Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestigagem in Rio de Janeiro

resumo
Baseado num trabalho de campo realizado numa favela do Rio de Janeiro, este artigo propoe a necessidade de uma reavaliac^io do entendimento convencional das categorias de rac,a no Brasil. Pesquisadores anteriores haviam assumido que afrobrasileiros se identificam usando multiplas categorias racias. Atrave*s de uma analise do uso diario de varios termos e das conceptualizac,6es locais de significac^o, o argumento e feito que os residentes da favela usam termos de rac,a-cor numa variedade de contextos discursivos que expressam func,6es lingiiisticas distintas. Termos intermediaries como moreno podem ser usados para descrever um grupo espeefficx) de caracterfsticas (em vez de uma "categoria racial") ou, alternamente, podem ser usados como termos de cortesia ou como eufemismos. E significante notar que os residentes da favela conceptualizam ra9a como uma noc^o bipolar. Assim, apesar de usarem termos de ra9acor, os residentes da favela insistem que todos afro-brasileiros sao membros da "ra9a negra". Este fato influencia significativamente os debates sobre as caracten'sticas de consciencia racial e democracia racial no Brasil contemporaneo.

It was a sweltering afternoon when I put aside the field notes I had been reviewing and remembered that it was something of a holiday, a special day that I had marked in my research calendar weeks before and then forgotten. I had been living in Morro do Sangue Bom, a favela (hillside shantytown), in Rio de Janeiro for nearly a year.1 I was studying race and racismthorny and painful topics wherever they have a bearing on the shape of people s lives, but they were especially so in Brazil. I had been interviewing middle-class whites who lived close to the shantytown, as well as activists committed to Brazil's small black movement, but my chief concern was with the ways in which poor Brazilians of African descent approached the issues of race, racism, and racialized identities. Morro do Sangue Bom was a predominantly black community but no one I knew there had mentioned the significance of the date; it was November 20, 1991, the anniversary of the death of Zumbf, the militant leader of Palmares, a 17th-century community of escaped slaves. Unlike the glowing tale of the kind-hearted Princesa Isabel, who is credited with single-handedly freeing the slaves, the story of Zumbflike the history of Brazilian slave insurrections and rebellions in generalwas largely forgotten 86 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8(1):86-115 copyright 2003, American Anthropological Associatio

Robin E. Sheriff
Florida International University
until the 1980s. At that time, black militants and sympathetic historians made concerted efforts to resurrect his name. As a result, some of my informants in Morro do Sangue Bom had begun to hear the name of Zumbi when references were made to him in the carnival lyrics of 1988, the centennial of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. In 1990, when I began asking people on the hill about Zumbi, they would say, "Oh yes, Zumbi of Palmares. He was a great leader of the negros [blacks]." Few, however, could tell me more. It was thus with a sense of keen curiosity that I took one of Morro do Sangue Bom's many labyrinthine paths to the home of my friend Joia. Like most of her coresidents, Joia was a person of color, a woman who sometimes referred to herself as morena (loosely translated as brown-skinned woman)2 and at other times as a negraan unambiguously black woman. Joia and her husband, Daniel, had been born on the hill and between her labor as a domestic servant and his as an air conditioner repairman, they cobbled together a living and supported two sons in a dilapidated but welcoming home. In common with most of the people in her community, Joia had only a glancing awareness of the existence of a black movement in her country. She knew the name of Zumbi, however, and knew that he was an emergent symbol of black pride. When I stepped into Joia's house I found her younger son, Tiago, and her friend and next-door neighbor, Elena, there as well. "You know, I just remembered that today is the day of Zumbi," I remarked. After a moment of silence, I added, "But it doesn't seem to be very important." Tiago, a nine-year-old who like his mother was a person of uncommon wit and intelligence, begged to differ. He squared his slight shoulders, puffed out his chest, and said, "He is important to me because he was a leader of the negros. And I am a negro." I was startled by his announcement, but before I could pursue the issue with him, Elena jumped in: "You are not a negro, Tiago," she corrected him, "You are a mestizo. You are mixed. Isn't that right, Joia?'! Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestiqagem in Rio de Janeiro 87

Joia, who had been sweeping up the remains of a broken glass, straightened up briefly, sighed, but then only nodded wordlessly. Tiago looked crestfallen for a moment, but then he too simply shrugged and left the house to play soccer with his friends. My record of this brief conversation seems to lend credence to the view, held by many Latin Americanist scholars, that Brazilians of color tend not to identify as negros. "Racial mixture," " mesticagem" "cultural hybridity," and the plethora of race-color terms that describe, inscribe, and invoke such notions are assumed to decenter racialized opposition such that black consciousness and politicized forms of negritude are nonsensical in Brazil. The fact that African Brazilians tend to choose from among a host of intermediate terms moreno (brown), mulato (mulatto), and mestigo (mixed), for exampleis taken as evidence that they seek to eschew unambiguous black identities and do not see common cause with one another. This view, however, fails to account for the fact that Tiago did indeed wish to honor his martyred African ancestor; he justified his wish not on the basis of a mixed heritage that he shared with all Brazilians but on his identity as a negro. In this article I argue that Tiago was not alone. Many Brazilians of African descent do, in fact, identify as negros. The assumption that they do not is based, to a large degree, on a misinterpretation of what people like Tiago and Elena are doing when they use words such as negro (racially black), preto (the color black), moreno (brown), mulato (mulatto), pardo (mixed), mestico (mixed), and so on. In places such as Morro do Sangue Bom, race-color terms tend not to be used in the way anthropologists usually assumeto classify or categorize a person as a member of a "racial type." Rather, such wordswith the exception of the term negroare used to describe cor (color), which is not conflated with race, or even more commonly they are used as polite euphemisms that avoid stigmatizing references to blackness. In the ordinary contexts of their use, race-color terms are less often conceptualized by their speakers as typological signs than as tokens within a system of etiquette. The colloquial expression, "If you do not pass for white, you are black," is common in Morro do Sangue Bom and elsewhere in Brazil. This article examines the implications of that expression and presents evidence for the existence of bipolar conceptions of racialized identity in Brazil.3 My argument is not merely a sociolinguistic one; it is situated within a larger debate about the nature of race relations and racism in Brazil. As is well known, dominant Brazilian racial ideologies assert the existence of democracia racial (racial democracy)the notion that racism is particularly mild or nonexistent in that country. In the contemporary discourses of democracia racial, discrimination is figured as a result of class identity (and the disadvantages associated with poverty) rather than color or concepts of race. Many Brazilians, 88 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

especially those of the middle and upper classes, continue to maintain that widespread miscegenation and what are assumed to be multiple categories of race represent evidence for the racial democracy thesis. Some scholars, moreover, insist on what might be called a "middle ground": while racism exists in Brazil, its forms are attenuated and softened by the existence of multiple racial categories (Da Matta 1997; Fry 1995, 2000; Harris et al. 1993, 1995). Lacking essentialist conceptions of race and leaning always toward fluidity, ambiguity, and the blurring of racial boundaries, Brazilians, it is asserted, have neither the ideological conviction nor the stable target necessary to create and maintain consistently racialized patterns of oppression. My argument allies itself with the scholarship that critiques the racial democracy thesis from historical (Andrews 1991; Butler 1998; Skidmore 1993a), demographic (Hasenbalg 1985; Lovell 2000; Lovell and Dwyer 1988; Silva 1985; Wood and Carvalho 1988), cultural (Burdick 1998; Goldstein 1999; Twine 1998; Sheriff 2001), and political (Hanchard 1994) angles. It does so, however, by exploring a previously unexamined question: What exactly are poor Brazilians of African descent doingin ideological, cultural, and linguistic terms when they manipulate what is widely regarded as a notoriously complex racecolor lexicon? What, in addition, does the manipulation of this lexicon tell us about the nature of racialized consciousness among poor African Brazilians? More broadly, what does it tell us about how racism is experienced in a country where its existence tends to be publicly denied?

