Gilberto Freyre,
Member of National Parliament of Brazil, 1946-1950.

The Portuguese found in tropical America an ideal space for the expansion and development of their ethnically democratic though, in some other aspects, aristocratic and even feudal civilization, that had began to flourish in the African and Asiatic tropics. Following assimilative methods that they seem to have learned from the Moors, the Portuguese have been successful, as no other European seems to have been, in assimilating to the institutions of social forms of Portugal, or of Christian or Latin Europe, local populations that even today, though predominantly yellow, as in Macau, or predominantly brown, as in Portuguese East India, or black, as among the assimilated negroes of Portuguese Africa, consider themselves Portuguese. Professor Morse Stephens, of Cambridge, in his book Rulers of India, has referred to this policy as "unique in the history of Europeans in India"; and as "far-reaching in its results..." In fact it has been unique in the history of European expansion in the tropics and farreaching in its results and influence upon the present conditions of Europeans in tropical regions everywhere, though one must admit that in some of these regions the Spaniards have shown a tendency to act like the Portuguese.

Brazil is a much vaster tropical space than Portuguese India; and here the Portuguese, in 450 years, of ethnic and especially cultural presence, have succeded in assimilating not only the Amerindians found in the part of America that is now Brazil, but also the African slaves imported from Eastern and Western Africa to work in plantations, and, more recently, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Syrian, Japanese and other immigrants. Brazil is today remarkable for its unity, though recently arrived immigrant groups, still in the first stage of the process of being assimilated, seem sometimes to contradict this. But they probably will follow older groups and will become Brazilian through the Portuguese or Luso-Brazilian pattern or way, though retaining some of their non-Portuguese characteristics. Brazil has been, seems to continue to be, an example of ethnic and cultural pluralism, where diversity is possibly becoming less important than unity.

Within this process of assimilation, do national and ethnic groups of non-Portuguese origin play each a characteristic or particular role in modern Brazilian society and politics ? In Brazilian society - in its development into a complex national society - yes : these groups have made and are making distinct contributions to such a development as a total, comprehensive pan-human and not narrowly Portuguese or Luso-Brazilian development. In politics this has hardly been true, for there has not been in Brazil a "German vote" or an "Italian vote" much less a "Negro vote", as has been the case in United States politics.

The absence of such solid expressions of national or rather, sub-national, exclusiveness in Brazilian politics seems to indicate that in Brazil the tendency of national or sub-national or ethnic groups to remain apart, as monolithic groups in the national culture, or even in the national society, has been much less vigorous than in the United States. The tendency to fusionism - ethnic and cultural - in Brazil, has been much more decisive, as a basis for attitudes towards national issues of a political or even a social or cultural order, than in the United States, or - if one takes the case of the Indian or the Amerindian in particular - in some of the other American Republics where the so-called "Indian problem" has taken the configuration of an ethnic or at least a culturally or socially ethnocentric revolt against the White or quasi-White groups in power, described by some observers as "oligarchical" in character or as equivalents of "castes" in their composition and behaviour.

This is not to suggest that Brazil is, or has been, a paradise compared with its sister Republics of the continent or to non-American nations with a national structure similar to its own, that is, made up of ethnically and culturally heterogeneous elements, though with one of them predominant, if not ethnically, culturally or politically. What happens, or has happened, is that its most important maladjustments and sharpest crises, as a nation, have been due much less to conflicts between sub-national or ethnic groups, eager for control of the national situation or impatient or disgusted at being treated as "inferior" on account of colour, race or ethnic prejudice, than to conflicts between regional cultures or regional groups, due to the isolation, economic disorganization and, consequently regional differentiation, of a few of these groups in relation to the technically and intellectually dominant ones. Even class antagonisms (more powerful, in Brazil, than race conflicts) have been so interrelated with other type of maladjustment - interregional maladjustment due to the isolation that has made some groups tragically archaic in relation to the progressive ones - that sociologists have come to admit that such interregional maladjustments have been, and are still, the critical and and the most dramatic ones in modern Brazilian social, cultural, economic and political organization or, rather, disorganization. For Brazil, geographically immense as it is, and surprisingly firm as it has been in its cultural and political unity, lacks a dynamic inter-regional balance based on an economic planning where industry and agriculture become better interrelated.

