The Other Brazilians: Community Ambivalences among Brazilians in Sydney

Abstract

The migration of Brazilians to Australia is a relatively new phenomenon, and has been increasing since the 1990s. Although an imagined Brazilian community is part of everyday discourses of Brazilians, receiving society and media, this concept is ambivalent. I address the limitations of multiculturalism and its correlated notion of diasporic community to point to other alternatives for understanding communal feelings, nostalgia and homebuilding. This perspective unveils disjunctions between the multiculturalist view of community and the lived experience of communities. I demonstrate the existence of shunning behaviour among Brazilians, and argue that such trend is due to their desire to recover their whiteness, cosmopolitanism and Western ethos in Australia. I also show that Brazilians use identity in a strategic way to work out their integration, such as the uses of a cosmopolitan identity and a pan-Latin American identity. These distinctions show that Brazilians have different degrees of affective investment in the Brazilian culture, belonging and integration strategies. In this light, we ought to think in terms of networking in order to deconstruct simplifications of a migrant community through culturalist explanations.

Keywords:

• Migration
• Cosmopolitanism
• Brazilian Diaspora
• Multiculturalism
• Whiteness
• Identity

Notes

[1] Orkut, the social networking site operated by Google, was widely popular in Brazil, and has only recently been overtaken by Facebook.

[2] Capoeira is a syncretic cultural manifestation blending game, martial arts, dance, music, oral poetry and theatre. Since the 1990s, Brazilian capoeira practitioners have been opening several capoeira schools in Sydney (Wulfhorst 2012).

[3] The discourse of authenticity also works as a form of distinction from other capoeira schools/styles and therefore from other Brazilians, which also involves a dispute over capoeira's authenticity.