Discourses of Mesticagem, Democracia Racial, and Fluidity

Brazil's celebration of mesticagem, or "racial mixing," is usually attributed to sociologist and historian Gilberto Freyre. Writing in the 1930s, Freyre enjoined Brazilians to embrace the "lubricious union" of the nations founding racial triadEuropeans, Africans, and Amerindiansand to view miscegenation not as a weakness but as the creation of a vibrant and sturdy race that would populate a "New World in the Tropics" (1986). Freyre credited Portuguese colonialists with nonracist sensibilities, qualities that permitted the development of erotic and affectionate relationships between masters and slaves and that paved the way for what would become Brazil's democracia racial. Many Brazilians, particularly those of the middle class, continue to echo Freyre's pronouncements: "How can we be racist when so many of us are mixed?" Freyre was more a codifier of the discourses of democracia racial than their creator, and historical research has demonstrated that elite discourses about racial mixture underwent significant and ideologically critical shifts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At first taken in and preoccupied by European discourses about racial degeneration and the dangers of "mongrelism," elite Brazilians later subscribed to the notion that Brawl's population would Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mesticagem in Rio de Janeiro 89

gradually be improved by miscegenation, through the process of embranqueamento (whitening). In genetic and racial terms, it was believed whiteness would supercede and eventually cancel out blackness (Skidmore 1993a). Although historians of Brazilian racial ideologies (Skidmore 1993a; Stepan 1991) have focused on the elite creation and dissemination of the notion of whitening, a similar concept probably developed in a parallel fashion among slaves, and later African-descended workers. The desire to seek lighter-skinned mates was and remains a pragmatic strategy, directed toward the hope that one's children might achieve more favorable positions in what isdespite the specious claims of democracia raciala political economy of racial hierarchy (see Burdick 1998; Goldstein 1999; Sheriff 2001; Shapiro 1996). Many of the fundamental contradictions within Brazil's contemporary racial politics stem from the collision of these two discoursesthat of democracia racial which asserts that Brazilians have avoided the more rigid forms of racialized prejudice and discrimination that plague countries such as the United States, and that of embranqueamento, which asserts that blackness is a problem, a stigmatized identity that ought to be erased through miscegenation. It is generally assumed that it was the process of miscegenation itself, as well as a tendency to see race as a fluid rather than a bipolar quality, that led to the development of an enormous number of race-color terms. These racecolor terms, anthropologists have asserted, constitute a "system of racial classification" that while similar to understandings of race in much of the larger Latin American region, is markedly different from the way North Americans classify race.4 This interpretation of the cultural function of racecolor terms has been widely accepted and has come to serve, in fact, as a distinct, alternative model of "racial classification." In his textbook for introductory courses in anthropology, Conrad Kottak has summarized this view of Brazilian conceptualizations of race: "Through their classification system Brazilians recognize and attempt to describe the phenotypical variation that exists in their population ... Brazilians have devised a way of describing human biological diversity that is more detailed, fluid, and flexible than the systems used in most cultures" (2000:147-148). Reference to the notion that Brazilians conceptualize racial identity as composed of multiple (rather than bipolar) categories is, in fact, requisite in all discussions of race and racism in Brazil; it is taken not merely as received wisdom but as "commonsense." Our assumptions about this "system of racial classification," and the language used to describe it, stem partly, I believe, from the persistent reification and naturalization of race itselfwhether it is defined as a multiple or a bipolar quality. More specifically, for Latin Americanist scholars these assumptions received their codification in a seminal article published by Marvin Harris in 1970. Harris devised a set of 12 drawingscartoon-like would be an apt
90 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

descriptiondepicting "a combination of three skin tones, three hair forms, two lip, two nose, and two sex types" (1970:2). The drawings were presented to a cross section of 100 Brazilian adults who were asked to provide race-color terms for the "persons" depicted. In Harris's much-cited conclusion, he collected "492 different categorizations" (1970:5). The following year Roger Sanjek published an article based on a similar experimental methodology. He elicited 116 terms, "the largest corpus of terms collected in a single locale" (1971:1127). Although Harris and Sanjek argued that racial meanings were highly ambiguous in Brazilso ambiguous that their informants showed a stunning lack of consensus in their attributionsthey suggested that the cultural and linguistic functions of the terms they collected were not. Such terms were defined as "raciological taxonomies," or "racial categories," and these terms together were assumed to constitute the "Brazilian system of racial classification" (Harris 1970; Sanjek 1971). Although Harris's conclusions about the ambiguity (often called "fluidity") of racial classification in Brazil are often cited in Latin Americanist literature, the artificiality (and superficiality) of his methodology are rarely recalled or described. Harris's and Sanjek's studies, as well as the more generalized tendency to conceptualize Brazilian race-color terms as primarily classificatory or typological in function, beg a number of critical questions. What, in fact, are Brazilians of color doing when they use intermediate terms such as moreno and mestiqo in nonexperimental contexts? How do they themselves articulate the context-bound meanings of racecolor terms and how do they account for their ambiguity? How do they conceptualize the relationship of such terms to notions of specifically racialized identity? What, generally speaking, is their metadiscoursehow do they talk about the ways in which they use the language of race and color?

