The ethnoracial commodification of Brazilianness at cultural festivals in Toronto,Canada

Abstract

This article analyzes representations of Brazilianness at festivals in Toronto, Canada, to understand how ethnoracialized groups are negotiating cultural commodification and neoliberal entrepreneurship. At these festivals, Brazilian immigrants employ specific semiotic assemblages to present themselves as a culturally rich, entrepreneurially successful group. They uphold Canadian multicultural ideals while avoiding negative stereotypes associated with Latin Americans. Entrepreneurship is thus a key idiom through which ethnoracial and cultural differences are managed and transformed for profit within a neoliberal regime where minoritized groups compete for visibility and resources. Current forms of cultural commodification therefore merit study because they illuminate how capitalism reproduces ethnoracial inequalities.

Keywords

semiotics racial capitalism entrepreneurship multiculturalism neoliberalism Brazil Canada cultural commodification

Social scientific studies from recent decades have shown that various social actors—from governments to individuals—have employed market-based logics to select, reassemble, and commodify objectified cultural forms (Canclini 2005; Dávila 2012; Heller 2010; MacLeod 2006; Yúdice 2004). While scholarly attention to cultural commodification has seemingly waned since the early 2010s, the phenomenon has nonetheless persisted, developing in step with capitalism’s shifts, including the rise of the “new” or “gig economy.” Within this new economy, precarious project-based forms of entrepreneurial labor are dominant, especially within the cultural industry. Accordingly, entrepreneurialism has become a central ideology guiding hegemonic regimes of value. Successful workers in the new economy are ostensibly autonomous, flexible, self-improving enterprises; they are expected to be productive while taking on financial and administrative risks without burdening or making demands on the state (Freeman 2014; Gershon 2011, 2014; Harvey 2005; McRobbie 2015). Neoliberal entrepreneurial policies and norms often focus on individuals as key economic agents, but ethnoracialized groups are also crucial to the intensification of entrepreneurship, especially in industries like tourism and entertainment where cultural authenticity is a crucial asset (Baud and Ypeij 2009; Bunten 2008; Collins 2015; Dávila 2001, 2012; Guilbault and Rommen 2019).

By examining public depictions of Brazilian immigrants and Brazilianness in Toronto, Canada, I contend that we must continue to analyze cultural commodification in order to gain a better understanding of how its joint proliferation with neoliberal entrepreneurialism is affecting ethnoracialized groups. Specifically, I focus on cultural festivals that showcase Brazilianness. As case studies, these festivals illustrate that as neoliberalism becomes more entrenched as both an economic policy and as a set of (inter)subjective norms, cultural commodification and entrepreneurialism are becoming increasingly interlocked. Tracing the effects of such processes on ethnoracialized groups helps to uncover the mechanisms of racial capitalism, the development of capitalist profit from the “unequal differentiation of human value” (Melamed 2015, 77), which rests on and reinforces the exploitation of racialized people (Hale and Mullings 2020; Leong 2013; Robinson 2000). Racial capitalism and racialization work together with other structures of power like class and gender to constrain people’s social mobility and access to capital (Al-Bulushi et al. 2020; Crenshaw 1991; Ralph and Singhal 2019; Walia 2021).

Racial capitalism provides the structural basis from which institutional, collective, and individual racializing discursive processes are (re)produced. Racializing discourses cast difference based on supposedly natural categories (Urciuoli 1996). Across social contexts, actors engage with racializing discourses to position populations in relation to the nation-state and relative to middle-class Whiteness as a default, unracialized standard (Urciuoli 1996, 2011). Historically, racialized groups were typically incorporated into the nation-state and exploited for their labor and other resources via colonization and/or enslavement; in general, public discourses have portrayed these groups and their descendants as homogeneous masses that are potentially dangerous, immoral, and lower-class (Urciuoli 1996). Since race is a structure of power, racializing discourses are institutionally and interactionally constituted even in contexts where participants may not be intentionally racist (Dick and Wirtz 2011). Meanwhile, ethnicized groups, which have typically been integrated into Global Northern nation-states through immigration, are understood as productively contributing to the nation and possessing cultural differences, such as fluencies in “foreign” languages, but without necessarily being understood as racially inferior (Urciuoli 1996).

