Racializing Region: Internal Orientalism,Social Media,and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes and Prejudice against Brazilian Nordestinos

The Old Republic, Scientific Racism, and Whitening Policies

To understand modern prejudice against nordestinos, it is fundamental to recognize the historical implications of the development of the Northeast. To begin, the Northeast must be located in the context of a broader international discourse over issues such as progress, modernization, miscegenation, degeneration, etc., and the way these processes influenced Brazil during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Gomes, Wegner, and Souza, 2017) European ideological and “scientific” paradigms such as positivism and eugenics came to be widely used by Brazilian elites to interpret social reality and to justify political moves that affected the nation’s social fabric.

During the transition from the Empire (1822–1888) to the First Republic (1889–1930), the imagined community favored by the elite was one utterly free of any colonial and Portuguese heritage (Guimarães, 2000). Anti-Catholic, antislavery (but not pro-black), and pro-Republican ideas imported from France were associated with progress and modernization. Even before the birth of the nation in 1889, Auguste Comte’s positivist ideas “were sweeping through the army and the law schools” (Nachman, 1977: 1). A positivist approach to society “compared the role of the social scientist to the role of the physician: to examine symptoms of the disease and propose therapies” (Borges, 1993: 235). Consequently, national reforms and medicalization efforts such as public hygiene, the attraction of European immigrants, vaccination campaigns, and decontamination services, all of which had significant implications for the Northeast and its poor populations, were designed and executed by positivists in the government (Blake and Blake, 2003; Nachman, 1977).

Throughout the years of the First Republic, the Northeast was considered one of the unhealthiest areas not only of Brazil but of Latin America as a whole (Blake, 2011). Although the causes of nordestinos’ health problems were part of a larger debate, racial inferiority was at the center of the discussion (Blake and Blake, 2003; Schwarcz, 1994). The nordestinos’ alleged unhealthy condition led the Brazilian elite to think of them as a decadent people (Schwarcz, 1994) and a threat to public health (Blake and Blake, 2003). This attitude was manifested in the belief that mixed-race people’s character would deteriorate into “sterile laziness,” “primitive mentality,” and “parasitism” (Borges, 1993: 244). These characteristics presented a threat to nation-formation ideals, making the elite fearful of the complete disappearance of the nation because of its sizable mixed-race population (Schwarcz, 1994).

As a solution to the “decadence problem,” the elite developed a plan to whiten the population racially. The idea of whitening had a physiological and a cultural component. For hygienists like Belisário Penna and Artur Neiva, who participated in a “seven-month sanitary survey of the Northeast” (Buckley, 2010: 390) in 1912, part of the nordestinos’ problem was their cultural isolation. Therefore importing Europeans could whiten the population phenotypically through interracial marriage and culturally by maximizing the contact of Brazilians with “individuals who were more advanced culturally” (Skidmore, 1990: 10). The strategy resulted in the arrival of more than 4 million Europeans between 1850 and 1932 (Guimarães, 2001), more than the number of African slaves brought in during the 300 years before (Hordge-Freeman, 2015). Most of these Europeans, however, settled in the South(east) because of its climate, agricultural and industrial opportunities, and government support. According to Graham (1999: 49), “the government paid for the passage of the immigrants, housed and fed them and their families on arrival in Santos or São Paulo, and managed a placement office to find them employment.” By 1902, around 90 percent of the workforce in the city of São Paulo were of European background (Graham, 1999). Despite all these efforts, whitening policies did not work as expected and, even worse, increased racial tensions and sharpened regional hostility.

Debates around issues of degeneration, however, were mostly held in the academic and political circles that constituted the Brazilian elite at the time. It was not until the 1905 work of Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões (translated as “Rebellion in the Backlands”), that the “Brazilian arid backlands made their dramatic debut on the Brazilian life scene” (Santos, 1985: 4). The book combined journalism, drama, positivism, and science with a social Darwinist bent (Skidmore, 2005) and became famous because of the detailed description of the Northeast and its people. According to Anderson (2008: 548), it initiated “a tradition of cultural production linking drought to underdevelopment and social unrest in the Northeast” and inspired a plethora of descriptions of the region as “a miserable, impoverished, and backward region that was, at the same time, the traditional heart of the Brazilian nation” (Sarzynski, 2008: 33). Through novels, cinema, plays, music, telenovelas, and other means of cultural production and distribution, the Northeast and its infamous sertão (arid, remote interior) became a spatial, social, and cultural category (Amado, 1995) defining the region and its people. It was only with the nationalizing project and the advance of a racial democracy narrative during the first Vargas regime that the “ethnic bomb” was dismantled (Guimarães, 2001), at least at the level of discourse. By 1930, Brazil and other Latin American countries began to experience a shift “that emphasized a fusion of racial boundaries” (Bailey, 2009: 71) essential to nation-building narratives. Central to these changes were Gilberto Freyre and the regionalist movement.

