Mixed Race Day is celebrated on June 27 in Brazil as a reference to the twenty-seven mixed-race ("mestiço" in Portuguese) representatives elected during the 1st Conference for the Promotion of Racial Equality, which occurred in the city of Manaus, State of Amazonas, Brazil, from April 7 to 9, 2005. It also refers to the month of June, in which caboclo activist Helda Castro was registered as the only mixed-race representative in the 1st National Conference for the Promotion of Racial Equality, which was held in Brasília (June 30 to July 2, 2005) and was sponsored by the Government of Brazil.
Manaus established "Mixed Race Day" (Dia do Mestiço, in Portuguese) as an official day of the city on January 6, 2006. The recognition was adopted by other cities and states: 2006, by the Brazilian state of Amazonas and by the city of Boa Vista, in Roraima; 2007, by the state of Roraima and the state of Paraíba.
Mixed Race Day honors all those who possess multi-ethnic origins. It occurs three days after the Day of the Caboclo, honoring the first mixed-race Brazilian group (people of European and Amerindian ancestry).
Famous quotes containing the words mixed, race and/or day:
“All nature is a temple where the alive
Pillars breathe often a tremor of mixed words;
Man wanders in a forest of accords
That peer familiarly from each ogive.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
—Booker T. Washington (1856–1915)
“I am worn out with dreams;
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;
And all day long I look
Upon this lady’s beauty
As though I had found in a book”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)