While racialization and ethnicization seemingly exist in opposition to each other, they represent different degrees of markedness. Racialization is a more intense and negative form of markedness whereas ethnicization, which is relatively less severe, mediates between Whiteness and non-Whiteness (Hill 2008; Trechter and Bucholtz 2001; Urciuoli 2009, 2011). Nonetheless, both racializing and ethnicizing discourses enable overlapping forms of socioeconomic and political stratification that, in turn, shape how groups are included or excluded in the nation-state and in interactional contexts (Rosa, 2019). In addition, the boundaries between racialization and ethnicization are neither stable nor uniform; a group or even an individual may be portrayed in ethnicizing ways in certain situations and racialized in others depending on the semiotic and/or interactional context (Rosa 2019; Urciuoli 1996). Nevertheless, such shifts work within the bounds of prevailing forms of social stratification and, as the examples I discuss help to illustrate, overarching policies and hegemonic discourses tend to stabilize ethnoracialized groups’ positions within the social order.

Racial capitalism and racialization are relevant to Brazilian immigrants in Canada. In general, Brazilians are racialized. Despite being one of the world’s largest economies, the legacies of Brazil’s colonization as well as ongoing global structural inequalities continue to shape the country’s subordinate geopolitical position as part of the Global South. Accordingly, asymmetrical power dynamics influence Brazil’s relations with Global Northern countries, including Canada. Brazil is Canada’s third-largest trading partner in the Americas and a longtime collaborator in cultural exchanges (Government of Canada 2020a; Robertson et al., 2013). Nevertheless, Canadian corporations extract natural resources like precious metals from Brazil (Gordon and Webber 2016). These power dynamics shape hegemonic Global Northern discourses that tend to racialize Brazilians both within Brazil and in diasporic contexts, including those who are construed—or understand themselves—as White in Brazil (Guimarães 1999; Joseph 2015; Nascimento 2007; Ramos-Zayas 2012).

Paradoxically, the increased population of Brazilians immigrants in Canada has both enhanced their status and visibility as an ethnic group and reinforced their general racialization. Brazilian immigrants, especially those that are well-educated, have increasingly moved to Canada to escape economic decline in their home country and are becoming an important part of Canada’s pool of entrepreneurial workers from the Global South. Meanwhile, Brazilian cultural festivals in Toronto suggest that Canadian policies and Brazilians themselves are also ethnicizing Brazilian immigrants in alignment with Canadian multiculturalism. These ethnicizing processes influence Brazilians’ social positionality within the Canadian state while also shaping the ways by which they represent and commodify Brazilian culture. These strategies, moreover, are facilitated by the increasingly symbiotic relationship between neoliberal entrepreneurialism and cultural commodification, a relationship that emerges from and is supported by racial capitalism.

The public displays of Brazilianness in Toronto I analyze suggest the utility of ‘ethnoracial capitalism,’ as a concept with which to examine how contemporary neoliberal multicultural forms of cultural commodification (re)produce discourses of racialization and ethnicization. The term ‘ethnoracial’ underscores that race and ethnicity are co-constituted and that together, they create “modes of sociopolitical inclusion and exclusion” (Rosa 2019, 72). Accordingly, ethnoracial capitalism is a structural condition that contributes to social inequality and, consequently, concomitant discourses of markedness. As a result, this case study also explores the contingencies of ethnicization and racialization. Brazilians are taking on cultural entrepreneurship to participate in Canada’s economy and, in theory, contributing to their ethnicization as “deserving” residents and citizens. They are, however, always at risk of being racialized due to their precariousness as mostly recent immigrants and because race, like other categories of identity and structures of power, operates within a constantly changing social landscape consisting of multiple and, often, competing ideologies (Dick and Wirtz 2011; Rosa 2019; Urciuoli 2009).

In order to gain analytic purchase on the racialization and ethnicization of Brazilians in Toronto, I employ the concept of semiotic assemblages to understand how verbal, visual, aural, etc., forms of signification—as well as objects and material resources—are arranged and distributed (Ong and Collier 2005; Pennycook and Otsuji 2017; Marcus and Saka, 2016; Sharma 2019). In general, as semiotic assemblages circulate through various forms of media and material culture, they mediate how individual and collective actors (re)produce and/or contest the ethnoracialization of subaltern groups (Rosa 2019; Shankar 2015).