The fact is that the nearest approaches to civil war that Brazil has known - for Brazil has never gone through a large-scale civil war like that of the United States or like the so-called Mexican Revolution: both strongly coloured by conflicts between races or fought to maintain or alter the status of a particular ethnic group or modify the treatment it should receive from "the Nation" or "the Republic" as a national whole - have been conflicts rather between sub-groups, regionally differentiated in their culture or economic activity, than between "national" or "ethnic" sub-groups badly adjusted to the national community. A characteristic example of this is the so-called Canudos War, subject of Euclides da Cunha's famous book which Samuel Putnam translated into English. The "Sertanejos" - a virile and energetic sub-group led by Antonio Conselheiro, a mystic - were not a clearly differentiated ethnic group, but, on the contrary, an ethnically very heterogeneous population, whose unity of purpose was based on its regional status and historical backwardness, as a population isolated from the politically and culturally dominant populations by its physical location in a distant interior region of Brazil and by the fact that, thus isolated, it the 19th century customs and cultural patterns that prevailed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Previous conflicts that had agitated Brazilian life as a colony, later as an Empire, and finally as a Republic, were conflicts of the same character, with one or two insignificant exceptions. One of these exceptions, the so-called Malê Revolt in Bahia, was a local slave revolt against the politically, economically and culturally dominant group by a sub-group that may be considered a vague "national minority" fighting for its minority rights, for it was largely made of African slaves (an ethnic category), who followed the Mahomedan faith (a cultural rather than a national category) and as an African Mahomedan sub-group felt that it was being oppressed by Catholic Whites or quasi-Whites. But even in cases like this, it may be stated that the ethnic or national category was secondary, though present, and that the real basis for violent action against the dominant groups was a revolt against an economic and social status that the Malês, as a sub-group conscious of its cultural superiority to other African sub-group of slaves, felt to be unjust to then, the Malês. But it would be going too far to state that Malês or other African sub-groups in Brazil have acted, in a systematic and continous way, as an ethnic group or sub-group, conscious of "national" or Pan-African rights in face of a population, like the Brazilian one since the colonial days, that has been predominantly European and Christian in the decisive and characteristic aspects of its pre-national and national culture and in the decisive and characteristic expressions of its political behaviour.

The lack of such an attitude of systematic and continuous African opposition to European dominance in Brazil seems to be due to the fact that European dominance in Portuguese America never became sharply exclusive, as in areas of Anglo-Saxon colonization or even in some parts of Spanish America. There has been this dominance in Portuguese America; and it explains why Brazil, in spite of its large non-European population, remains an area characterized by the presence of a European and Christian civilization, preserved, carried on and developed - with inevitable and desirable changes - not only by pure descendants of Europeans but by pure descendants of non-Europeans and by a large number of intermediates, partly European, partly non-European in their ethnic composition and in their cultural origins.

Eric Fischer seems to be right when in his The Passing of the European Age - a Study of the Transfer of Western Civilization and its Renewal in other Continents (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), he claims that in addition to the shift of political power from Europe to non-European areas, there has been a gradual transfer of predominantly European cultural centers from Europe to non-European and especially American countries. Brazil has been one of these American countries (the center of Portuguese literature, for instance, is now Brazil and not Portugal) and the Brazilian case seems to be a positive denial of the theory - held by many white South Africans - that where a population has become ethnically mixed there is no possibility for the survival of a civilization like the one that has been developed by Christian Europe. Brazil is an area where a national civilization has developed, whose main or decisive characteristics are European and Christian - culturally European and sociologically Christian - though non-Europeans have been numerous, since the 16th century in relation to Europeans, and where non-Christians have been admitted in considerable numbers in recent decades, through a policy or religious toleration that has put on trial Christian cultural vitality in face of Mahomedan, Japanese and especially Jewish immigrants.

This does not imply that Brazilians, by being carriers, in a sociological sense, of a civilization that must be considered, in its decisive traits, a renewal of a Christian European civilization, are only and passively an expression of a sub-European civilization. They are increasingly becoming ultra-European. They have been developing more and more as a renewal of Western civilization in the American continent and as an artificial preservation of European values and cultural styles in a tropical area of America, whose physical conditions have been and are the first to call for adaptation of the same values and styles to new surroundings. The very fact that as an immense sub-continent, the largest part of Brazil is tropical and quasi-tropical, has been a stimulus for Brazilian social and cultural differentiation in relation to Europe and for the adaptation by Brazilians of various ethnic and cultural origins - Italian, German, Polish, Japanese, etc - and ways of living and dressing, cookery and architectural styles, recreation and musical tendencies, that represent a pre-American Portuguese adaptation of European and cultural values to the tropics: an adaptation that goes back to Portuguese experience in tropical Africa and in the tropical East, previous to the Lusitanian colonization of Brazil.

