Brazilian Historiography and National Identity: Foundational Texts from the 1920s-1940s

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of intense political, economic, and cultural ferment in Brazil. Deeply influenced by European modernist movements and a significant wave of Southern European immigrants, the nation experienced a profound intellectual paradox. While Brazilian elites were physically and culturally drawn closer to Europe, a generation of intellectuals began to forcefully declare Brazil’s cultural independence. This era saw the emergence of Brazilian Modernism, a movement that sparked a fundamental re-examination of Brazilian society, identity, and history. The subsequent collapse of the Old Republic in 1930 initiated a transformative quarter-century dominated by the political figure of Getúlio Vargas, whose regime would actively shape historical narratives.

Under Getúlio Vargas, especially during the authoritarian Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945), the Brazilian state systematically moved to appropriate historical production. The regime consciously molded the official representation of the nation’s past through state publishing, standardized school curricula, national museums, and orchestrated patriotic celebrations. This political context provided the backdrop against which key interpretive works of history were produced, works that would define Brazilian thought for decades. These texts sought to diagnose the nation’s character and origins, offering competing visions for its future trajectory amid rapid modernization and state-building.

Three major interpretive works laid the intellectual foundations for much of the century's historical writing. The first, Paulo Prado’s Retrato do Brasil: Ensaio sobre a tristeza brasileira (1928), presents a deeply pessimistic portrait of national formation. A scion of a powerful São Paulo coffee dynasty, Prado concluded that centuries of racial mixture, a corrosive Portuguese political heritage, and entrenched inequality had trapped Brazil in debilitating social patterns. His work, emphasizing a national “sadness,” followed in the tradition of Euclides da Cunha’s epic Os Sertões (1902), a foundational analysis of Brazilian identity.

Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (translated as Rebellion in the Backlands) is long considered a cornerstone text on Brazilian nationhood. Blending journalism, history, and natural philosophy, da Cunha framed the central dilemma for early-20th century intellectuals: defining Brazil’s essence. He vividly described the nation as a product of the mixture of Africans, Indians, and Europeans. However, constrained by the racist scientific thought of his era, da Cunha ultimately concluded that Brazil’s only hope lay in the "whitening" of its population through European immigration and the gradual eradication of non-white influence.

In contrast, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil (1936) offered a more conciliatory vision centered on the Portuguese legacy. Holanda identified the "cordial man" as the key Brazilian archetype, characterized by a personalistic talent for compromise, negotiation, and social maneuvering. He argued this trait explained the relative political stability of Brazil’s first post-independence century compared to its Spanish American neighbors. Holanda, largely self-taught, emphasized a national character predisposed to conciliation, which he believed could forge a bright future, and he later became one of Brazil’s most revered historians.

The second great foundational text is Gilberto Freyre’s revolutionary Casa-Grande e Senzala (1933), or The Masters and the Slaves. This brilliant, sprawling essay on colonial society formation radically redefined the value of racial mixing. Building upon yet starkly contrasting with his predecessors, Freyre argued that the racial and cultural mixture of Portuguese, Native Americans, and Africans was not a weakness but Brazil’s glory. He conceived of a unique "Luso-Tropical civilization"—a culturally rich, Portuguese-derived society adapted to the tropics—as the key to understanding Brazil’s past and future.

Gilberto Freyre’s vision of a nation forged through miscegenation gradually became the heart of a powerful state-sponsored nationalism. Beginning under Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s and accelerating during the populist presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961), this Freyrian vision became integral to nation-building. Its most potent and later contested concept was the idea of a "racial democracy," the notion that Brazil had harmoniously transcended racial conflict. Ironically, this vision became official state ideology under the later military dictatorship (1964-1985), used to promote national unity and downplay racial inequalities.

Holanda and Freyre were young intellectuals upon publishing their seminal works, unlike the elder Paulo Prado. None held formal academic positions initially, though both would later assume university roles in Brazil and abroad as the national academy developed. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda significantly contributed as the general editor for the first six volumes of the monumental História Geral da Civilização Brasileira (1960-1971). Notably, all three authors, including Freyre from a Recife sugar-plantation family, were children of the Northeastern or Paulista planter elite, a background that informed their perspectives.

This pattern of elite, interpretative scholarship continued in other major works of the period. A prime example is Caio Prado Júnior’s Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo (1942). A member of the same distinguished Prado family as Paulo, Caio Prado Júnior provided a groundbreaking Marxist reinterpretation of colonial society. His materialist analysis focused on economic structures, arguing that Brazil was formed as a vast commercial enterprise for export, a colonial essence that shaped its subsequent underdevelopment and social relations, offering a starkly economic counterpoint to the cultural analyses of his peers.

Together, these foundational texts established the principal axes of debate in Brazilian historiography: between pessimism and optimism, between cultural and economic determinism, and between viewing racial mixture as a flaw or a strength. They provided the intellectual raw material from which the Vargas regime and subsequent governments crafted an official historical narrative. Their enduring legacy is evidenced by the continued centrality of their themes—national identity, racial democracy, and colonial legacy—in scholarly and public discourse about Brazil’s past and present, demonstrating their profound role in defining how Brazilians understand themselves.