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Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are less white and considered less “modern” than the nationals of the countries where they arrive. In this essay, my purpose is to examine what happens when we apply the idea of “immigrant integration” to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These immigrants and their descendants have faced a contradiction between integrating into a national “imagined community,” constructed as “mixed-race,” and participating in local, national and global projects of (white) “modernity.” The paper explores how this contradiction was historically constructed in Brazil, how some Brazilians of European descent resolved it, and how we can think of the relationship between race, modernity, nationhood and immigrant integration from a more global perspective.

While international asylum law includes race as the first protected category—followed by religion, nationality, particular group membership, and political opinion—Haitians' ongoing racialised persecution and denial of refuge across the Americas reveals the failures of this framework. Drawing on academic literature, documentary evidence, and primary sources, we analyse the racial and neocolonial logics constituting Haitians' experiences at home and as migrants through the Americas. Focusing on Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico as nodes of migration trajectories, we argue that Haitians confront a "hemispheric frontier regime". Unlike a single border that impedes passage, this multilayered frontier regime constantly uproots Haitians, even while states evade their responsibilities vis‐à‐vis asylum seekers. Over time, mutually reinforcing frontier logics of policing, dispossession, extraction, and empire at various scales—urban, domestic, transnational—structure Haitians' and other migrants' racialised exclusion from rights regimes across geographies from Haiti to South, Central, and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how affirmative action in Brazilian public universities has evolved from the start of the new millennium up to recent years. After an overview of the existing policies in public universities, we explain these patterns based on an analysis of the processes internal and external to the universities. Although these policies were initially thought of as racial quotas, class-based criteria have predominated, while the racial criteria became relatively circumscribed. Within the institutions, affirmative action brought new concerns about how to support and retain low-income students, as well as a discussion about racism, although the latter remains controversial.

The authors reflect on the use of marital status to study the living arrangements of elderly people (aged 60 years and older) in a comparative perspective. Traditionally, relevant studies have differentiated by marital status and assumed that married people lived together and that unmarried people did not live with partners. However, marital status is a social construct, whereas union status is the residential one, and although marriage is universal, it is different in different places and at different times. Using fairly recent census data from nine countries around the world, the authors examined how well marital status helps indicate union status. They found reason to believe that marital status has been a good indicator of union status in some places at certain times but that it is not always so. Keywords: living arrangements; elders; international; marital status

Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 304 pp. $US 24.95 paper (978-0-8047-6278-6), $US 70.00 hardcover (978-0-8047-6277-9) Legacies of Race [...]

This paper analyses the relationships between "race" and violent victimization, and between "race" and support for violent practices of social control in Brazil, using nationally representative survey data. I start from the premise that "race" is a set of relational practices rather than bounded "racial groups". I operationalize this relational understanding of "race" methodologically by triangulating three measures of "race" – self-identified "census race", interviewer-identified skin colour, and racial composition of the municipality – in conjunction with measures of class, gender and space. I find that whiter geographic spaces have lower overall levels of violent victimization, but that interviewer-identified darker-skinned individuals are disproportionately victimized in these whiter geographic spaces. Controlling for other variables, self-identified census race is not correlated with violent victimization. I find that public support for violent practices can best be understood by considering people's simultaneous relationships to race, gender, class and spatial categories and hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]