Perhaps this explains why immigrants, though able and free to introduce, as they have introduced, into the Brazilian variant of European and Christian civilization, a considerable number of culturalisms, Italian, German, Polish, Japanese, English, Gallic, have shown a general tendency to conform to a Luso-Brazilian structure of that variant. Therefore, this Luso-structure is a national and not a regional, phenomenon in Brazil, regional phenomena here being the predominance of diverse ethnic and cultural additions to the same structure : German, in Santa Catharina and part of Rio Grande do Sul; Italian, in Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo; Polish, in Paranà; Japanese, in São Paulo and now in part of the Amazonian region; Syrian, also in São Paulo. There were attempts in some parts of Southern temperate Brazil, by some of these non-Portuguese ethnic-cultural groups, to keep apart from the Luso-Brazilian or Luso-Afro-Amerindian community or from the Luso-tropical larger community or civilization. Luso-tropical civilization is an expression I have suggested to characterize what seems to me a particular form of behaviour and a particular form of accomplishment of the Portuguese in the world : his tendency to prefer the tropics for his extra-European expansion and his ability to remain successfully in the tropics - successfully from a cultural as well as from an ecological point of view - an intermediary between European culture and such tropical cultures as the one found by him in Africa, India, Malaya, the part of America that became Brazil and other areas. This suggestion is not extravagant, for it harmonizes with the tendency among some modern historians and sociologists to give "inter-continental names " - as Oscar Halecki writes in a recent article, "The Place of Christendom in the History of Mankind", published in the Journal of Word History - to large intermediate regions of the Eurasian type. As in the case of an Eurasian conception of regional history, the Luso-tropical conception of regional history and regional sociology, "seems to open an entirely new field of study", based, as it is, on what Professor Arnold Toynbee calls "intelligible fields of study", made not by individual nations, but by larger trans-national communities.

When one sees Brazil as the leading member of that larger community - the Luso-tropical community - one understands better its cultural vitality and the ability or capacity it has shown to resist attempts of such sub-national ethnic groups as the German in Santa Catherina to remain apart from the Brazilian national society and culture, as in a plural or heterogenous society where groups not only speak different languages, eat different food, wear different clothing and live in different types of dwellings and worship different gods but - what makes them unhealthy from a national point of view - have little or no common "will", and, as Professor Eric Walker points out in his Colonies, "can therefore have little common political or social life". Such attempts by German or Japanese or Polish sub-groups to lead in Brazil a separate life as super-groups - based on a mystique of being not only different, but superior, to the Luso-Brazilian community - have failed, and it would be difficult for a sociologist to find in America a national society that in spite of the vast territory it occupies - a sub-continent, indeed - is so psychologically and culturally unified as Portuguese-speaking Brazil, in regard not to all feelings and cultural styles but to the decisive forms that characterize a national society or culture as a unit that may serve as "a clearly understandable field" of historical, socio-psychological and sociological study. This seems to be supported by the fact that Brazil does not stand alone as a social-historical and ecological complex, but is part, and a vital part, of that larger Luso-tropical community and, as such, a very satisfactory example of Oscar Halecki's application of Professor Toynbee's theory to a concrete historical and sociological analysis of regional situations. To Halecki, since modern historians are looking for units smaller than continents, or at least independent of their physical limits, which could serve as clearly understandable fields of study and thus as preparatory approaches to the tremendous task of a world-wide synthesis, students of civilizations should consider regions rather than nations or continents, in order to grasp "the concrete relationship between land and man". This recent statement perfectly harmonizes with my early suggestion that in order to understand Brazilian civilization one should consider it as a regional civilization in the tropics, intimately related to other civilizations established and maintained by the Portuguese in tropical lands, as dynamically homogeneous societies and not as colonial dependencies under the form of stratified plural societies, as has been the Dutch and the English method in tropical areas.