"Only White and Black Exist": The Discourse on Race

Let me return to Elena, the woman who insisted on the day of Zumbi that Tiago was not a negro but a mestic.o. In an attempt to understand the meaning of race-color terms in Morro do Sangue Bom, I asked my informants to provide terms for themselves. Elena was one of my first interviewees. She had dark skin and what Brazilians tend to call cabelo bom (good hair)that is, tresses that do not resist the comb but fall in smooth waves to the shoulders. She described her facial features as fino, a word that means "narrow" while also connoting refinement. Elena's configuration of features, she explained, were given by the fact that her mother was white and her father was black. Jose*, Elena's husband, also had what might be called a "mixed" appearance, but in a rather different way: his lips and nose were fuller than Elena's, and he had reddish hair, whose texture was what Brazilians call cabelo ruim (bad hair). Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestigagem in Rio de Janeiro 91

His skin was much lighter than Elena's and freckled. It was precisely this diversity of phenotypical features, the anthropological literature led me to believe, that represented the raison d'etre for Brazil's complex "system of racial classification." However, when I asked Elena to provide a term for herself, she said without hesitation, "Preta [black]." "And Jose?" I asked, trying to conceal my surprise. "Preto also," she said and continued, "Only branco and preto [white and black] exist. The rest of those things don't exist." Later in our conversation, she explained, "That's right, only preto and branco exist. The rest of those things don't exist, no. We've mixed it all up, right? Branco, moreno, mulatoI don't know what allbut they don't exist, no. Other informants echoed Elena's pronouncements. My landlady, Dona Janete, for example, ceded that the term mulato might refer, like black and white, to a real category, but she insisted that all other terms, no matter how commonly used, were an "an invention of the people." As my interviews continued, I began to elaborate on my questions about race-color terms. I asked many informants to list all of the words they could think of that referred to race or color, to define those terms for me, and to describe the contexts of their usage. Moving away from my initial assumption that such terms are typically used in a simple dassificatory sense, I began to elicit metalinguistic data: I asked informants to speak about how they used the terms and understood their meanings. Rosa, a dark-skinned woman in her forties, responded to my request for color terms and their definitions: Rosa: Preto, moreno, mulato, pardo, russo.5 If the hair isn't straight, they're negro, right? Robin Sheriff: And what else? R: There are Japanese, for example, but they're white. RS: Okay, what does "preto"mean? R: Preto is preto, right? [We laugh.] RS: What does "moreno" mean? R: It's preto also, right? It's the same thing. RS: What does "mulato" mean? 92 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

R: For me, that's preto also. RS: What does "pardo" mean? R: Light-colored people with hard hair; I think its preto. As we were talking, Rosas friend Carla dropped in for a visit and began reheating coffee at the stove. A woman in her twenties, Carla had very light skin. Her hair was covered by a scarf. "Like her, like her color," Rosa said, gesturing toward Carla. "But the hairshow her your hair, Carlait's hard." (The expression "hard hair" is used to describe hair that is extremely curly or tightly kinked; it is synonymous with the expression "bad hair," but it is more polite.) Carla obligingly removed her scarf. "So, a light person with hard hair is " "Is negra," Rosafinishedfor me, using a term that unambiguously refers to blackness. "Aren't you?" Rosa pointedly asked Carla. "Are you white?" "No," Carla responded. As I will illustrate in the following section, the term negra is often thought to be offensive and, quite aside from that fact, I was startled that Rosa had presented Carla with a simple, bipolar choice. If she was not white, Rosa implied, she must be a negra. Carla did not balk at the choice and went on to tell me about an employer she had worked for as a domestic servant. "He didn't like my color," she said; he had "found it horrible." Her relatively light skin was not fundamentally significant to her racial identity, Carla implied. She was seen as and saw herself as a negra regardless. Rosa's view that most or all race-color terms (excepting those that connote whiteness) signify racial blackness was echoed by other informants. For example, Susana, a woman in her thirties, provided a similar set of responses. I asked her to list all the terms she could think of and she began: "Preto, negro, right? Preto, negro, and [pause] moreno. They say that. There's a guy here, he's a mulato from Paraiba [a state in Brazil's Northeast], He calls me morena,' you know? He doesn't call me 'preta' or 'pretinha [diminutive of preta}. He says it like, 'Hey morena!'" In my interviews with her, Susana tended to refer to herself as a preta or as a negra, but as she pointed out, others might, in calling out to her, use the term morena. (I had observed this sort of usage many times in quotidian, conversational contexts in Morro do Sangue Bom.) As Susana seemed to imply, the use of this term might have more to do with social contextwith etiquette, in other wordsthan with what Susana (or others) perceived to be her racial identity. As our interview continued, she provided five of the most common color terms: mulato, moreno, pardo, neguinho (diminutive of negro), and preto. As had Rosa, Susana told me that all these terms meant negro. She offered no qualifications. Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestigagem in Rio de Janeiro 93

I took a slightly different tack with Yvonne, a woman in her late twenties. After she had provided a number of race-color terms, I asked her, in more specific terms, to tell me about appearance. She began with preto: Robin Sheriff: What does a preto look like? Yvonne: A preto? Oh, for me a preto is one who didn't pass for white, [Preto i aquek que nao passou de branco], RS: What? I don't understand. Y: If one is not white, one is black, Nestor, a man in his thirties, clarified this simplified notion of racial bipolarity. For him, as for so many of my informants, it was a mistake to assume that a "racially mixed" personone who might be called "mestico" or "moreno," for exampleoccupied a category that was different and separate from negro or preto. If one was mixed, Nestor explained, one was, ipso facto, a negro: Robin Sheriff: So, a question. You said in the other interview that we did that you are a negro. Didn't you say that? [He nods,] So, I'm confused because you could be moreno, or pardo, or negro, or whatever Nestor: It is because of the color, it passes. For example, the definition is the following: "Passou de branco, preto e," I define it this way,6 RS: But this expression, "passed by white is preto" N: It defines"passed by white is preto"it defines everything. One who doesn't have light skin is a negro, in general. Everyone, In Brazil this is so. It's hard in Brazil to find a person with really light skin, RS: So, you can say, in this other sense, in this sense that we are speaking now, that most of these people [morenos, pardos, etc] are negros also? Is that right? Because they aren't white? N: In Brazil, yeah. The majority, I will tell you the following: 98 percent is all negro. It's a mixture. Passed by white is preto. There are very few pure whites here in Brazil, right? Because there is a great deal of racial mixture, RS: But a mixed person also has this idea that he is a negro? N: That's right.

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In one of our interviews, my landlady, Dona Janete, also suggested that "mixed" people were, by definition, negros. In the same conversation, she referred to her son Jacinto as a negro and as a mestico. "So, mulato, moreno, jambo7all these people can be of the black race?" I asked her. "Of the black race, yes," Dona Janete replied unequivocally. Referring to both of her sons, neither of whom had very dark skin (their father was white), she added, "Because isn't the mother negra? Am I not negra? I am negra! That's what I think."8 In all these cases, my informants in Morro do Sangue Bom interpreted my queries as questions about the "real" meaning of racecolor terms and as questions about what they evidently conceived as a bipolar system of racial classification that was thought to underlie a deceptively complex terminology. "Look, there are two colors," one informant said as though she were reiterating what ought to be perfectly obvious, "white and black."9 If poor Brazilians of African descent such as those in Morro do Sangue Bom embrace a bipolar conception of racial identity, why do they, as many Brazilians and Brazilianist scholars have observed, overwhelmingly prefer other termsmorenoy mestifo, mulato, and so onwhen they speak of themselves and others? I argue that this preference has far less to do with how African Brazilians actually think of themselves in terms of racial identity than with the ways in which they negotiate and manage the complex social etiquette in which race-color terms are embedded. This point will be clarified by examining the semantics and linguistic functions of the term negro.

