Brazil

Core values & worldview

If you want to understand a Brazilian, start with the fact that Brazil is enormous and plural. It is bigger than the contiguous United States, has about 203 million people, and was built from three great streams: the Indigenous peoples who were there first, the Portuguese who colonised it from 1500, and the millions of Africans brought in chains. Later came Italians, Germans, Spaniards, Lebanese, Syrians and Japanese. Many Brazilians describe themselves as a mixture of all of this, and they mean it with pride.^•

Warmth and closeness. Brazilians are often physically and emotionally open: hugs, kisses on the cheek, long goodbyes and an easy willingness to talk to strangers. Relationships matter more than rules, and getting things done often depends on who you know. The anthropologist Roberto DaMatta famously described the tension between the warmth of the “house” and the impersonality of the “street”.^•

The jeitinho. The “little way” of finding a creative workaround, bending a rule, charming an official or improvising a solution is a national self-image, half proud and half rueful. It reflects real resourcefulness in a country where institutions have often failed people, and many Brazilians also see it as the small-scale cousin of corruption.^•

Family first. Family is the main safety net. Adult children often live at home until marriage, Sunday lunch with the extended family is a ritual, and grandparents are central to raising children.

Hope and humour. Brazilians are known for an optimism that has survived inflation, coups and crises; the old joke that “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” is told by Brazilians themselves. Humour, often self-mocking, is how hard things are discussed.^•

Daily life & customs

Brazilian life runs on food, family and the street. Lunch is the main meal: rice and beans, meat, salad and farofa, followed by a tiny, very sweet cafezinho. Saturday may mean feijoada; Sunday, a barbecue (churrasco). Each region has its own cuisine, from the African-influenced dishes of Bahia, cooked with dendê palm oil, to the Amazon’s açaí and fish, to the gaúcho south’s mate tea and grilled beef.^•

Football is everywhere. People are loyal to a club, often inherited from a parent, as fiercely as to a political party, and the national team’s World Cup games stop the country: offices close and streets fill. The defeat by Uruguay in the 1950 final at the Maracanã and the 7–1 loss to Germany in 2014 are remembered almost as national traumas.^•

Music is the soundtrack of everything: samba, born in the Afro-Brazilian neighbourhoods of Rio in the early twentieth century; bossa nova; the northeastern forró danced at the June festivals (festas juninas); and today’s sertanejo country music and baile funk from the favelas. Carnival, in the days before Lent, is the climax of the year in many cities.^•

Television novelas (soap operas) have long been a shared national experience, and WhatsApp is the way families, neighbourhoods and political campaigns talk.

Religion is part of daily speech: se Deus quiser (“God willing”) and graças a Deus (“thanks be to God”) are everyday phrases. 12 October, the feast of Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil’s patron saint, is a national holiday, and on New Year’s Eve millions dress in white and jump seven waves or leave flowers for Iemanjá, the Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea, whatever their faith.^•

Wounds & sensitivities

Slavery and racism. Slavery lasted more than 350 years, and Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish it, in 1888.^•

Racism in Brazil is often denied, which many Black Brazilians find more painful than open hostility. Black Brazilians are about three-quarters of homicide victims and are heavily overrepresented among those killed by police.^• Since 2012 national law has reserved university places for students from public schools and for Black, brown and Indigenous students, a policy many credit with changing who becomes a doctor or a lawyer.^•

The dictatorship. For families whose members were tortured, exiled or disappeared between 1964 and 1985, the lack of trials still hurts. Others remember the period as one of order and growth, and that split runs right through families and politics.^•

Violence and fear. Many Brazilians, especially in big cities, live with a background fear of robbery and armed violence. Favela residents live between drug gangs, militias and police raids. It is a daily reality, not a story for tourists.^•

Indigenous peoples. About 1.7 million Brazilians identified as Indigenous in 2022. Land conflicts, illegal mining and violence against Indigenous leaders are painful, highly political issues.^•

Being looked down on. Brazilians can be sensitive to foreign condescension: being treated as a land of beaches and bikinis, being lectured about the Amazon by countries that cut down their own forests, or being assumed to speak Spanish. The phrase complexo de vira-lata, the “mongrel complex”, coined by the writer Nelson Rodrigues after the 1950 World Cup defeat, names a sense of national inferiority that Brazilians themselves joke about and resent.^•

Modern attitudes

Polarised politics. Since the 2010s Brazil has been split between the left led by Lula and the Workers’ Party and a right that rallied around Jair Bolsonaro, with evangelical voters, agribusiness and security-minded voters at its core. The 2022 election was decided by less than two percentage points, and the storming of government buildings in Brasília on 8 January 2023 shocked the country.^•