We cannot understand the present status of non-Portuguese sub-groups in the Brazilian community - structurally a Luso-Brazilian community and part of a Luso-tropical totality - except against a back-ground of the whole; and this whole is a Luso-tropical reality that for more than five centuries has developed, through a gradual process, into a new type of civilization in the tropics : one that decisively European and Christian in its main characteristics has not attempted to be or become, exclusively European or Christian in its styles. On the other hand, this lack of exclusiveness has never meant the social plurality, or cultural pluralism, that, based on European economic, strategic or narrowly political or superficially ethical motives or aims in a tropical area, allows what an English analyst of colonial problems in the Asiatic tropics, J. S. Furnivall, has described (in The Tropical Far East), as "a plural society in which different communities live side by side but separately, and have no common interest except in making money".

Tendencies to this sort of pluralism were not entirely absent from the early efforts of Portuguese colonization in the tropics. Even to-day they are noticeable in some sub-areas of what may be described as the Luso-tropical area, which includes tropical lands in different parts of the world. But the fact is that such tendencies never became so strong as to overshadow, in any of these sub-areas, a characteristic trend common to all of them : the tendency towards a common pattern and fundamental unity - both social and psychological - in spite of what ethnologists and ethnographers may consider, by comparing differences in ethnic composition and even cultural configurations in these various Luso-tropical sub-areas, as "a many colored patchwork of diversity".

This common pattern comes from the fact that Luso-tropical societies (and Brazil is one of them : the most advanced of all, economically and culturally, and the most politically mature also) roughly correspond to that almost ideal condition for human and social development in the tropics - development admittedly from a European point of view and based on a European conception of progress - outlined by Professor Eric A. Walker, in his excellent essay on Colonies already referred to. This almost ideal condition is made possible by the existence - as he admits and as the Luso-tropical civilization confirms to be a present-day reality - of "mixed societies" that "are homogeneous enough because their various racial groups belong to the same civilization and have the same fundamental ideas, regardless of pigmentation or the shape of the nose". This "happy situation", he adds (on page 72 of his essay), "is still rare", the rule being for societies in the tropics under European influence to consist "a number of more or less self-conscious groups, often marked off from one another by distinctive colors, which try to live their separate lives within a single political framework". Professor Walker seems to me be right when he generalises that "the color is the world problem of minorities translated into tropical terms with this difference, that in many colonies the depressed class constitutes the majority".

The problems of ethnic minorities in terms of color or race has never been a major problem for Brazil, either in its pre-national or national days. It has been always a minor problem for Brazilians : socially and politically insignificant for most of then. In the afore-mentioned societies established by Europeans in the tropics and in sister-republics of Brazil where the "Indian problem"- the problem of the Amerindian in face of such national developments as that of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador - has taken the most dramatic aspects, the relations between ethnic groups have even become the real motives for civil wars and revolutions. But in Brazil the assimilation not only of Amerindian but of African Negroes into a national society whose decisive traits have been culturally and psychologically Portuguese and Christian, has been a relatively peaceful and smooth process, with only a few instances of cultural and class conflict where race antagonism has been also present. In Brazilian politics, there was no time when a predominantly ethnic problem presented itself as an important issue, as has been the case with the "Indian problem" in Peru, Mexico, Bolivia and other Latin American Republics. The very peaceful way by which the abolition of slavery was accomplished in Brazil is well known to all students of Latin American social history.

As to the problem of the German, Polish and Japanese "minorities" during the Second World War, it was rather a deliberate attempt of Nazi and para-Nazi powers to apply to Brazil a Nazi thesis, politically valid in other areas where ethnic minorities have really developed as separate groups, than a problem created by Brazilian conditions. It is true that in some sub-regions of Southern Brazil, political parties, before 1930, found it convenient to treat Brazilian voters of German or of Italian origin as "German voters" or "Italian voters". Through intermediaries of the same origin these voters usually voted for the Government, not without claiming for their particular cultural rather than ethnic groups certain privileges that normally according to the already well-established Brazilian traditions should not be given them : the right to have their own schools, where the entire teaching should be in their national language, for instance.