"What the Masters Called the Slaves": The Word Negro and Pragmatic Speech
During one of my first visits to an organization associated with the black movement, I asked one of the activists there, "Why is that people don't like being called 'negro'?" With considerable invective, she leaned over me and replied, "How would you like it if someone called you a worthless, ugly thing, shit, dirt, less than a dog?" As my quotation of people in Morro do Sangue Bom suggests, the term negro is sometimes used as a neutral reference for one who is said to belong to the raga negra (black race). Most black militants insist that the term negro ought to be reappropriated and embraced with pride. As my activist informant made dear, however, this is more easily said than done. In everyday speech, the word negro is commonly used as an epithet, as a racist slur. This fact was abundantly confirmed by my informants in Morro do Sangue Bom. As Tiago, Joia's son, told me on one occasion, "Negro is a name that the whites gave to the blacks." To explain, he described a scene he had seen on television in which a white man was whipping a black man and calling him

Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestigagem in Rio de Janeiro

95

"negro." The word, Tiago intended to suggest, was the linguistic equivalent of beating someone with a whip. "The word negro is offensive because it's what the masters called the slaves," Rosa similarly explained. "The word negro is prejudiced," a 12-year-old girl told me, "It is generally used by racist people." Another informant explained, "That is a word used to criticize. It means you want to humiliate someone." "You can't call someone a negro," Joia's friend Elena told me. "That will start a fight!" My landlady, Dona Janete, explained, "Negra is a very dirty word. I think that people should avoid calling others 'negro.' I feel offended when I am called 'that negra over there.' I don't want to be called that.. .In my consciousnesswell, you know that I am a negra, but no one talks like that ... Even when the person is lighter than the one who says this, they feel offended ... I think, generally here, no one likes it." Although she insisted that intermediate terms were "an invention of the people" and assured me that she and her sons were, racially speaking, negros, Dona Janete followed the local etiquette in avoiding the word in everyday speech. The term negro is firmly anchored within a set of racist associations that are common throughout the Americas. As a cultural trope, the figure of the negro was familiar to everyone in Morro do Sangue Bom: the negro is thought to be dirty, stupid, ugly, sexually promiscuous, given to thievery, drunkenness, and immorality. "A white man running is in a footrace," goes the old Brazilian saying, "and a negro running is a thief." Similarly, a very well-known saying that I heard repeated among my middle-class white informants states: "If the negro doesn't shit on entering, he shits while leaving." Writing about the urban context of Sao Paulo in 1969, Brazilian anthropologist Florestan Fernandez noted, "The word negro becomes interchangeable with words such as drunkard or boozer, carouser and thief; and negro woman becomes interchangeable with streetwalker" (1969:176). (Needless to say, white drunkards, boozers, thieves, and so on are never called "negros," nor by any other term that associates social deviance with concepts of race!) Despite the obvious degree of ideological contradiction involved, such associations and the discourses that articulate them continue to thrive alongside the platitudes of democracia racial. The connotations of the word negro have certainly been noted, at least anecdotally, in the literature on race and racism in Brazil, but their implications for our understanding of the relationships among race-color terminology, racial classification, and racial identity have not been fully explored. What I want to emphasize is not merely the fact that the term negro and others like it are associated with negative qualitiesand that they thus bespeak the reality of racism in Brazilbut that such words have a power that extends well beyond that of mere reference. 96 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

As John Austin (1962) pointed out in his seminal analysis of linguistic functions, utterances often have a performative function. Linguistic and cultural anthropologists (for example, Crapanzano 1992; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Silverstein 1979) have drawn our attention to what is called the indexical or pragmatic function of speech. A pragmatic utterance is both context-specific and context-creative in the sense that it can and often does mark or enact a particular kind of relationship between speakers. The power of pragmatic speech, in other words, lies in what it does, as well as in what it says. R. Brown and A. Gillman's (1960) classic analysis of second-person pronouns illustrates this point. Latinate languages (Brown and Gilman provide examples from French) allow one to address ones interlocutor with the formal second-person pronoun "vous" or the informal pronoun "tu." In the former case, a speaker communicates deference, respect, and possibly social distance vis-a-vis one's interlocutor. In the latter case, one signals familiarity or intimacy (or possibly condescension) with one's interlocutor. The function of the terms is not that of simple referenceboth address the same interlocutor. Rather, they mark or indeed even create the tenor of the relationship between speakers. An additional, more directly analogous illustration serves to underscore the difference between referential and pragmatic utterances. In the United States, as we know, negative associations are attached to aging and the aged. Particularly when speaking about or to an older woman, we often engage in a subtle but nonetheless conventional etiquette. While waiting in a checkout line at a drug store in Florida, for example, I observed a woman in her sixties request assistance from the cashier. He turned to a coworker and said, "Would you help this young lady here?" Neither the customer nor the cashier would suggest that he was using the term as an age classification; he was engaging in a form of politeflattery,a common function of pragmatic speech. If this same woman were to drive well under the speed limit on a two-lane highway, a driver might, if sufficiently rude, shout, "Old bag!" out the window while passing her. Again, the intent would be less to classify her by age than to insult her. Both of the termsyoung lady and old bagincorporate a reference to age, of course, but their chief social and linguistic functions are not to categorize in a neutral or nominal sense but to flatter or demean. As they are used in these contexts, the words have a distinctly performative dimension. We would not argue, on the basis of the existence of many ambiguous "age terms" in American English that we truly perceive age categories to be fluid, shifting, or negotiable. Nor would we argue (if we were honest!) that age is not a significant feature of social identity in our culture. We would, rather, recognize that age and other characteristics (such as body weight) for which we have many euphemisms and insults are fraught and delicate subjects that represent the focus of considerable cultural preoccupation and tension. Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestigagem in Rio de Janeiro 97

I offer these illustrations because as a number of linguistically-oriented scholars have pointed out (Crapanzano 1992; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Silverstein 1979), we tend to assume that language is always and everywhere referential (and in the case of Brazilian race-color terms, classificatory) in its function when it is often pragmatic, (The error is compounded when translating from one language to another.) This is precisely the point that so many of my informants in Morro do Sangue Bom made when I asked them to deconstruct their usage of race-color terms, "It depends," as so many informants told me, "on how it is said," Such terms were often, I was told, "a way of treating someone," Neusa, a woman in her late twenties, was one of many informants who urged me to read between the lines of racecolor terms and to recognize that they were typically pragmatic rather than referential or typological in their function. As Neusa suggested, it was the overwhelming pragmatic power of the word negroits capacity to wound, to humiliate, to insultthat offered the key to understanding the way in which all racecolor terms could be, and so often were, uttered in the pragmatic mode. Like Rosa and Susana, Neusa told me, "Only preto and white exist," As our conversation continued, I asked her to tell me which of the words she had listed might be considered offensive in everyday speech: Robin Sheriff: Is negro offensive? Neusa: Negro. Look, it's like this: It depends on the sense in which the person is speaking, you see? Sometimes the word negro is used to discriminate. It is not valorizing, you see? It is discriminating. But it depends on how you put it, RS: And mulatocan it be offensive? N: [Sighs with slight exasperation,] No! Look, so many [words] exist exacdy so that one is not of a totally negro color. So they use the mulata color, the parda color, the morena color, to treat the person in a sense [like they are] a little lighter, a little, like, less discriminated against, Neusa was describing an etiquettewell-known and consciously practiced in Morro do Sangue Bomin which the term negro was strenuously avoided. The other terms she listedmulata, parda, morenawere not intended to "classify" people but to "treat the person" in a particular way There were not truly solid referents for the terms, Neusa suggested. Rather, their meaning must be sought in an understanding of "how you put it"the pragmatic mode, that is, in which they were spoken. The point that such terms were not used in a classificatory sense was borne out, as Neusa argued further, by the 98 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