Religion on the move. Catholicism is declining and evangelical Protestantism rising fast, especially among poorer, urban and Black Brazilians. Evangelical churches offer community, discipline and help in neighbourhoods the state neglects, and evangelical politicians form a powerful bloc in Congress. Conflicts between some Pentecostal groups and Afro-Brazilian terreiros are a source of real tension.^•

Social questions. Brazil recognised same-sex civil marriage through a court ruling in 2013, and São Paulo’s Pride parade is among the largest in the world, yet the country also records high levels of violence against LGBT people. Abortion remains illegal except in narrow cases, and most Brazilians support keeping it that way.^•

The Amazon and the environment. Brazilians are proud of the Amazon and divided over how to use it. Agribusiness is a huge part of the economy, and its political weight is matched by a strong environmental and Indigenous movement.^•

Not all Brazilians are the same

Regions. The differences between regions are huge. The northeast, where colonial Brazil began, is poorer, strongly Afro-Brazilian on the coast and proud of its music, food and accent; many of its people migrated to São Paulo and Rio, sometimes facing prejudice there. The southeast is the industrial and financial core. The south, settled heavily by Germans and Italians, can feel culturally closer to Uruguay and Argentina. The north is the Amazon; the centre-west, the land of soy and cattle.^•

Race and colour. Brazilians describe colour along a spectrum rather than in fixed boxes, and the same person may be called moreno, pardo or negro in different settings. The Black movement encourages pretos and pardos together to identify as negros, and the share of people identifying as Black has risen markedly.^•

Class. Class shapes life chances as sharply as region does: whether you go to a private or public school, whether you have a domestic worker or are one, whether you live on the “asfalto” or in the favela.^•

Immigrant communities. São Paulo has the largest population of Japanese descent outside Japan, as well as huge Italian- and Lebanese-descended communities; southern towns still celebrate Oktoberfest.^•

The diaspora. Brazil’s foreign ministry estimated about five million Brazilians living abroad in 2023, about two million of them in the United States, and others in Portugal, Paraguay, the UK, Japan and Italy.^•

Meeting someone

Conversation starters

• Football. Ask which club they support. You will get a passionate answer, and probably some teasing about the rival.^•
  • Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life — Alex Bellos, Bloomsbury (2002)
• Food and home region. Ask where they’re from and what you should eat there. Regional pride runs deep.
• Music. Ask about samba, MPB, forró or what they listen to now; most Brazilians have strong opinions and a playlist ready.
• Carnival and festivals. Whether they love carnival or flee the city to escape it, everyone has a carnival story.^•
  • The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil — Hermano Vianna, University of North Carolina Press (1999)

Topics to approach carefully

• Lula and Bolsonaro. Politics is raw, and families have stopped speaking over it. Let them raise it.^•
  • Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)
• Race. Don’t assume Brazil has no racism because people look mixed, and don’t impose American racial categories either. Listen to how people describe themselves.^•
  • Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil — Edward E. Telles, Princeton University Press (2004)
• Favelas and violence. Many people live in or come from favelas. Avoid treating them as tourist curiosities or crime scenes.
• The Amazon. Brazilians care about it, but foreign lectures can feel like hypocrisy. Ask what they think rather than telling them.^•
  • The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon — Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, Verso (1989)
• The dictatorship. Someone’s family may have suffered under it, or may remember it fondly. Tread gently.^•
  • Relatório da Comissão Nacional da Verdade — Comissão Nacional da Verdade (2014)

Common misconceptions

• “Brazilians speak Spanish.” They speak Portuguese, the result of the Portuguese colonisation, and many find the mistake tiresome.^•
  • Brazil — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• “The capital is Rio.” It was until 1960. The capital is Brasília.^•
  • Brazil — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• “Brazil is a racial paradise.” Racial mixing is real, but so is deep racial inequality.^•
  • Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil — Edward E. Telles, Princeton University Press (2004)
  • Atlas da Violência 2024 — IPEA and Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (2024)
• “It’s all beaches and carnival.” Brazil has major industries, cutting-edge agriculture, a huge university system and serious, often hard-working people who joke that the year really starts after carnival.
• “The Amazon is empty jungle.” It is home to millions of people, including hundreds of Indigenous peoples and big cities like Manaus and Belém.^•
  • Censo Demográfico 2022: Indígenas — IBGE, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (2023)