Mixed-race Brazilian - History

History

Before the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil was inhabited by nearly five million Amerindians. The Portuguese colonization of Brazil started in the sixteenth century. In the first two centuries of colonization, 100,000 Portuguese arrived in Brazil (around 500 colonists per year). In the eighteenth century, 600,000 Portuguese arrived (6,000 per year). Another important "race", Blacks, were brought from Africa as slaves, starting around 1550. Many came from Guinea, or from West African countries - by the end of the eighteenth century many had been taken from Congo, Angola and Mozambique (or, in Bahia, from Nigeria). By the time of the end of the slave trade in 1850, around 3.5 million slaves had been brought to Brazil–37% of all slave traffic between Africa and the Americas.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a considerable influx of mainly European immigrants arrived to Brazil. According to the Memorial do Imigrante, Brazil attracted nearly 5 million immigrants between 1870 and 1953. Most of the immigrants were from Italy or Portugal, but also significant numbers of Germans, Spaniards, Japanese and Syrian-Lebanese.

The Portuguese settlers were the ones to start the intensive race-mixing process in Brazil. Miscegenation in Brazil, according to many Historians, was not a pacific process as some used to believe: it was a domination form found from the Portuguese against the Native Brazilian and African populations.

The White Portuguese population in Brazil never outnumbered the non-White one. The numbers of Indigenous peoples and African slaves were much higher during Colonial Brazil. However, in the 19th century, there were more Brazilians of mixed Portuguese descent than those of pure African or Indian descent.