cultural notion that, at bottom, racial identity was a simple bipolar affair: "So, these things do not exist. One is white, or one is negro. But people feel so humiliated to be negro. The negro was a slave. The negro suffered. The negro was treated like an animal. All that. But here it is truly correct to say that one is white or one is preto. No one can be anything else." As was the case with her neighbors in Morro do Sangue Bom, Neusa could not bring herself to abide by what she viewed as "truly correct"; when I asked her what term she might use for herself, she said "mulata." Such is the wounding force of the term negro and the pervasive power of the etiquette that insists on other "softer" (or, in Neusa's words, "lighter") terms. Tiago's folk etymology of the term negro ("a nickname that the whites gave to the blacks") and Rosa's ("what the masters called the slaves") are, in fact, correct. In a cogent and meticulously documented account of the historical development of race-color terms in the Americas, Jack D. Forbes argues that the term negro came to stand less for a person of particularly dark skin color than for anyone who was not white. The usage of the term, moreover, was typically pragmatic and deeply insulting in intent: In so far as the term negro in the Portuguese Empire became synonymous with "slave" or with servile status, it, of course, lost any mandatory color reference and became a general term of abuse...Unfortunately, many English-speaking authors tend to translate negro as "black" rather than as "nigger" or "slave" and have failed to see the implications for Brazilian history of the above distinctions.10 [Forbes 1988:75] I fully concur with Forbes's point and my research suggests that the implications he refers to are broad indeed. The term negro is not merely an example of a race-color term that tends to be used pragmatically (and often viciously); it is also the central signifier around which the semantic parameters and linguistic functions of other race-color terms are culturally organized. The term preto can be a neutral descriptor of the color black, but because it is closely associated with the term negro, it too can be construed as an insultalthough as Joia pointed out, "it hurts less than negro." It is precisely because such terms "hurt" and "humiliate" that polite speech requires their avoidance and stipulates a substitution. My informants in Morro do Sangue Bom, it is clear, engaged in a form of metadiscursive logic that deconstructed the notion that the many terms they use served primarily as "categories" within a "system of racial classification." Within this logic, it is asserted, all people of color were negrosthat is, members of the ra9a negra; however, because the term negro and others like it slip so easily and dangerously from neutral referents into epithets and insults, a plethora of other terms are used in their place. Depending on context, these Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestiqagem in Rio de Janeiro 99

other terms might refer to or describe color-^a quality my informants conceptualized as related to but distinct from raceor more commonly they were employed pragmatically, as euphemisms.

Race-Color Terms as Euphemisms and Descriptions

My informants in Morro do Sangue Bom were masterful in their attempts to coach me toward an understanding of their use of race-color terms and they were well aware of the distinction between the referential and pragmatic functions of speech. In addition, they often emphasized the difference between color and local conceptions of race. For example, Jose, Joia's stepfather (and Elena's husband), spelled out the distinction: "Now, Joia is preta. But people call her morena. Why? Because of her color. She isn't preta like the color of your clothes. So, she's morena ... But deep down, everyone is preta. Look there [gestures toward the people going about their business on the hillside]. Some are lighter, some are darker, but they're all negros." As Jose and others suggested, one might refer to Joia as morena in describing her color. As both a linguistic utterance and a conceptual act, this was distinct from classifying her in racial terms. The term morena^ in this sense, was not understood as a distinct category but as a provisional description of her appearance, the medium-brown color of her skin; its use was adjectival rather than nominal. This distinction between color and race was not the only, nor even the central one I needed to grasp, however. Jose went on to illustrate the difference between pragmatic and referential usagethe distinction, in this case, between a concept of racial identity and the polite euphemisms of everyday speech. He referred to a woman whom we both knew: "She's preta also. People say mulatinha [little mulata, or a little bit mulata] so as not to say 'preta.' Isn't that so? But all this is preto. They're all macacos [monkeys]! But no one is going to say that, right?" Jose's use of the term macacoan egregious racial insultwas ironic; his intention was pedagogical. He was playing with the delicacy with which people avoided stigmatized terms and substituted them with softening diminutives and euphemisms. Mulatinhay Jose suggested, was not to be construed as an objective classification, nor even as a description of the woman's appearance her skin was darkbut as a pragmatically employed, polite term whose use was predicated on the culturally elaborated rules of etiquette. In saying "But this is all preto," Jose was speaking in a straightforward referential fashion and he referred in this instance to the woman's ra$a. Many of my informants explained that terms such as moreno, mulato, mestico, and pardo were preferred precisely because they were polite.11 Such terms could be and were used for any person of color, regardless of skin tone. "Moreno and pardo are words that people like," an 11-year-old girl explained, 100 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

"They are good words." Coming straight to the point, another informant, a woman in her thirties, said, "Moreno is used so as not to call someone 'negro.'" In addition to the ubiquitous, pragmatic use of vague intermediate terms, diminutives are also a favored way of politely addressing or referring to a person of African descent. As Jose* noted in the same conversation I quote above, "Instead of saying 'preto,' it is better to call a person escurinho [a little bit dark]." A woman in her twenties told me that such diminutiveswhich include pretinho, neguinho, and escurinho, as well as the ultrapolite moreninho, mulatinho, and so onare generally regarded as "affectionate" and bem delicada (quite delicate). Jose's wife, Elena, suggested an even more polite (and common) substitution. "It is not good to call a person 'negro,'" she explained, "so we call him a 'man of color' [homen de cor]." All euphemisms, of course, have a double-edged quality. They soften or obscure their original referentin this case the wounding associations of the terms negro and pretoat the same time that they invoke that referent. The very notion that a euphemism is called for suggests that shame, distaste, or discomfort is attached to that which is being euphonized. Susana, for example, pointed out what she perceived as the condescending nature of the term morena: "It offends because people who are pretinha are called 'morena.' They say I am morena because I am preta. You see?" As is so frequently the case with euphemisms, people in Morro do Sangue Bom felt compelled to use them, even while recognizing their double-edged quality. Even in the context of describing the condescending implications of diminutives, Susana could not resist using the expression "people who are pretinha."12 Thus far, I have emphasized the distinction between those instances in which race-color terms are used in a referential sense to refer to a notion of race and those instances in which such terms are used in a pragmatic sense to convey politeness, to flatter, or, alternatively, to insult or humiliate. I must further complicate my analysis of the linguistic functions of race-color terms by noting an additional register that is both referential and descriptive. Despite my informants' insistence that "there are only two races," differences in color are indeed recognized in Brazil. While people in Morro do Sangue Bom point out that words such as moreno are often used pragmatically"so as not to call someone negro" they can also be used to describe a person of a particular appearance. A moreno, as some of my informants noted while speaking directly in this descriptive register, is one who is "neither dark nor light." The term moreno is a particularly vague and polysemic onethis fact is given largely by its favored use in pragmatic speechbut there are others of a more obviously adjectival function. One may be said to be achocalatada (literally "chocalated"), canela (cinnamon), Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mestigagem in Rio de Janeiro 101