The Vargas Regime, Racial Democracy, and Gilberto Freyre

During the Vargas regime (1930–1945), the dichotomy of modernity and tradition that later characterized the South(east) and the Northeast became even sharper with Gilberto Freyre’s construction of a nordestino identity. Blake (2011: 2) argues that “for Freyre, the nordestino personified the ideal of racial democracy, the idea that Brazil is a nation in which individuals of different racial identities compete equally in a society largely free from racial prejudice and discrimination.” Freyre, however, was not only interested in the exaltation of the mixed race of nordestinos but also wanted to give them a tradition, a memory, and a history (Albuquerque Jr., 2004). Using cultural aspects of the baiano (Bahian) caricatured by modernists and progressive politicians, Freyre’s nordestino turned this negative image upside down and transformed it into the embodiment of the Brazilian soul (Guimarães, 2004).

Freyre’s modernist ideas looked inward to the “old colonial and mixed-race Luso-Brazilian Northeastern culture” (Guimarães, 2004: 12) through the Northeast Regionalist Movement, which played a vital role in the creation of a sociocultural narrative for the region. The movement was, as Campbell (2014: 16) maintained, “the first attempt to define the Northeast as culturally distinct from the rest of the nation.” It asserted that the Northeast “was not just dry, poor and unhealthy, but also the most racially mixed and authentically Brazilian region, resistant to the cosmopolitanism of the country’s southern and southeastern cities” (Campbell, 2014: 27). It was intended not to divide the nation but to unite it. According to Freyre, “a regionalist Brazil would be a Brazil not divided, but united in its diversity” (quoted in Blake, 2011: 194). Other essayists, novelists, musicians, and artists who were part of the regionalist movement were Rachel de Queiroz, José Américo de Almeida, Jorge Amado, Dorival Caymmi, and Ariano Suassuna. This heavily media-centric regionalist movement co-created the Northeast as a category “known by a set of values, ways of life, musical, aesthetic, and gastronomic styles, with ties of regional identity referenced for a shared past” (Godoy, 2013: 65). It also created human archetypes that were believed to reflect the politics, religiosity, culture, and environment of this imagined region. Some of these characters preserved many, if not all, of the marks portrayed by da Cunha in Os sertões while creating new ones such as the colonel, the bandit, and the migrant (Domingos, 2004).

Although Freyre’s regionalist movement came to be associated with the past and with tradition, some writers have seen in Freyre not a negation of modernism but a modernism of a different kind (Ricupero, 2008). While paulistas’ modernism was related to industrialization and urbanization, Freyre’s was to a certain extent hostile to cosmopolitanism (Ricupero, 2008). Slowly, these two different branches of modernism came to be at odds with each other and eventually divided the nation. This regionalist divide became even more acute with the internal Orientalist claims of those from the South(east) that they were responsible for the economic sustenance of the country and that their prosperity was due to their “superior cultural attributes” (Weinstein, 2003: 239). Fontes (2008) contends that, while the image of São Paulo and its culture as progressive and in fact the source of economic development in the South(east) became linked with São Paulo and whiteness, the racialization through which nordestinos became associated with racial mixing and blackness connected the Northeast with stagnation.

As the Revolution of 1930 propelled the country into a new phase of nationalist projects for development and modernization, masses of nordestino peasants “marched” southward, escaping harsh living conditions and looking for a better life. This movement continued for many decades as rapid industrialization and the expansion of the service sector in the South(east) demanded cheap labor. In an exploitative labor market in which domestic workers had to resist oppression regardless of the region they were born into (Bernardino-Costa, 2011), rural nordestinos represented competition for local workers and a problem for labor unions because of their lack of class consciousness (Fontes, 2008). Internal migration therefore sharply contrasted with previous waves of immigration, particularly from Asia and Europe (Menezes, 2004: 112).