Specifically, I apply the lens of semiotic assemblages to the 2019 editions of two cultural festivals in Toronto that prominently include Brazilians and representations of Brazilian culture. I compare the Toronto International BrazilFest and the TD Salsa on St. Clair Festival to show how Brazilian and Latin American immigrants are commodifying themselves and objectifying cultural practices in response to increasing economic and political demands to become more entrepreneurial. Like similar events in other places, these festivals represent diversity via ethnicized and often fetishized forms of nationally or ethnically specific kinds of music, dance, and cuisine (Hutnyk 2000; Román-Velázquez 1999; Urciuoli 2009). In keeping with the demands of the new economy, however, these festivals are also settings where Brazilians present themselves—and are presented—as an ethnically marked yet respectable entrepreneurial group that includes business owners, artists, and cultural promoters.

The Toronto International BrazilFest (henceforth, BrazilFest) and the TD Salsa on St. Clair Festival reveal continuities in twenty-first century forms of neoliberal (multi)cultural commodification. As in other recent contexts, these festivals depict Latin American people as actual and/or potential entrepreneurs (Dávila 2012; Orozco et al. 2020; Ramos-Zayas 2012). Similarly, these festivals reinforce the racialization of culture as something embodied by non-White others whose practices enhance mainstream, implicitly White culture (hooks, 1992; Pacheco, 2004; Schwartzman, 2021; Urciuoli, 2009).

What sets BrazilFest and the TD Salsa on St. Clair Festival apart in a novel way, however, is that these festivals suggest that more than ever, entrepreneurship is a key idiom through which ethnic, racial, and cultural differences are managed and commodified. Nation-states employ neoliberal multicultural strategies to harness such differences as expressions of soft power and to boost economies. Meanwhile, minoritized groups are leveraging their differences for specific purposes, including, as we see here, to carve out a place in the Toronto’s competitive multicultural marketplace and, as a result, distancing themselves from racializing processes. This case study, however, gives a sense of how difficult it is for members of ethnoracialized groups to unhook ethnicization from racialization; these discursive processes are not only intertwined and historically entrenched but they are also continually maintained and stabilized by various actors across interactional scales (Pacheco 2004; Rosa 2019).

Sociolinguistic researchers have productively applied the concept of semiotic assemblages in multiethnic and multilingual communities to consider sign-making as a dynamic process, rather than as a discrete, stable product of interaction (Hua et al. 2017; Pennycook and Otsuji 2017). At the festivals I analyze, however, the semiotic assemblages of texts, images, speech, and music present a relatively orderly, uniform, and ultimately, commodified version of Brazilian culture. This representation seemingly seeks to reign in the potential messiness of signification while minimizing the racialization of Brazilians and maximizing their ethnicization. At these festivals and in other contexts, participants seek to celebrate Latin American immigrant entrepreneurs and valorize their cultural contributions (Orozco et al. 2020). Yet despite these ostensibly benevolent intentions, the (infra)structural conditions of the festivals I examine also perpetuate the markedness, racialization, and marginalization of Brazilian and other Latin American descended people in Canada. The kinds of cultural commodification made possible under neoliberal multiculturalism and ethnoracial capitalism are predicated on marking, racializing, and ultimately, exploiting these and other Global Southern populations.

Entrepreneurialism: the centerpiece of Canadian neoliberal multiculturalism

The kinds of cultural commodification I observed at BrazilFest, the TD Salsa on St. Clair Festival, and in public representations of Brazilianness in Toronto are best understood in relation to the overarching structure of Canadian multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has been Canada’s dominant policy since 1971. It was later strengthened in 1985 when the Canadian Multiculturalism Act specified that citizens have legal protection to “enjoy their own culture, to process and practice their own religion or to use their own language” (Government of Canada 2020b). Early forms of Canadian multiculturalism were intended to “domesticate internal [ethnic] diversity,” (Handler 1988, 125) and in theory, to establish all ethnicities in Canada on an equal footing as part of an imagined mosaic of diversity.