avermelhado (reddened), and so on. Differences in appearance, that is, skin color, hair texture, and facial features, are the focus of cultural standards of beauty as many Latin Americanist scholars have noted. In a world in which blackness is denigrated and whiteness is valorized, these differences may be significant in a variety of contexts, most notably, courtship and marriage (Burdick 1998; Sheriff 2001). The idea of embranqueamento (whitening), as well as the more generalized assumptions associated with racism, have indeed contributed to a cultural preoccupation with differences in skin tone, hair color and texture, and facial features. Although the distinction between the descriptive and pragmatic uses of terms such as moreno may be difficult for outsiders to perceiveand while it might occasionally be blurred even for native speakerspeople in Morro do Sangue Bom readily recognize and manipulate the distinction. "I know I'm a negra, but I'm really morena, right?" Joia once asked me and her family. An unpacking of the question would read something like: "In strictly racial terms I am black, and in polite terms I would be called 'morena,' but I really and truly am, in my appearance, light brown." What must be emphasized in understanding the use of the descriptive register is that the terms are understood (by virtue of conversational context) to refer to colora person's unique configuration of featuresrather than to categories of racial classification or racial identity, as has been conventionally assumed. This distinction between classification and description and its intersection with the distinction between race and color clarifies the puzzle that Harris (1970) presented in his seminal article on the "referential ambiguity" of Brazilian racecolor terms. The puzzlethe fact that Brazilian informants demonstrate such a marked lack of consensus in their attribution of terms should be no more surprising than the common scenario in which a husband and wife cannot agree on the appropriate usage of terms such as mauve, light purple, antique rose, or pink. Color perception is notoriously subjective, as well as culturally conditioned, and color does indeed exist on a continuum. The puzzle, in other words, disappears if we assume that informants are not speaking about racial typologies but about relative and necessarily subjective judgements of color. "Racial classification," "raciological taxonomies," "racial identity," and so on are, as my informants in Morro do Sangue Bom assert, a different matter. The expression "If you do not pass for white, you are black" reveals that despite perceived differences in color, ra$a is conceptualized as both a different and "deeper" quality, as well as a simple, bipolar category.

Racial Bipolarity: A Structural Reality

The notion that Brazilians conceptualize race as composed of multiple or fluid categories has had a significant bearing, of course, on debates about the 102 Journal of Latin American Anthropology

extent to which Brazil's characterization as a "racial democracy" is justified. Earlier scholars of Brazil's race relations have argued that the permeability of racial boundaries, as well as the existence of multiple racial categories have precluded the more rigid, oppositional, and antagonistic racial politics observed in countries such as the United States (see Wagley 1963). Stated in the simplest (and more popularized) terms, the assumption has often been that the lack of distinct racial boundaries has made systemic forms of racism virtually impossible. "As far as actual behavior is concerned," Marvin Harris has tellingly insisted, "races do not exist for the Brazilians" (1964:64). This argument was forcefully articulated by Carl N. Degler in Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (1971). Basing his analysis on the extant literature rather than on ethnographic research, Degler argued that light-skinned Brazilians of African descent, unlike those in the United States, are able to strategically pursue what he called a "mulatto escape hatch," whereby they are permitted to climb the socioeconomic ladder and thus achieve a position intermediate between those of blacks and whites. More recendy, researchers have challenged the notion that light-skinned Brazilians of African descent occupy positions of greater economic and cultural advantage vis-a-vis darker-skinned African Brazilians. Basing his argument on a detailed analysis of 1976 census data, Nelson do Valle Silva has concluded that mulatos and negros constitute, in socioeconomic terms, a "homogeneous group" (1985:49). There is little difference in income between them: both are very disadvantaged vis-a-vis whites, even when the variable of educational achievement is controlled. Silva concluded,"The joint analysis of Blacks and mulattoes constitutes a sensible approach to the analysis of racial discrimination in Brazil" (1985:49). Other researchers who have pursued a demographic approach to the analysis of specifically racialized forms of discrimination, such as Carlos Hasenbalg (1985), have joined with Silva in reworking the language through which racialized discrimination is discussed. Rather than speaking of three or more categories, or emphasizing the supposed fluidity of racial categories, he and others have argued that the structurally significant categories are "white" and "nonwhite." Two historians of Brazilian race relations, Thomas Skidmore (1993b) and George Reid Andrews (1991) have also urged a rethinking of Brazilian racial categories and have questioned the assumption that there are significant differences between the socioeconomic location of light-skinned Brazilians of African descent and those who are unambiguously black. Citing both Silva's work and the discourse of the black movement, Skidmore argues that the conclusions drawn from research on racial classification may have been underinformed and premature. He suggests that Brazil may be much closer to a "biracial model" than has previously been assumed. Andrews also argues against Embracing Race: Deconstructing Mesti^agem in Rio de Janeiro 103

the assumption of significant differences between light- and dark-skinned Brazilians of African descent. "I have chosen," he writes in his meticulously researched history of race relations in Sao Paulo, "to emphasize the commonalities between the two groups as well as the black-white racial dichotomy, which I believe accurately describes twentieth century Brazilian society" (1991:254 [cf. Burdick 1998]).13 My analysis of both everyday speech and metadiscourse in Morro do Sangue Bom confirms these observations and analyses from distinctly ethnographic and sociolinguistic angles. In concluding, I will briefly discuss what I believe to be the ideological implications of the distinctive registers in which my informants use race-color terms. When people in Morro do Sangue Bom assert that "there are only two races"and additionally, when they sometimes speak of sangue negro (black blood)they certainly seem to be engaging an essentialist concept of race. This point requires qualification. In eliciting, recording, and analyzing narratives of racism in Morro do Sangue Bom, my research demonstrates that my informants reject the racial democracy thesis. Specifically racialized forms of prejudice and discrimination are rife in their country, they believe, and they have no shortage of stories by which they describe their personal encounters with it. Significantly, light-skinned people of color felt that they were subject to the same racialized vulnerabilityrejections during job searches, ill-treatment while on the job, occupational limitations, police harassment, and racist namecalling, for exampleas their darker-skinned neighbors (Sheriff 2001). Their experience, of course, fits the statistical picture I refer to above. If it can be said that my informants' understanding of race bears the shadows of essentialism, it is an essentialism that it is historically producedtraceable, in fact, to the fetishization of whiteness and pureza de sangue (purity of blood) that preoccupied the Portuguese colonial empire (Boxer 1969). Yet in a fuller and more immediate sense, I believe my informants' understanding of racial bipolarity is given less by received notions of biological race than by their accurate perception of the oppression to which they are subject, and which they share, as people of colorpeople of color, that is, who live within a racially bifurcated political economy whose reality speaks louder than the platitudes of democracia racial. My informants' belief that racial identity is bipolar in nature is thus largely determined by the bedrock of experience in the world, as well as by a rather self-conscious stance of solidarity and communal understanding about the deceptions of democracia racial. It is nevertheless true that what I would call the discourse on racethat is, the insistence that "there are only two races"is not a dominant one in everyday speech. Discourses of racialized opposition tend to be muffled or

