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Barbara Weinstein , The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham, NC, and London : Duke University Press , 2015), pp. xiii + 458, £20.99, pb.
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In her insightful and well-documented book, Barbara Weinstein discusses how São Paulo's regional identity has developed and manifested in the twentieth century, particularly between the occurring of two historical events. The first event is the failed Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, in which the state of São Paulo stood against the presidential takeover of Getúlio Vargas in 1930. The second event, in 1954, is the 400-year anniversary of the foundation of the city of São Paulo, a public occasion in which paulista pride was displayed quite powerfully. Weinstein uses these two events as markers of an identity process that São Paulo has crafted around the image of its own modernity and progress, something that, from the perspective of paulista official discourse, had not been equally attained in the rest of Brazil. She illustrates how the construction of paulista identity as 'modern' was particularly possible due to its imagined opposition to less-developed northern and north-eastern Brazilian 'others'. These people were racialised as less economically dynamic, traditional, and, most significantly, as darker-skinned (or more typically Afro-descendant) than paulistas. Paulista regional pride, in fact, has been inextricably entangled with notions of whiteness and industriousness, largely drawing from the experience of Portuguese pioneers (bandeirantes) and Italian immigrants.
Weinstein's choice of events is very effective for two reasons. The first reason...