As neoliberal policies and ideologies proliferated, however, multiculturalism in Canada—as in other countries—became neoliberalized. As such, multiculturalism became less about channeling diversity towards nationalist goals per se and more about re-envisioning the cultural practices and products of minoritized groups as resources with which to spur socioeconomic development, especially by boosting domestic service and cultural industries (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002; Dávila 2012; Yúdice 2004). As early as the 1980s, for example, entrepreneurialism became a guiding principle within Canadian multiculturalism, a stance emblematized by a 1986 conference in Toronto entitled, “Multiculturalism Means Business” (Kobayashi 2014, 144). Consequently, in Canada as in other multicultural regimes, governments and other organizations encouraged minoritized groups to promote, objectify, and commodify their cultural practices, but in mostly prescriptive ways that upheld hegemonic standards of authenticity, morality, and public propriety (Dávila 2012; Hale 2006; Hooker 2005; Povinelli 2002; Yúdice 2004).

Multiculturalism has enhanced Canada’s reputation as a welcoming place for immigrants. This reputation, however, belies Canada’s support of U.S. imperialism and its own colonialist projects within Canada and elsewhere (Razack 2002). Canadian commercial projects and immigration policies enable the nation-state to extract surplus value from Latin America and other parts of the Global South (Gajardo and Macias 2000; Gordon and Webber 2016; Reitz et al., 2009; Walia 2021). The economic and political relations between Canada and Global Southern countries are supported by neoliberal regimes that harness the state as a vehicle for expanding the free market (Foucault 2010; Harvey 2005). Rather than empowering marginalized citizens to expand their social mobility and political power, in the new economy, governments compel them to embrace entrepreneurial labor and subjectivities to enhance the enterprise of the state (Dávila 2012; Gershon 2011, 2014; McRobbie 2015).

Consequently, in the twenty-first century, Canadian policies have prioritized entrepreneurship among immigrants and have instrumentalized cultural diversity to make Canada more competitive in the global marketplace (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002; Ley 2003; Reitz et al., 2009; da Silva and Heller, 2009). In the last decade, for example, the Canadian government established a “Start-up Visa” to attract entrepreneurial immigrants, especially those with significant financial and cultural resources (Fellet 2017; Ley 2003; Minister of Citizenship and Immigration 2015). The pressure for immigrants to become entrepreneurs continues once they are in Canada. Even those who arrive without intending to work as entrepreneurs often end up doing so because of the difficulty of recertifying their credentials from their home countries, a lack of well-paying, high-status jobs, and as a result of attending government-funded programs that encourage them to embrace entrepreneurship (Allan 2014; Rahman 2018).

In general, and for recent immigrants, therefore, entrepreneurship is central to Canadian multicultural policies; it shapes how the Canadian state interpellates immigrants and, in turn, how immigrants participate in the labor market. Yet entrepreneurial policies and discourses construe ethnoracialized immigrants’ cultural differences in contradictory ways as both potentially commodifiable contributions to diversity and as obstacles that seemingly prevent them from succeeding economically and assimilating to White, middle-class norms (Allan 2014; da Silva and Heller, 2009).

Overall, neoliberal multiculturalism is the hegemonic logic that mediates the ethnoracialization of subaltern groups in Canada and, accordingly, the semiotic assemblages by which these groups are publicly represented. The effects of these processes are perhaps most visible in Toronto where immigrants constitute almost half of the population (Government of Canada 2017b). The city’s streets feature a commodified multicultural landscape featuring a plethora of businesses that advertise themselves, for example, as “authentically” Chinese, Mexican, or Filipino.

The city’s multicultural landscape is perhaps most evident in the summer when the city hosts cultural festivals like Caribana, a Caribbean Carnival festival, and Portugal Week (Jackson 1992; Lord 2020; Silva 2011; Walcott 2001). Like Toronto’s ethnic businesses, these festivals represent and, in theory, enact multiculturalism. And, in general, festivals are events that add value and prestige to cities, attracting creative and white-collar workers as well as tourists (Sassen 2011). Toronto’s cultural festivals are also sites where minoritized groups claim space in the city (e.g., Jackson, 1992; Lord, 2020; Veronis, 2006). Through hosting festivals and running businesses, entrepreneurial immigrants commodify their cultures and consequently demonstrate their worthiness as citizens.