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muted in Brazil and as I argue elsewhere (Sheriff 2000), the open discussion of racism is constrained by the pervasive practices of cultural censorship. Moreover, as Natasha Pravaz (this volume) argues in her analysis of the symbolic construction of the mulata (women who dance the samba in various entertainment venues, including carnival) there is a persistent tension between notions of racial hybridity, bipolar constructions of identity, and nationalist representation. Although many of Pravaz's informants self-identified as negras (racially "black" rather than "mixed") their performance of mulatice (mulataness) reflected, reproduced, embodied, and celebrated the mythology of a thoroughly hybridized and racially democratic Brazil. The ideological tensions Pravaz so cogendy illustrates are central features of Brazilian public discourses on the meanings of race and nation. Thus, I do not mean to suggest that poor African Brazilians such as those in Morro do Sangue Bom consistently resist dominant racial ideologies, but rather that they struggle with the contradictions of those ideologies in complicated and often ambivalent ways. It is thus pragmatic speech, an indirect and "double-voiced" mode (Bakhtin 1981), that most fully fills the cultural space that exists between the ideology of racial democracy and the structural realities of racism. As I have argued, the euphemistic register permits the avoidance of the hurtful associations attached to words such as negro. In larger terms, however, a degree of ideological resistance can and should be read into both pragmatic speech and the descriptive discourse of color. The descriptive discourse, in focusing attention on the uniqueness of an individual's appearance (rather than membership in one of a set of mutually exclusive categories), stretches toward a de-essentializing of race (that is, a recognition of its politically constructed character), and its insidious significance. The pragmatic discourse, which insists that all people of color be referred to with an ambiguous and intermediate term, stretches toward a democratic leveling of color distinctions. Ideologically speaking, these registers resist the cultural hierarchies of both race and color and all that they suggest about invidious distinctions, aesthetic beauty, and moral worth. Although people in Morro do Sangue Bom reject the claims of democracia racial, their use of the pragmatic, polite register is, in a sense, a rhetorical attempt to support its prescriptive values: neither race nor color should matter. In this article I have insisted that it is not racial identity that poor Brazilians of African descent manipulate when they choose a word from the race-color lexicon but rather language itself. "Well, you know that we Brazilians, we adore slang, right?" one informant said when I asked why people in his community had so many words for race and color. "Here in Rio, there are people from all over the country, so it's an exchange of slang." What this

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informant emphasized was not the notion of multiple categories of racial being that require separate terms, but rather the point that the words of race and color are situated within a space of rhetorical play, a space of self-conscious linguistic agency. There is, however, a paradox underlying the ideological implications I describe above. Even when the intention of speakers is to level differenceto suggest for example, that everyone is moreno and that distinctions do not matterall of the words in the lexicon are anchored, semantically speaking, within a vision of value and hierarchy. Because there is a constant interplay of referencing, indexing, connoting, and evasion that occurs in the minds of interlocutors and in the rapid shifting of the registers of everyday speech, true escape from that hierarchy seems close to impossible. When Susana hears herself called "morena," she also hears an echo, an implication behind it: she is being condescended to precisely because her darkness is noticed and considered unfortunate. Thus, while the language of race and color is articulated from within a space of linguistic play, it is also circumscribed within a space of cultural and ideological entrapment. What did Elena intend when she told Tiago in the encounter that I describe in the beginning of this article that he was not a negro but a mestico? (It was, after all, Elena who first told me that "only white and black exist.") As sometimes happens when the rules of a complex and largely unspoken etiquette become tangled, Tiago and Elena were speaking at cross purposes. They spoke in separate registers, and their registers embodied different sociolinguistic functions and called upon different levels of cultural, political, and historical understanding about the meanings of race and blackness. Elena turned 50 that year. She was childless and she adored Tiago. Her husband, Jose, was Joia's stepfather and so Tiago was to her, something like a grandson. She took a hand in supporting him through a childhood spent in poverty and the vulnerabilitiesboth material and psychologicalto which children of color were exposed. Like others in Morro do Sangue Bom, Elena knew that when Tiago became a teenager, he would often be regarded with suspicion, fear, and contempt when he left the community and went to seek work or entertainment in the public spaces of Rio de Janeiro. She knew that young black men were trailed in shops, eyed with distaste on city buses, and subjected to arbitrary harassment by cops, who often called them nego safado (no-account nigger) as though the use of racial slurs were a routine part of police work. Elena knew, as Tiago did, that "negro was a name that the whites gave to the blacks." When Elena told Tiago that he was not a negro but a mestico, she spoke automatically, pragmatically, reassuringly, politely, and lovingly. She spoke not to deny his budding racial pride but in defense of his character. She heard a
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different meaning of the word negrofromthe one Tiago intendeda meaning that was closer to the surface (despite its deep roots in history) and that had, on many occasions, hurt her and the people she loved. As she swept the shards of glass from the floor, Joia, I am sure, took it all in: her sons appropriation of the term negro to signify pride in identity, heritage, and struggle; Elena's intent to remove Tiago from the wounding reverberations heard behind the word; and the embarrassed puzzlement of the foreign anthropologist. It was too messy, too tangled, and too painful to get into on a hot and fatiguing afternoon, so Joia let it pass. She no doubt understoodas I later didthat Tiago was capable of recognizing the nature of the misunderstanding, of recognizing that he was, without contradiction, both a negro and a mestico, and of appreciating, if perhaps ambivalently, the warmth of Elena's intent. There was, besides, a slight stir in the air, the breath of change that blew through the open door when Tiago spoke so proudly and directly in his child's voice. He had cut through the complexity, the paradoxes, and the entrapment of which I have written. He had claimed Zumbia symbol of the dream of a real, rather than merely rhetorical, equality among all Braziliansas his own. He called himself a negro and did so in a register I have not described here: an unfettered one of belonging and community, one that offered no qualification, no apology, no shame. Perhaps Tiago's generationteenagers now who experiment with symbols of black pride and who watch, listen, and speak up as their nation debates new proposals for affirmative actionwill redefine what it means to be a negro in Brazil.14

Notes
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Aisha Khan, organizer of the session "Mestizaje and Other Mixes: Identity Politics in the Age of 'Hybridity,'" for inviting me to present an abbreviated version of this paper at the Latin American Studies Association International Congress in 1997. I also extend my thanks to Jean Muteba Rahier, guest editor, for inviting this submission, as well as Mary Weismantel, editor of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology. Maureen O'Dougherty and the anonymous reviewers of this article provided many insightful comments. My analysis has been honed by fruitful discussions with the anthropologists associated with the Programa Ra$a e Etnicidade of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where I was a visiting fellow in 1995: Peter Fry, Vincent Crapanzano, Yvonnie Maggie, Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Guy Mussart, Claudia Rezende, and Livio Sansone. The research on which this article is based was supported by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

