You're Brazilian, right? What kind of Brazilian are you? The racialization of Brazilian immigrant women

Abstract

This article analyses the responses of Brazilian immigrant women who live and work in the greater Boston, Massachusetts, area of the United States to questions about their racial and ethnic identity. Based on thirty face-to-face in-depth interviews conducted between June 2004 and July 2005, we explore the many ways by which the women's identities are racialized and the variety of responses to the process of racialization. In particular, we focus on the degree to which the women's reported race, ethnicity and immigrant status exacerbate or protect women from the exclusionary aspects of the racialization process.

Keywords:

• Racialization
• Brazilian immigrant women
• race
• ethnicity
• identity negotiation
• in-depth interviews

Notes

1. All demographic information is accurate as of the date of the interview.

2. Each woman, unless she had significant difficulty answering the question, came up with her own terms and racial identifiers.

3. These tensions have increased significantly since the events of September 11, a tragedy that occurred before our interviews, and now during the battle in the United States over the ‘immigration’ problem.

4. In this specific case, the respondent used what would be the equivalent of negro, which is used interchangeably with ‘Afro-descendente’ and with Afro-Brazilian, the more acceptable terms for Brazilians of African descent. It is not pejorative like ‘Negro’ is in the US. In Brazil, it refers to the person's origin or ethnicity and it has been embraced by the black movement and people of African descent.

5. Our interviews did not ask about Latin identity, yet several respondents used the term in their responses. When respondents used this label, we did not capitalize it so as to connote something that is less formal and less precise. We believe respondents’ use of ‘latin’ reflects both the ambiguity in the way some women identify and a reflection of the popularized yet problematic use of the label as a casual reference to anyone of Latin American descent.