Neighborhoods of Mixture and Massacre

Chapter 3, “Neighborhoods of Mixture and Massacre,” follows the residents who migrated to and produced Vila Brasilândia beginning in the late 1940s in the wake of the displacement spurred by the Avenues Plan. The chapter tracks how, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, local residents and officials negotiated the transformation of this former hub of both slavery and Black self-determination into a microcosmic “Brazil-land.” That transformation aimed both to reflect and engender a nationalist ideal of harmonious ethnoracial mixture. That celebration of mixture, however, quite often entailed the threat or practice of anti-Black violence—massacre—both in Brasilândia and beyond. While centered on Brasilândia, this chapter also details how the context of World War II and its aftermath, particularly anti-Japanese sentiment, influenced popular ideas about ethnoracial mixture and massacre in geographic space throughout the city of São Paulo.