The Italian Colony of São Paulo argues that Italians first became racialized as white in Sao Paulo, Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas Italians in the United States struggled with xenophobia and were often not fully acknowledged as white, in Sao Paulo, due to a series of social, economic, and cultural factors, Italians became closely associated with ideas of whiteness, modernization and civilization. This book brings to light how the overlooked experiences of Italians in Brazil complicate conventional narratives about the racial ambiguity and oppression of Italians in the Americas, on the one hand, and the conflation of Italians with cultural and economic backwardness in Europe, on the other.
In the book, close readings of a wide array of texts — the travel writings of Gina Lombroso Ferrero, the short stories of Antônio de Alcântara Machado, the columns of José Correia Leite, the political essays of Miguel Reale, and the memoirs of Zélia Gattai — trace a “New World Italian discourse,” or the overlapping narratives about Italian racial, economic, and cultural superiority which constructed and maintained Italians’ status as model minority in Sao Paulo.
These discursive practices represent important antecedents to the racial nationalism that reared its ugly head in Italy proper throughout the twentieth century and remain central to contemporary debates about national identity in the Italian public sphere.