Eugenics, Scientific Racism and Anti-racism in Brazil: Debates about Science, Race and Immigration in the Brazilian Eugenic Movement (1920-1930)

Abstract

The article analyzes the debates on eugenics, race, and immigration in Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s, paying attention to the antagonisms and disputes between supporters of scientific racism, who saw the racial issue as the great national dilemma, and those who denied racial determinism, here called “antiracists”. The author highlights that Brazilian eugenics was quite polysemic and mobilized different scientific, racial, and political polemics about racial miscegenation, immigration selection, and population whitening. The article especially explores the clashes produced at the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics, held in 1929, and the racial ambivalences promoted in the complex context of the 1930s, which mobilized different projects and interpretations on eugenics, racial selection, and national identity, including with impact on Constituent of 1933-1934