Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2022
Interracial marriage is common in Brazil today despite an overall preference for racial endogamy. Fully one-fifth of all Brazilian unions in 1980 were racially exogenous (Silva 1987), although only a small portion of those marriages involved persons of widely differing colors. Indeed, 93 percent of interracial unions in 1980 were between whites and browns (pardos—persons of mixed race or mulattos) or between browns and blacks; only the remaining 7 percent (1.3 percent of all unions) took place between whites and blacks (Silva 1987, 73). Because intermarriage is the ultimate indicator of social distance or assimilation, these rates suggest little or moderate social distance between persons who are proximate in color but greater social distance between persons at the extremes ends of the color spectrum.
The data for this paper were compiled by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) under a UCLA grant from the Latin American Center while the author was a Rockefeller Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Special thanks to Arlindo Mello de Nascimento of the IBGE for computer programming and to David López, Sonia Báez-Hernández, and the anonymous LARR reviewers for suggestions on earlier drafts. The author also benefited from extensive conversations with Mariza Correa, Ana Maria Goldani, Carlos Hasenbalg, Octávio Ianni, Clovis Moura, and Nelson do Valle Silva.