- Third Cultural Post
Something I have always been curious about is the diversity of Brazil. As one of the most diverse countries in the world, Brazil has an interesting mix of food, culture, music, and religions all in one country. I wanted to explore the regional differences and races within Brazil, as I don’t know particular much about this subject and would love to educate myself on it.
I learned that Brazilians trace their origins from five sources: Europeans, Amerindians, Africans, Levantines, and East Asia. Brazil also has a population of about 208,862,818 people, and is the fifth most populated country in the world. The distribution of the population is very uneven however, as most Brazilians live along the coast line, and the interior surrounding the Amazon Basin is almost bare. Most of Brazilians came from three main places: 1)Europe: these are mostly ethnic Portuguese who were forced to convert to Christianity 2)Sub-Saharan Africans 3)Indigenous People (Tupi and Guarani). The population of Brazil based on ethnicity is as followed: White 47.7%, Mulatto 43.1%, Black 7.6%, Asian 1.1%, Indigenous 0.4%. Most European immigrants live in the southern states such as Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and São Paulo. São Paulo alone has 30 million white people. In the northeast, the majority of people are of African or mixed-race decent, mostly on the coastline. Brazil also has the highest number of Japanese descendants outside of Japan, with about 1.8 million Japanese-Brazilians, most of whom take up residence in São Paulo.
These were some of the many facts I have learned about Brazilian ethnicities, and I can’t wait to ask my partner more about her personal experience surrounding diversity in Brazil.
Comments