Producing Ethnoracial Infrastructures

Chapter 5, “Producing Ethnoracial Infrastructures: Making ‘Japanese’ Liberdade and ‘Italian’ Bexiga,” follows the neighborhood residents who partnered with city officials on campaigns to ethnoracialize Liberdade and Bela Vista from the 1960s to the 1980s. Tourism-oriented economic development drove public funding for the project to make Liberdade “Japanese,” while the official rationale behind producing “Italian” Bexiga centered on historic preservation. I show how these projects were conceived of and pursued in relation to earlier ethnoracial identities prominent in these spaces as well as the in-migration of families from other regions of Brazil, especially the Northeast. These ethnoracialization projects would reinforce the social prestige of populations of Japanese and Italian descent in São Paulo, transforming places previously associated with African descendants into seemingly timeless, naturally occurring, and non-Black immigrant enclaves.