I do know that racial identity is important and perceived differently there. For example, people who consider themselves black or African American in the U.S. would not automatically be considered black or African Brazilian in Brazil. People who have brown or lighter skin complexions in Brazil are mulattos, morenos, or some other nonblack color category. Approximately half of Brazil's 150 million people are classified as mulatto or black. "Pe na cozinha" means "Foot in the kitchen" and "mulatinho" means "little mulatto." "Foot in the kitchen" refers to someone normally seen as white acknowledging his African ancestry because the kitchen is the kitchen of slavery in which blacks served white in all aspects of life.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
316 p., She was an 18th century black Suriname woman with millions of dollars. But she sought the forbidden: to marry a white man. Why, when she already had so much? Elisabeth Samson's immense wealth puzzled many early historians who concluded that it could only have been the result of an inheritance from a master with whom she had lived and by whom she had been set free.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
951 p., Story of an elderly African, blind and dying, traveling from Africa to Brazil in search of the lost son for decades. Along the journey, she will tell her life, marked by killings, rape, violence and slavery. Set in an important historical context in the formation of the Brazilian people and narrated in a way in which the historical facts are immersed in daily life and in the lives of the characters.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
236 p., Addresses what it means to be black in Peru. Based on extensive ethnographic work in the country and informed by more than eighty interviews with Peruvians of African descent, this ground breaking study explains how ideas of race, colour, and mestizaje in Peru differ greatly from those held in other Latin American nations.