The preponderance of ethnic businesses and festivals in Toronto, though, does not reflect an equitable distribution of power and resources among the city’s immigrant and minority populations. Instead, ethnoracialized groups in Canada and elsewhere compete within a literal and metaphorical marketplace (da Silva and Heller, 2009; Silva 2012). The semiotic assemblages produced and consumed at these festivals and businesses also reinforce a “white spatial imaginary” (Lipsitz 2007, 13). In this spatial imaginary, ethnoracial forms of otherness are only publicly acceptable as commodities that uphold White supremacy and advance the socioeconomic interests of dominant classes and institutions (Hill 2008; Melamed 2015; Rosa and Flores 2017; Urciuoli 2009). As they negotiate multiculturalism, Brazilians in Toronto must therefore position themselves in relation to other minority groups and to hegemonic forms of Whiteness.

While neoliberal policies and ideologies have emphasized entrepreneurial labor, they have also transformed cultural production and consumption into key sites of public participation (Canclini 2005; Dávila 2012; Yúdice 2004). Accordingly, at BrazilFest and the TD Salsa on St. Clair Festival, promoters invite participants to consume and perform culture by, for example, learning to dance. These efforts make ethnoracialized cultural forms more accessible to outsiders. They also reinforce the globally preponderant neoliberalization of culture as segmented, objectified, and commodifiable things as well as “a possessable, marketable set of skills” (Urciuoli 2009, 24).

The festivals I examine are thus venues where Brazilian and other Latin American immigrants legitimize themselves as entrepreneurs while validating their ostensibly foreign practices as valuable forms of cultural capital that can theoretically benefit everyone.

Brazilians’ visibility and invisibility

In keeping with the neoliberal multicultural emphasis on entrepreneurship, BrazilFest amplifies Brazilians’ growing entrepreneurial reputation. Toronto-based media depict them as creative, resourceful entrepreneurs who purvey authentic culture (Barrionuevo 2018; Schuster 2018). In the city’s western neighborhoods where relatively high proportions of Portuguese speakers reside, Brazilian-owned businesses use assemblages of commodified products and multimodal signs to make Brazilianness recognizable as a brand. Restaurants have names that include Brazilian words like carioca, the demonym for people and things from Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile, import shops and sports bars that screen Brazilian soccer matches typically display Brazilian flags—or images of them—on windows and awnings while playing Brazilian pop music through their speaker systems.

Despite their commercial presence in Toronto and like their counterparts in the United States, Brazilian immigrants are nevertheless politically “invisible” (Jouët-Pastré and Braga 2005; Margolis 1994, 1998). In Toronto they face exploitation and racialization while also feeling alienated from other Canadians and immigrants. They also lack of a sense of belonging because of their institutional and vernacular (mis)identification as part of “the Portuguese or Latin American community” (Dowbor 2008, 34). If naming is a political act that shapes one’s belonging in the nation (Walcott 2001), then the Canadian government’s inability to consistently name Brazilian immigrants as a distinct group magnifies their liminality and lack of belonging. This makes them more vulnerable to being racialized and, therefore, marginalized along multiple political and social dimensions.

Brazilians’ invisibility in Toronto is partly due to demographic conditions and the depoliticizing effects of neoliberal multiculturalism. Unlike larger immigrant groups that have been settling in Toronto for more than a century, like those from China and India, Brazilians only began immigrating to Canada in significant numbers during the 1980s (Barbosa 2009; Pacheco 2004). Brazilian immigrants have therefore had less time to build a significant political base in Toronto. More importantly, due to their relatively recent arrival, Brazilians have had to contend with neoliberal multicultural policies that have incentivized entrepreneurship among immigrants. These policies have coincided with the Canadian state’s relative decline in support for immigrant and minority organizations that build democratic citizenship and a collective sense of belonging (Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2002; Kobayashi 2014; da Silva and Heller, 2009).

Since Brazilians began immigrating to Canada in significant numbers during the 1980s and 1990s, most have sought to escape periods of economic crisis in Brazil (Goza 1999). During the most recent recession of the 2010s, which has been accompanied by an increase in violence and political divisiveness, a new population of Brazilians have become motivated to move to Canada (Almeida 2017; Tortato 2020). Canada’s 2021 census estimates that approximately 15,000 of Toronto’s 6.2 million residents were born in Brazil and a census questionnaire sent to 25% of households shows that approximately 21,000 Torontonians identify as Brazilian in ethnic or cultural origin (Government of CanadaStatistics Canada, 2022). As past studies suggest, however, the total number of Brazilian immigrants listed in the census may be inaccurate since it does not necessarily account for those who are undocumented or whose legal status is indeterminate (Goza 1999; Pacheco 2004). Regardless, between 2016 and 2021, the census shows a growth of over 5,000 Brazilian immigrants in Toronto (Government of Canada 2017a). This increase was building in 2017 when Brazilians submitted the fourth-highest total applications for permanent residency in Canada (Fellet 2017). More than in past decades, this recent population of Brazilian immigrants includes a high proportion of well-educated middle-class people (Tortato 2020). Anecdotally, since the economic crisis began in 2013, I have encountered a handful of middle-class Brazilians who have moved—or are considering moving—to Canada to pursue better job opportunities.