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1. Morro do Sangue Bom is a pseudonym as are all of the names I use for informants. Morro do Sangue bom translates literally as "Hill of Good Blood." "Sangue bom" is a slang expression used to describe a person who can be trusted, who does not put on airs, and who communicates in a warm, easygoing manner. For some, it is also a favorable reference to people of color, or alternatively, to working-class people. 2. Morena is a particularly ambiguous term as I argue later in this article. It can sometimes refer to a white person and is, in such cases, similar to the English term brunette. When used for a person of color, it may refer to light or medium brown skin, or alternatively, it can be used as a polite term for a darkskinned person. 3. For a more detailed analysis of the sociolinguistlcs of race-color terms in Morro do Sangue Bom, see Sheriff 2001. 4. Distinctions of color clearly represent a focus of cultural preoccupation in other Latin American and Caribbean nations as well. See, for example, Godreau 1994, 1995; Khan 1993; Lancaster 1991; Martinez 1974; Rahier 1999; Segal 1993; Stutzman 1981; and Wade 1993. See, especially, Mary Weismantels (2001) recent analysis of racial constructions in the Andean region. She argues that contrary to public ideology, everyday speech there is rife with derogatory racial references and, furthermore, that a plethora of euphemisms are used in an attempt to conceal what are, at root, distinctly racialized, indeed binarized, oppositions. As with the majority of anthropologists, I view race as a thoroughly cultural and ideological rather than natural or biological category. 5. Russo literally translates as "Russian." It is not a particularly common term but several informants told me it refers to a person with reddish coloring. It may be a corruption of ruivo (redhead), or indeed, a play on the reference to Russian communists as "reds." 6. This expression has a number of local variants. Nestor's variant, "Passou de branco, preto e," could be more literally translated as "past white, is black." The meaning of these expressions, however, is best summarized as "anyone who is not white is black." J.Jambo (alternatively spelled jambu) is considered a slang term. It refers to the reddish color of the tropical fruit eugenia malaccensis. 8. Marvin Harris and others (see especially Harris and Kottak 1963) have argued that the "Brazilian system of racial classification" differs from the American one in that North Americans subscribe to the notion of "hypodescent"a classificatory rule wherein the children of "mixed race" parents are automatically classified as belonging to the racial category of the lower-status parent. Hypodescent does not operate in Brazil, according to Harris, where not only parents and children, but also siblings may belong to

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what Harris conceptualizes as (emically) separate racial categories. My research in Morro do Sangue Bom does not support this contention. Siblings may indeed be described with different color terms, but they tend to be classified, as Dona's Janete's comments suggest, as racially negro. Another informant, whom I would have described as white, insisted that she and her children were negro because she had "negro in the family." As I argue in this article, Harris's assertion is based on the conflation of color description with racial classification, which are, in the view of my informants, distinct. 9. As my quotations suggest, the terms cor (color) and raca (race) tend to be used interchangeably in everyday speech. This is not because the terms are synonymous but because the word raca (which also refers to the concept of "breed" when speaking of dogs, for example) is often considered impolite. The term cor is, therefore, often preferred, even when the speaker refers to specifically racial concepts. The distinction between race and color was also articulated when I asked informants to explain the difference between the terms negro andpreto. Most told me that "negro is race, preto is color." Dictionaries of Brazilian Portuguese confirm the distinction. 10. Modern dictionaries of Brazilian Portuguese support Forbes's and my informants' contention. The 15th edition of the Novo Dicionario Aurelio (a standard and widely used dictionary), for example, gives the first definition of negra as "a woman of the black color," and the second definition as "a slave, a captive." 11. Roger Lancaster (1991) and Isar Godreau (1994, 1995) have made similar claims for Nicaragua and Puerto Rico respectively. They both urge a recognition of the significant role that etiquette plays in the use of race-color terms. 12. Debates about census terms and their meanings are ongoing. The issue is a critical one because our interpretations will necessarily skew our understanding of the demography of racial identity in Brazil, and the analysis of census data has been one of the best means of demonstrating the structural consequences of racism in Brazil. Space considerations prevent me from engaging in this debate directly, but my data certainly suggest that Brazilians such as those in Morro do Sangue Bom often respond to census queries not with terms that reflect their sense of racial identity but with those that refer to differences in color or with terms that are considered polite. Neusa's insistence that one must be either black or white and her subsequent choice of the term mulata for herself is a case in point. It was Neusa herself who in 1991 was responsible for conducting federal census information in Morro do Sangue Bom. Census workers were instructed to allow interviewees to choose from among four census terms, but Neusa told me that she herself chose the terms.

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I have little doubt that she chose pardo for most of her neighborsthose I spoke with in Morro do Sangue Bom agreed that this was the preferred category on all government documentsdespite her assertion that one must be either black or white. For recent contributions to this debate, see Harris et al. 1993, 1995; Silva 1996; Telles 1995. Thomas Skidmore (1992) notes that Brazilian institutions, particularly those involved with censuses, have been and remain reluctant to collect data related to race. (In the 1991 federal census, for example, only one in ten respondents were asked to provide information on "race.") This reluctance, Skidmore argues convincingly, is closely related to the tenacious ideological constraints imposed by democracia racialthat is, the denial that racism is a significant social problem in Brazil. 13. It is likely that the concept of intermediate racial categories once had more structural significance than it does now. In the 19th century, for example, the existence of mulato brotherhoods and even of a mulato press suggests the existence of an intermediate category for free people of color living in the context of slavery. The institutionalization of such distinctions had waned, however, by the early 20th century (Andrews 1991; Russell-Wood 1982). Harris (1964) has also argued that mulatosfree people of color who were likely to be the offspring of slave women and their mastersfilled specific occupational and economic niches during Brazil's colonial era. Again, however, contemporary class structures have eroded these distinctions. I would speculate that the subsidization of European immigrants in the post-abolition era led to a displacement of those mulatos occupying intermediate niches and, furthermore, with the end of slavery, they no longer had a legal basis by which to assert an identity separate from that of other Brazilians of color. 14. A number of indications suggest the recent emergence of more public and explicit debates about negritude and racism in Brazil. See Roth Gordon 1999 for a discussion of Brazilian hip hop and black consciousness; Sansone 1993 for a discussion of the preference for the term negro among youth in Bahia; and Hanchard 1998 and Winant 1999 on governmental efforts to address the issue of racism. Most significantly, of course, the Brazilian government has recendy proposed the institution of racial quotas in universities, civil service jobs, and television. See Rohter 2001 (writing for the New York Times) and Fry 2000 for discussions of debates surrounding the issue. Predictably, some (including university professors) have protested the proposal on the basis of the notion that multiple racial categories not only make affirmative action difficult to implement, but also absurd within the Brazilian cultural context. Speaking from within the logic of democracia racial, moreover, it has been argued that affirmative action measures would introduce racism where it had not existed before.

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