Wilson Center: Free Publications About Brazil

The Wilson Center, which hosts the excellent "Brazil Portal," offers a series of free publications about Brazil. They are available for downloading as PDF files, and can be viewed on a computer or iPad, or printed.

Several of the titles are offered in both English and Portuguese.

So far, I've read one of the articles in the book titled "Brazilian Perspectives on the United States: Advancing U.S. Studies in Brazil." The article I chose is called "Seductive Imperialism: The Americanization of Brazil During World War II."  The author is Antonio Pedro Tota, associate professor of History at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in São Paulo. 

He begins by explaining how, in the early 1940's, the "thumbs up" hand gesture replaced the traditional Brazilian gesture of clasping the earlobe with two fingers to signal approval. The thumbs up signal was used by American pilots stationed in Northeast Brazil to communicate with their Brazilian ground crews. The signal spread rapidly among Brazilians in the Northeast, and from there, throughout Brazil.

He also includes a detailed and interesting account of the circumstances surrounding Carmen Miranda's return visit to Brazil in 1940. She was received coldly by her Brazilian audience. She began by greeting them in English, and not very idiomatically. Se said "Good night, people!" instead of "Good evening," but in any case her use of English got things off to a bad start. According to Tota, the audience sat in stony silence when she finished singing the song "South American Way," which, to be fair, does paint South Americans in a rather stereotypical way.

He then goes on to tell about her returning to the stage a couple of months later to sing "Disseram Que Voltei Americanisada." It wasn't long after this that she returned to Hollywood, and it would be 14 years before she again visited Brazil.

The article includes detailed information about the ways in which the US developed its "good neighbor" policy for Latin America, which it viewed as increasingly important as the US faced war-time challenges in Europe and Asia. 

For some reason, this particular article appears only in the English version of the book, and not in the Portuguese, but the other articles appear in both versions.  

This screenshot shows the complete contents of the book: