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:
“When truth is nothing but the truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth. That’s why art moves you—precisely because it’s unadulterated with all the irrelevancies of real life.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“This seems to be advanced as the surest basis for our belief in the existence of gods, that there is no race so uncivilized, no one in the world so barbarous that his mind has no inkling of a belief in gods.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“When the weather is bad as it was yesterday, everybody, almost everybody, feels cross and gloomy. Our thin linen tents—about like a fish seine, the deep mud, the irregular mails, the never to-be-seen paymasters, and “the rest of mankind,” are growled about in “old-soldier” style. But a fine day like today has turned out brightens and cheers us all. We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)