..the ultimate melting pot...

Food for thought...

Stefan Zweig - 1942 on Brazil

“For four hundred years now the masses have been boiling and fermenting in the enormous retort of this country – new material constantly being added, and the mixture being constantly shaken up. Is this new process now definitely finished? Have these millions already taken form and shape of their own? Is there in existence today something one could call the Brazilian race, the Brazilian man, the Brazilian soul? On the question of race, Euclydes da Cunha, the gifted expert on Brazilian national character, long ago gave a definite denial when he explained simply: ‘Nao ha um typo anthropologico Brasileiro.’ -‘There is no Brazilian race.’ Race, if one must use this doubtful and today most over-rated term at all, means a thousand-year-old combination of blood and history. With a real Brazilian, on the other hand, all memories of prehistoric times slumbering in his unconscious must hark back to the genealogy of three continents at once: of the European coasts, the kraals of Africa, and the American jungle. The process of becoming a Brazilian is not only one of becoming acclimatized to Nature, to the spiritual and material conditions of a country, but above all a problem of transfusion; because the majority of the Brazilian population – with the exception of a few late immigrants – represents a mixed breed of the most complicated and diverse kind. Besides, each member or part of this threefold home country – the European, the African, and the American – has layers within itself. The first European arrival in Brazil, the Portuguese of the sixteenth century, is anything but of pure race. He represents, in fact, a mixture of his Iberian, Roman, Gothic, Phoenician, Jewish, and Moorish ancestors. Actually, the original population of Brazil is divided into two separate groups – the Tupis and the Tamoyos.”
Stefan Zweig, Brazil, Land of the Future
1942