My senior year of high school, I completed a 10-month cultural exchange in Santa Maria, a city of almost 300,000 inhabitants in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. Immediately upon landing at Porto Alegre Airport, my expectations of Brazil were shattered— it was 40°F, raining, and the beautiful beaches so often depicted in U.S. media were nowhere to be found. The racial makeup of my host state was also surprising—83.2% of inhabitants self-identify as branco (white), 10.6% as pardo (brown), 5.5% as preto (black), and .6% as amarelo (yellow) or indígena (indigenous) (IBGE). Before living in Santa Maria, I assumed all of Brazil to be homogenous racially. The media I had consumed before my arrival misled me to believe Brazil was a country of pardo, or brown, people. However, because of the Brazilian government’s immigration policies in the 19th century, the southern region of the country is disproportionately white (Gates, 15).
Although comprising a large percentage of the Brazilian population, pardos and preto were a minority in my host state—making me, by default, a minority as well (CIA). Rio Grande do Sul is renowned as the state that exports Victoria’s Secret models like Alessandra Ambrosio (whom my host cousin briefly dated in middle school) and Gisele Bündchen. Although accounting for only 5% of Brazil’s population, my host state exports more than 50% of the country’s models (PBS).
Rio Grande do Sul has the “right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in” that produces the “tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success” (New York Times). My classmates, most of whom were 15 or 16, conflated my nationality with my ethnicity: they thought that because I was American, I must be white. I was afforded white privilege because of my status as a non-Brazilian (Twine, 10).
During the first weeks of my exchange, I was idolized by younger students and treated like a celebrity. Because I spoke Spanish the language barrier wasn’t as difficult to overcome and most students understood my portunhol, a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese languages. During our recess break, students surrounded me and asked me questions about my life in America. My class of 40 students had only two pardo students, both of whom received a full, need-based scholarship. Much as I had fallen victim to the media’s representation of Brazil, my schoolmates had also internalized the media’s inaccurate depiction of Texans.
Their image of Texas was a desert state populated by cowboys and of people who rode horses to school and work. Needless to say, I gave multiple presentations explaining to young people my life as a young, Mexican-American woman.
For the first time in my life, I questioned the core of my racial and ethnic identity. This quest had such a resounding impact on my being, I wrote about it in my college admissions essay, “yes, I’m American and no I’m not a spy, an imperialist nor a war-loving brute. I haven’t met President Obama. I don’t live in New York, Miami or Los Angeles. I haven’t been to Disney World. I am not the girl typically portrayed by Hollywood as the “girl next door.” In reality, I’m not even entirely American.”
Sources:
Censo Demográfico, The World Factbook: BRAZIL, Off Runway, Brazilian Beauty Goes Beyond Blond