It is interesting to note that when a regime, if not para-Fascist, as claimed by some critics, at least, authoritarian, was established in 1937, with Getulio Vargas as its chief, this new regime, not having to depend upon voters of any king, followed in Southern Brazil, sometimes with the collaboration of the Brazilian Army, a nationalistic policy that may have had its excesses, but was beneficial to the development of the country as a single community, inspired in the old Luso-tropical tendency for predominantly but not exclusively Portuguese populations or cultures established in the tropics to grow as national or pre-national communities and not as plural societies of a heterogeneous type such as the ones established by the Dutch or the English in tropical places. That nationalistic policy prevented Germans, Poles, Japanese and Italians from having schools with the entire reaching in their national languages, as if they were not in Brazil but in some unbrazilian territory. Other measures were adopted, some of them too severe for rigid enforcement. They implied an attempt to violently and rapidly uproot Brazilians of non-Portuguese origin from their maternal cultures, so capable of contributing, within reasonable limits of cultural pluralism, to enrich, through regional sub-cultures colored by this or that non-Portuguese culture, the general national culture of Brazil. For analysts and interpreters of this general culture who consider it a particularly happy adaptation of a plastic type of European and Christian civilization to the tropics and do tropical cultures, without claiming that it should be exclusively or almost exclusively Portuguese and Christian, do not fail to recognize how the Brazilian nation may be benefited by a freer participation and expression in even non-Christian Brazilians. The only restriction would be against non-Portuguese and non-Christian Brazilians claiming the right to live apart from the Luso-tropical community that Brazil has been for more than four centuries, with a language and basic processes of adaptation of Europeans to the tropics that time has proved to be sociologically valid and sound processes.

Broadly speaking, this accommodation has been reached in a fairly satisfactory way and since the first non-Portuguese European groups have established themselves in Brazil, their normal tendency or attitude - exceptions do not invalidate the general rule - has been for their members to adopt Luso-tropical values as well as methods of living in the tropics and of dealing with tropical nature, tropical populations and tropical human cultures. By doing so, some of them have been able to introduce Italianisms, Germanisms, Anglicisms, Gallicisms, etc., to Brazilian culture, in a way that has proved valuable to this culture, with out taking Brazilian society to the dangerous excesses of pluralism or introducing in Brazilian politics the equally dangerous habit of ethnic or national groups voting solidly this way or the other, as narrowly ethnic or national groups.

It is interesting to note that Brazilians of Italian origin, for instance, who are so numerous in the State of São Paulo and in parts of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, instead of concentrating in a political party or of voting as a monolithic group, spread themselves in so many parties that it does not seem to link "Italian vote" in modern Brazil to any particular political ideology or tendency. Some of them are conservative, and have as their representative Cyrile Junior, a brilliant lawyer and an eloquent orator, who presided for some time over the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies with the tact and the finesse of an Italian cardinal who had become intimately acquainted with the most characteristically Luso-tropical linguistic subtleties as well as with psychological variants of behaviour of Brazilians of the various regions of Brazil. In this he had a predecessor, in the early days of the Republican regime, in Laure Muller, the Brazilian son of German colonists, born in Santa Catharina, who rapidly became as astute as a polititian as a Bahia-born Brazilian (the old Brazilian Province of Bahia is Known as the "Brazilian Virginia", due to the fact that so many Brazilian statesmen, politicians, and diplomats have been born there). He was for years a presidential possibility, just as David Campista - the Brazilian son of a German Jew and a very capable member of the National Parliament who also revealed his political talent as a Minister of Finance - came very near being chosen and elected President of the Republic. Neither in his case nor in the case of Muller had the fact that they were the sons of non-Portuguese colonists anything to do with their failure to become President of the Brazilian Republic.

It is true that Brazilian sons of Non-Portuguese colonists who have become active in politics or even in the industrial and commercial life of the nation have, in many cases, shown a lack of finer moral scruples that has given them the reputation of being always morally or ethically inferior. This is true of some of the most prominent leaders of political groups to day : Brazilians with non-Portuguese surnames who are considered to display the reverse of public spirit or of elementary ethics in political activity, and area given as examples of the fact that the sons of "immigrants" are morally inferior, as political leaders, business men, and industrial pioneers to the sons of old Brazilian families. Of course, sons of immigrants who follow such careers, are freer than the members of old and well-known families from certain moral controls that act upon men who are deeply rooted to their towns or countries or regions. Some of them, having ceased to be influenced by moral standards of their parents' national group, have not acquired a new national morality : they are, therefore, transition men who easily succumb to the temptations that surround political, industrial and commercial leaders in a phase - also a transition phase - of rapid industrialization, such as the one that Brazil has been going through in the last few decades.