Brazilians who have recently immigrated to Canada are more likely than their predecessors to have formal experience as entrepreneurs. As in Canada, twenty-first century Brazilian neoliberal multicultural policies made entrepreneurship more accessible and normative while transforming it into a keystone of economic development (Enriquez 2022b; Gomes et al. 2013). Scholars suggest that these policies disproportionately benefit middle-class people while creating obstacles for working-class, racialized Brazilians (Collins 2015; Enriquez 2022b; Gough 2015; Millar 2014). The socioeconomic disparities exacerbated by Brazil’s contemporary entrepreneurial policies stem from centuries of racial and class-based stratification. However, hegemonic narratives from the mid-twentieth century, mainly, racial democracy and mestiçagem (miscegenation) obscured racial inequality and silenced anti-racist discourses by championing Brazil as a site of harmonious racial mixture (Sheriff 2001). Although Brazilians are more likely to acknowledge racism today, the use of marked categories like White and Black, is often interpreted as impolite or even racist (Roth-Gordon 2017; Sheriff 2001).¹

Although multicultural discourses in Brazil have generally downplayed the material causes and consequences of racial inequality, racialization is nonetheless a crucial part of the objectification and commodification of Brazilian culture. In fact, Brazilian multicultural policies have also resulted in the racialization of culture. Institutions and individuals often conflate cultural differences with racial differences and/or discuss specific cultural forms as proxies for race (Collins, 2015; Enriquez, 2022a; Schwartzman, 2021). For instance, through portraying northeastern working-class musicians as embodiments of tradition, middle-class Brazilians also essentialize and racialize them (Enriquez 2022b; Sharp 2014). In addition, in an effort to re-brand the Brazilian nation within the global cultural industry, recent government efforts strategically draw on Blackness as a sign of cultural diversity (Goldschmitt 2019).

Whereas Brazilians have negotiated multicultural policies in their home country in numerous ways, in Canada their agency is more limited due to their status as immigrants. Specifically, the racialization of Brazilian immigrants in Canada is partially evident in their minority status, which is ambiguous and ambivalent. Multicultural policies reinforce their “invisibility” by grouping them under two categories. Federal policies classify Brazilians under the “visible minority” group ‘Latin American.’ In general, the federal government defines visible minority groups as non-White, non-aboriginal people.² Meanwhile, in Ontario and Toronto, provincial and municipal policies, respectively, include Brazilians among the city’s Portuguese speakers (Lusophones). The lack of recognition that Brazilian Canadians receive as a distinct group at all levels of government reduces their direct access to public resources and, in turn, hinders their ability to create community centers, host publicly funded events, and combat the discrimination to which they are vulnerable (Dowbor 2008; Silva 2011).

Policies that group Brazilian Canadians under ‘Latin American’ and ‘Lusophone’ demonstrate that despite discourses extoling diversity, Canada’s multicultural regime treats ethnoracialized and immigrant groups as homogeneous, monolithic entities (Walcott 2001, 13). Some first-generation Brazilian immigrants in the U.S. and, more commonly, their second-generation counterparts, identify as ‘Latina/o/a’ (Joseph 2015; Menezes 2003; Ramos-Zayas 2012). Many other Brazilian immigrants in North America, however, do not identify as Latina/o/a, Hispanic, or variations of these categories (Martes 2008; Tosta 2004). This lack of identification is informed by Brazilians’ tendency to understand ‘Brazilian’ as a distinct ethnic and/or racial category (Joseph 2015; Margolis 2008; Martes 2008; Ramos-Zayas 2012). Both in Brazil and in diasporic contexts, this stance is shaped by Brazil’s historical and contemporary position as being “a part apart” (Tosta 2004, 576) from Hispanophone Latin American countries.

