The image of a miscegenated, culturaly assimilationist and politically integrating Brazilianess delineates the heart of the ideology that constitutes the Brazilian nation, as of the first decades of the 20th century. The eulogy over hybridism was, thus, a means to overcome the racist biologisms that predominated in public and intellectual debates until then. However, such a nationality model increasingly lost its legitimizing strength during the process of democratization. Many of the recent cultural manifestations as well as many of the important social actors in Brazil nowadays look for an ethnic identification that will distinguish them from the nation that assimilated all the cultural differences. Thus, they express their discontent with structural inequalities associated to the process of the ideological construction of the mestizo nation. The paper describes such ethnizing processes and discusses their consequences for the democratic construction.
ethnicity; miscegenation; nationality; Brazil