Mass Migration, Racism, and Xenophobia

Beginning in the 1930s but gaining speed after World War II, internal migration from the impoverished rural Northeast to the fast-industrializing South(east) helped to increase prejudice against nordestinos. Albuquerque Jr. (2012) contends that the root of the problem was not necessarily the persistent droughts in the region but the concentration of land combined with poor working conditions and labor exploitation by a regional elite. The situation was particularly dire for those situated in rural areas, where the decision to migrate was also a survival decision. This southward movement later created a negative stereotypical image of nordestino workers and their culture in the places where they settled. Prejudice against these migrants was primarily fed by previous forms of bias (cultural and racial). The novelty, however, was that those considered backward, blacks, and poor “Others” were now nearby, living side-by-side in the largest and fastest-developing cities of the country. It was not that the South(east) was not accustomed to migration but that nordestinos were not the “ideal” immigrants.

Sarzynski (2008; 2018), writing about the cultural and political debates related to the Northeast during the Cold War, traces some of the profoundly racist perceptions of nordestino migrants during the 1950s. First, there was a widespread understanding that not only were they the “kind of people southern Brazilians would not want to be Brazilian” (Guimarães, 2000: 4) but also not fully human, “a different type of human species” (Sarzynski, 2008: 186). That perception was corroborated by literary works such as Vidas secas (Barren Lives), by Graciliano Ramos. Moreover, the flagelados (whipped), as they were called, were considered genetically predisposed to perpetuate a culture of poverty and misery. Helping them, then, was to be avoided so as not to repeat “the system of slavery” (Sarzynski, 2008: 187).

Northeastern newspapers reported on the mistreatment, exploitation, and prejudice suffered by poor nordestino peasants in many southern Brazilian cities. On many occasions, slavery language was used to describe their working conditions and treatment, to the point of comparing a truck that carried them (known as a pau-de-arara) to a slave ship. Such racist press reports forced the region’s politicians to propose a congressional investigation into “the exploitation of and discrimination against nordestinos in São Paulo” (Fontes, 2008: 67), and these conditions met with resistance among nordestinos themselves. Fontes documented that nordestinos emphasized solidarity and praised their work ethic for combating discrimination. References to themselves as “very supportive” or as “a race of hardworking people” were common among migrants as a way of encouraging the stigmatized community (198).

Such solidarity continues to be necessary as nordestinos face contemporary forms of racism such as the social media reactions to the 2014 and 2018 presidential elections. Online expressions of hatred and prejudice have been noted since the 2010 presidential election, with the infamous tweet by a paulista woman asking her followers to drown nordestinos because they were not humans, and may be becoming worse because the laws prohibiting racism and xenophobia—Article 20 of Law 7.716 of 1989 and Law 9.459 of 1997—do not carry harsh penalties. For example, those found guilty, instead of spending time in jail, have had their sentences converted to community service. Another reason may be that people still think that what they say on social media will not have any consequences in the real world (Keum and Miller, 2018). In addition, the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has not helped to reduce such xenophobic sentiments by disseminating the racist stereotypes attached to nordestinos, calling them “Paraíba” (Aragaki, 2019) and making jokes related to their physical appearance (Madeiro, 2019).

Old Prejudices Delivered Through New Media

The Brazilian presidential elections in 2014 and 2018 have shown the world that prejudice against nordestinos is alive and well. The avalanche of social media reactions to Dilma Rousseff’s reelection and Haddad’s advance to the second-round runoff reflect a contemporary trend of offensive speech on social media meant to “explicitly transgress, reassert and negotiate norms of racial and national identity” (Cisneros and Nakayama, 2015: 122). In the Brazilian case, where a color-blind, racial-democracy ideology has been around since the beginning of the twentieth century, such virulent online manifestations reveal that racialization, otherization, and other oppressive hierarchical colonial systems continue to manifest themselves in (post)colonial times (see Quijano, 2005). The Internet gives users a false sense of anonymity or protection from the law (Keum and Miller, 2018). Most of the racist reactions to nordestinos on social media attest to their ability to capture public discourses that would be censored and even subjected to legal action if they occurred in face-to-face interactions (Lapidot-Lefler and Barak, 2012). Anonymity emboldens users to make what Gantt-Shafer (2017: 8) calls “backstage racist” comments in “public neoliberal frontstage,” reducing the politeness of the discussion (Halpern and Gibbs, 2013), attracting like-minded racially intolerant people (Klein, 2012), and allowing users to hide their identities (Bräuchler, 2003). Keum and Miller (2018: 788) conclude that online anonymity is “a significant driving force behind online racism.”