It would be, however, unfair to accept as valid the generalization that the sons of immigrants, when engaged in those activities, act always as morally or ethically inferior citizens. There are too many examples to the contrary. Men like Raul Pilla - the son of an Italian colonist who has been for years a political leader and is a distinguished Brazilian known for his moral integrity both as a private citizen and a politician and member of the National Parliament - are not rare but almost as numerous as the men of the "transition type" who are willing to do anything to make a fortune in business or in industry or in politics. One should not forget, in this connection, that men of the pathological "transition type" are as numerous among Brazilians of old Portuguese origin who come from agrarian or pastoral provinces of Northern or central Brazil to the industrial centers of Southern Brazil, as among the sons of immigrants. They are the victims of the same adverse environment, the same absence of moral controls, so much more powerful in one's ancestral environment than in a comparatively new one.

Here one faces a problem that is not peculiar to Brazil but common to all communities where most of the sons of immigrants go through a period of transition that is also one of incomplete assimilation. Therefore, instead of being positive in the part they in society and politics, some of them become noted for a negative activity : negative from an ethical point of view.

In dealing with almost the same problem - that of immigrants incompletely assimilated - as it presents itself in the United States, Professor Max Ascoli, of the University of Rome, pointed out that a few years ago some of them "have become Americans before they were ever Italian, largely unaware as they were, as rustic Italian peasants, of the Italian civilization". "To a peasant of Sicily", he suggested, "Milan would have been as much of an alien city as New York". And as to the "second generation"- that is, the first generation of Americans born in the United States of Italian parents is has been remarked by students of the subject that a regular political career has been difficult for them, on account of having to work "within the framework of Jewish or Irish machines". Hence their attempts to attain success through other methods. In Brazil fortunately there are no Jewish or Irish "machines" in politics; and sons of Non-Portuguese immigrants have at present wide opportunities to rise to positions of authority and leadership, not only through regular political, but through ecclesiastical, military, technical and commercial careers equally regular or normal.

This explains the increasing number of non-Portuguese family names in the "society" columns of newspapers; the increasing number, also, of such names among the members of the National Parliament and the Brazilian diplomatic service; and even in the Army, the Air Force and the Navy - where, for some time, only aristocratic foreign names, such as von Humboldt, appeared beside old Portuguese names, among the officers. This explains also a number of bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil who are equally the sons or grandsons of non-Portuguese Immigrants, of peasant or humble origin, and who have outnumbered in these and other positions of authority and leadership the descendants of the old agrarian or urban aristocracy of Iberian origin, sometimes - as in the case of the first cardinal of Latin America, who was a Brazilian from an old Pernambuco family - with an Indian, that is, Amerindian princess or cacique or captain, among his ancestors.

Sons and grandsons of modest immigrants are rapidly rising in Brazil to leadership in business, industry, politics, religion, the press; in medicine, like Mario Pinotti; in science, like Cesar Lattes; in art, like Candido Pertinari and in architecture, like Henrique Mindlen; in music, like Mignone. And also to prominence in literature : an activity where some of them are surpassing the descendants of old Portuguese families as masters of the subtleties of the Portuguese language, some as philologists, others, as literary artists. Almost on a level, in some respects, with Machado de Assis - the greatest writer of fiction Brazil has ever produced and who of Portuguese ancestry, and also African in his ethnic condition, as well as plebeian in his social origine - there are now in Brazilian literature a number of authors of non-Portuguese origin who are greatly contributing to develop the Portuguese language of Brazil into one of the great modern literary languages of the world : men like Augusto Meyer, the scholarly and enthusiastic analyst of Portuguese classics; Viana Moog, the novelist and essayist; Menotti del Pichia, the nationalistic poet; Augusto Frederico Schmidt, another poet with nationalistic as well as universalistic leanings; Sergio Milliet, the litterary critic; Marcos Konder, the young poet; Castão Cruls, a novelist who has specialized in the description both of the Amazonian region and of the Rio bourgeois society; Raul Bopp, another specialist in the Amazonian region, which he has extolled in good modernistic verse. When assimilation goes as far as to include literature of the most lyrical and intimately introspective kind, this means that Brazilians of European non-Portuguese origin are really becoming a new force in Brazilian life and culture, by the side of descendants of Portuguese, Amerindian and Negro, through old instruments of expression such as the Portuguese language and the Portuguese lyrical tradition.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. Plural and mixed societies in the tropics: the case of Brazil considered from a sociological point of view. Lisboa: International Institute of Differing Civilizations, 1957. 13p.