineteenth century was dependent to a large degree on slave labour. Many elements of Brazilian culture derive from this fact. Severe social and class distinctions, paternalism in politics, and complex intermixing of racial and cultural elements in the population all can be traced to the country’s slave-based agrarian economy. This is most obvious in the northeast, the heart of the old sugar region, where aristocratic Portuguese clans still live alongside African religious centres and sometimes share beliefs about the spirits or gods of nature (ôrishás) and of the dead (Éxu). Although other regions of the country became economically more important, the essence of Brazilian culture is still derived from the northeast, where African elements have gradually become integrated into national life.

Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822, when the heir apparent to the Portuguese throne, Dom Pedro I, declared himself emperor of Brazil. The elite of the new Brazilian empire was literate and highly sophisticated, even though the country’s economy was still based on slave labour working coffee plantations. Trade was opened up to the rest of Europe, especially France and England, and Brazilian society, literature, music, and art began to take on forms that were clearly different from those of Portugal. Even though Portuguese was the official language and Roman Catholicism the dominant religion, Brazilians were rapidly becoming aware of the fact that in the conditions of the New World they had become a distinct people. They were proud of their culture and their distinct form of Portuguese, the latter being characterized by the use of African and Tupi-Guaran² terms and concepts, the complex nature of pronouns, and, reflecting perhaps the influence of African speech, the softer quality of the spoken language.

The discovery in the eighteenth century of gold and precious stones in the east-central province of Minas Gerais led to the robust expansion of the population of that region. But it was farther south, in the heart of the coffee economy based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, that the greatest economic and political developments occurred. The abolition of slavery in 1888 brought about the collapse of Brazil’s imperial government. In its place a federal republic was founded in which each region was given a high degree of local autonomy. Federal policies, however, were dominated by coffee planters from the state of São Paulo (the Paulistas), who after emancipation sought to replace Black slaves with European immigrants. Consequently, millions of people immigrated with government assistance to Brazil from Italy, Germany, Lebanon, Poland, Ukraine, and even Japan to work the coffee plantations and also to engage in trade and industry. Brazil’s new society was becoming a largely European multicultural mix that was much more urban and entrepreneurial in outlook. Local industries were established in the 1920s which were to flourish both during and after World War I.

In 1930 Brazil experienced its first military coup, this one led by Getúlio Vargas, who was intent on breaking the political and military power of the São Paulo coffee elite. He declared himself dictator in 1937 and deliberately set out to “modernize” the country, encouraging industrial development, education, and even labour unions, although all under his control. Vargas’s nationalist policies were popular and, though deposed by the army in 1945, he was again elected president in 1952. After Vargas’s death in 1954, industrialization and urbanization continued to expand and to threaten the hegemony of the more traditional economic and social elites. The considerable economic and political development of the 1950s and 1960s made it seem that Brazil might become a popular democracy. Such ideas, however, frightened the ruling elite, who supported the military. In 1964 a military dictatorship came to power.

The years from 1968 to 1974 marked the apex of military rule in Brazil. It was also one of the few times in Brazilian history when brutal physical repression (including torture, which previously was meted out only to the lower classes) hit the urban middle and upper classes. Independent labour organizations, peasant leagues, student unions, political parties, and other groups were broken up, their members jailed and sometimes tortured and killed. At the same time, political stability encouraged foreign investment, rapid industrial growth, a spectacular rise in the country’s per capita gross domestic product, and the formation of a new entrepreneurial lower middle class. The very success of the Brazilian economy during the 1960s and 1970s probably contributed to subsequent emigration. Hence in 1981, when the economic boom collapsed and Brazil was plunged into a severe fiscal crisis, numerous lower-middle-class entrepreneurs, finding their prosperity checked, sought new business opportunities by going abroad.

By the early 1980s the military had initiated a period of political liberalization, and in 1985 Brazil returned to civilian rule. Since that time the country’s civilian leadership has with difficulty been trying to overcome an ongoing economic and social crisis that is characterized by high inflation, unemployment, and fiscal corruption within the government.