Nonetheless, with the United States presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump in 2016, there was an attack on what was perceived as “political correctness” (Gantt-Shafer, 2017:1). Trump’s candidacy and his subsequent victory were supported by a reactionary white supremacist movement attempting to normalize racist discourses against minorities both online and off (Potok, 2016). Trump voters elected him “not despite his prejudices but because of them” (Smith and Hanley, 2018: 207). Using the 2016 American National Election Study, Smith and Hanley (2018) argue that many Trump voters not only share Trump’s prejudices but also support his authoritarian impulses. Similar authoritarian and anti–“political correctness” sentiments were also observed during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election. Although Bolsonaro has a long history of racist and reactionary comments (Purdy, 2018), he was able to channel the rise of far-right, nationalistic, populist, and conservative politics in several countries (Bieber, 2018) to his advantage. While Bolsonaro’s team focused on the Northeast to promote a narrative of national unity (Souza and Fagundez, 2018), Bolsonaro himself was promising to end the victimization of blacks, women, gays, and nordestinos (Bertoni, 2018). He not only denied and minimized both historical and current oppression but also blamed these groups for the injustices they suffered. His attempt to capitalize on political gains in the region did not, however, materialize, and he lost in every Northeastern state.

Although most of the racist and xenophobic language was similar in 2014 and 2018, some differences were evident. For instance, in 2018 there was an increase in references to Venezuela and Cuba and heightened animosity toward the PT. Additionally, the posts showed an increased ideological polarization between good and evil, conservatives and liberals, neoliberal capitalists and communists, etc. While in both elections there were push-backs, counternarratives, and solidarity, in 2018 more than in 2014 media coverage treated both discrimination and support as one more aspect of the country’s polarization.

Bolsa Família and Cultural (Mis)Representation

Nordestinos are constantly being attacked in terms of distorted images of their culture. One of the most salient and offensive aspects attributed to nordestino culture relates to a perceived “laziness.” Usually, the claim goes like this: because the Northeast is underdeveloped and its political elite are corrupt, the nordestino is someone “who lives at the expense of the . . . taxpayers of other regions, a parasite on the public coffers who brings the country no return” (Albuquerque Jr., 2012: 96). This hypothetical nordestino is usually positioned within a narrative asserting that southern Brazilians are hard workers whose taxes pay for the nordestinos’ cash transfer program, the Bolsa Familia. Rooted in the nation’s imaginary, this was a recurrent theme in attacks against nordestinos on various social media, as illustrated in the following Twitter and Facebook posts:

2014

These nordestino bums who receive by only putting children in the world while others kill themselves working and paying taxes, but this is Brazil.

How to win the nordestino vote? Just give them food and a water bottle. Get a job.

2018

@jairbolsonaro if you win, cut off the water (which is already limited) and cut off the Bolsa Família, and cut them off of the f—ing map and let them be an independent place so that communism can stay there, for God’s sake

If the Northeast did not receive a large slice of the money from the Southeastern and Southern states, this riffraff who voted for PT, PCdoB [Communist Party], etc., would have to work hard, then they would not appreciate communism.

Although the Bolsa Família has succeeded in placing children in school and requiring regular doctor visits as conditions for receiving the benefit (Pires and Rego, 2013), many still believe that it encourages dependency, laziness, and even communism. The reality is that the program “has increased the access of the poorest of Brazilian society to basic social rights [like education and health]. It has also contributed to the economic development of numerous municipalities in the country, energized markets, and encouraged local production” (Castro and Modesto, 2010: 11). Particularly in the Northeast, “the increase in family income due to the benefit is as much as 60 percent” (Cotta and Paiva, 2010: 66). Finally, the program has “pulled 36 million people from extreme poverty since it was first expanded in 2003” (Boadle, 2013).

The above examples of 2014 posts present a country divided between “them” (the lazy ones) and “us” (the hardworking people). Although this trend continued in 2018, some posts added the idea that the Bolsa Familia had been co-opted to make communist ideas appreciated in the region. This “us” versus “them” dynamic establishes a relationship of superiority and inferiority; nordestinos are branded as deserving antagonism, rejection, and exclusion (Souza, 2018). In this Manichean and hierarchical worldview, nordestinos represent a threat to the nation because of the socialist proclivities evidenced by their support of the PT. This representation, however, according to Alves and Vargas (2018), is not just ideological or partisan but a consequence of “the country’s long, enduring, and foundational odium of Black people.”

Miscegenation and Blackness as a Problem for Brazil’s Progress

Numbers from UNICEF’s (2015) annual report show that in the past 25 years the number of homicides against black males under the age of 19 has increased to 10,500 annually. A black man in Brazil is “almost three times more likely than his white counterpart” to be killed (Barbara, 2015). Racism in Brazil persists, and the situation is even worse in the Northeast. According to the 2018 Violence Atlas Report, five out of seven Northeastern states have among the highest homicide rates in Brazil. The chance of homicide among young black males is almost 9 times that of young white males in Alagoas and 13 times in Paraíba (Ministério da Justiça, 2015). Violence against black and brown populations is systemic and in most cases occurs via the state police (Alves and Vargas, 2018). Bolsonaro’s insistence on fighting urban violence with more violence will most likely increase these numbers. In an environment that is already violent for black and brown poor communities, he has proposed relaxing gun laws, which may increase violence disguised as self-defense (Marcello and Stargardter, 2019). His embrace of the slogan “A good bandit is a dead bandit” and his family’s connections to paramilitary militias pose an additional threat to these communities in Brazilian cities regardless of region (Reist, 2018).

A notable difference in social media posts related to race and nordestinos in 2018 compared with 2014 is the intensification of xenophobic and violent language. In both years, social media users insisted on dividing the region and the nation into racial hierarchies. However, while in 2014 the racial references were more symbolic, evoking the era of banditry, in 2018 most Twitter and Facebook references to race were related to ethnic cleansing:

2014

These nordestinos trash, cangaceiros [bandits] of shit, they voted for PT and hit their chest to say, “She was the only one who did something for the Northeast” BUT F—ED Brazil.

Nordestino people are dumb as f—, Bolsa Família increases, but inflation increases twice. Go back to school cangaceiros son of a bitch.

2018

Is it already allowed to beat blacks, gays, and baianos?

Concentration camps for baianos now

I’m proud of not having nordestino blood running in my veins

In 2014 Internet users racialized nordestinos by comparing them to the well-known mythical symbol of the region, the bandit. Sarzynski (2008) argues that depending on where one is on the political spectrum, one’s understanding and appropriation of the bandit as a symbol will vary significantly—from hero to criminal. In 2018, however, the racial language was much more explicit and employed a different type of symbolism. Reference to Bahians replaced the bandit language and added a precise racial connotation to the posts. “Baiano” is an all-encompassing word for “nordestino” in São Paulo just as “Paraíba” is in Rio de Janeiro. Bahia is socially constructed as associated with laziness and backwardness just like the rest of the Northeast, but it “rapidly became known for symbols associated with Blackness, with enslavement, with Africa and, in terms of the orientation of the rest of Brazil—certainly of southern Brazil—with the past” (Dawson, 2015: 141). As antagonisms increased and were exacerbated by political disputes in both election cycles, southern Brazilians conjured up what they believed were the worst representations of nordestinos.

Whatever the terms employed, these representations were meant to disseminate an old, deep-rooted, pre-racial-democracy idea that miscegenation created a problem for Brazil that is reflected in Northeastern culture. Part of this xenophobic narrative continues to promote violence at the hands of nationalist groups that take to the streets to beat and harm nordestinos. Albuquerque Jr. (2012) argues that racist stereotypes associating nordestinos with bandits and Bahians in urban centers has made nordestino migrants particularly vulnerable to Neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, which blame them for the economic crisis and defend a separatist agenda for the South(east) (Oliveira, 2019; Silva, 2017).

In 2014 and 2018, as part of xenophobic sentiment, many social media posts attempted to advance a separatist narrative. This reaction aligns with European differentialist racist practices that justify a separatist racist agenda on the grounds of preserving white traditions and identities from “culturally/racially others” (see Taguieff, 2001). Weinstein (2015: 2) argues that the idea of “two Brazils” has always reinforced the image of the Northeast as backward and traditional and São Paulo as “the largely uncontested center of Brazilian progress and modernity.” As the 2014 presidential election results unfolded, tweets promoting separatist discourses abounded. In 2018, in addition to the regular posts asking for separation, users added memes in which the Northeast was highlighted in red on a map of Brazil with a mention of Venezuela or South Cuba. These memes reinforced the idea that the region was dominated by socialist ideology and did not belong to the rest of the country. Here are some examples.

2014

Divide Brazil in the middle, I refuse to be from the same nation as the nordestinos.

If Dilma wins it is going to be all fault of nordestinos that is why I am in favor of the South to become an independent country.

2018

Dude, someone take the Northeast and send them to Venezuela

Petition to exclude the Northeast from the rest of Brazil, they are the deterioration of this country . . . always trying to elect the PT

The Northeast is constantly accused of interfering with national progress and development, with this accusation alone creating justification for splitting the country in two. Even before the advent of social media, separatist movements emerged in the southern states seeking to create an independent nation. Although these movements were suppressed by the federal government, they continue to spread their ideology through social media today. This separatism resembles the modern world-system, in which race, division of labor, geography, and the nation-state are among the most common political categories of social identity (Wallerstein, 2011). In the Brazilian case, separatism of Northeast and South(east) is usually advanced by the myth of regional and racial superiority (see Weinstein, 2015).

“In Search of a Better Life” and Socioeconomic Prejudice

The perception of the nordestino migrant as a poor peasant who left the Northeast because of the drought still permeates the imaginary of southern Brazilians. Recent data from Banco do Nordeste’s Technical Office of Economic Studies of the Northeast, however, show that the Northeast is currently experiencing return migration. Since the 2010 Census, 62 percent of the population arriving in the Northeast has come from São Paulo. Of those, 60.3 percent (almost 600,000) say that they were born in the region. In addition to São Paulo, cities like Rio de Janeiro (53.7 percent) and Pará (48.3 percent) have sent significant numbers of migrants to the Northeast (Leite and Souza, 2012).

Part of the reason is the region’s economic development. For instance, from 1995 to 2010 the Northeast’s participation in the economy has grown from 12 percent to 13.5 percent while that of the Southeast fell from 59.1 percent to 55.4 percent (Lima and Souza, 2013). Another aspect that may account for an increase of return migration in the region is the improvement of its educational system. Data from the 2017 Brazilian National Household Sample Survey (PNAD, 2017) show that the Northeast has the second-highest level of school attendance by age-group in the country, second only to the North. These data help illuminate why the Northeast has voted for the PT since 2003; its support comes from a reasonable decision based on the improvement in living conditions in the past 15 years. One way in which racist Internet users attack nordestinos is by using old stereotypes. At one time, nordestino migration to the South(east) was a matter of survival. It was also the result of many years of political exploitation and the use of the government to cause more inequity in the region. As Buckley (2009: 164) concludes, “Landless sertanejos were vulnerable to drought and famine because of political dynamics governing the sertão and Brazil as a whole.” Leaving the Northeast was in fact the pursuit of a better life—the same life improvement that many paulistas and other southern Brazilians attempt when they move to the United States, Europe, or Japan. This is confirmed in the following social media reactions:

2014

It is not possible that more than half of the population of São Paulo is made of immigrants! Because to be happy with almost nothing and zero quality, they can’t have been born here!! These people who come from outside are just all messed up.

Congratulations to all the nordestinos who voted for PT (again) and then went to São Paulo looking for a better life.

2018

The Northeast votes for PT and then come to the Southeast to sell hammock and steering wheel cover.

What is revealing in these posts, however, is the enduring image of the nordestino trapped in poverty, escaping climate adversity, and pursuing a “Brazilian dream” found only in the more developed South(east). Despite economic development and the resistance to such ideas of the majority of Brazilians, what dominates the perception and representation of nordestinos is an embedded cultural and racial stereotype. This racialized and classist way to citizenship and civil rights, rooted in a Southern elitist mentality, affects poor and peasant nordestino migrants unevenly compared with nordestinos with more education, lighter skin, and better socioeconomic conditions.