In addition to nationalist ideologies, a desire to distance themselves from racializing stigmas about Latin Americans also deter Brazilian immigrants from identifying as Latin/a/o/x (Beserra 2005; Joseph 2015; Ramos-Zayas 2012). The dehumanization that Latin American (im)migrants face in the United States (Dávila et al., 2014; Dick 2011) is also operational in Canada (Armony 2018; Walia 2021). Latin American people have been immigrating in significant numbers to Toronto since the late-1950s, a trend that increased during the 1970s when wars and dictatorships afflicted the region (Gajardo and Macias 2000). Although Latin American immigrants to Canada are increasingly skilled workers, they nonetheless continue to be racialized and exploited (Veronis, 2006, 2007; Walia 2021).

Brazilians in Toronto also distance themselves from ‘Lusophone.’ The city’s Portuguese immigrant community is relatively prominent, but it is nonetheless subject to racialization, especially in institutional contexts. Since first arriving in large numbers during the 1950s, immigrants from mainland Portugal and the Azores transformed themselves into a community known for its strong work ethic (Pacheco 2004; Pereira 2018). However, as a mostly working-class group that speaks a minoritized language and as a population with high dropout rates among secondary students, Portuguese Canadians are precariously White (Pacheco 2004; Pereira 2018). Given these circumstances, some Brazilians avoid speaking Portuguese in schools and in public (Pereira 2018).

Racial, class-based, and cultural cleavages also shape interactions between Brazilian and Portuguese Canadians in Toronto even when they live in the same neighborhoods (Dowbor 2008; Silva 2011). Portuguese Canadians have leveraged their relative power, which stems from the legacies of Portuguese colonization and their establishment in Canada, in ways that often racialize and/or exclude other Lusophones such as Brazilians and Angolans (Pacheco 2004; Silva 2011). Similarly, Brazilians and other Lusophone speakers are generally ignored by Canadian policies, which do not differentiate national varieties of Portuguese despite centuries of divergences between them (Government of Canada 2017a).

BrazilFest thus serves as an opportunity for Brazilians in Toronto to enhance their collective reputation and distance them from the racialization of Latin American and Portuguese immigrants. As I observed during the summer of 2019, the festival is a site where Brazilians can highlight their entrepreneurial and cultural contributions as a distinct group while ostensibly demonstrating that they merit belonging in the nation-state.

BrazilFest: showcasing entrepreneurship

As Toronto’s biggest annual Brazilian-themed event, BrazilFest showcases Brazilianness on a large scale and seemingly legitimizes Brazilians as part of Canadian multiculturalism. The free festival was founded in 2003 by Arilda de Oliveira, a Brazilian who immigrated to Canada in the late-1980s and an entrepreneur who owns an entertainment production company (Vianna 2018). As the event’s organizer and spokesperson, Ms Oliveira models the entrepreneurship that the event highlights. In 2019, she described BrazilFest as “an opportunity [for Brazilians] to show and strengthen the image of our country, which is so great and culturally rich” (Itabras Entertainment Productions Inc., 2019). In part, BrazilFest demonstrates this cultural richness to a captive Lusophone audience. The festival has long taken place at Earlscourt Park, located on St Clair Avenue West. This is an administrative area with more than 108,000 residents and where, besides English, Portuguese is the second most spoken language (City of Toronto Ward 9 Davenport, 2018).

In addition to targeting Lusophones, BrazilFest addresses a general audience. The event’s official publicity also reveals that like other minority groups, Brazilian immigrants contend with Whiteness as the unmarked Canadian identity (Kobayashi 2014; Pacheco 2004; Razack 2002). As an official online press release for BrazilFest reads, “the party also welcomes people from diverse cultures, such as Portuguese, Filipinos, Mexicans, and Asians and, of course, Canadians who are attracted to Brazilian dance, music, food and drink” (Itabras Entertainment Productions Inc., 2019). By rhetorically separating immigrant groups from ‘Canadians,’ the statement reinforces hegemonic multicultural discourses that ostensibly celebrate diversity, but which depict White Canadians as the “culturally empty” default (Pacheco 2004, 111; see also Lord 2020; Walcott 2001).

Accordingly, semiotic assemblages at BrazilFest help make Brazilianness broadly accessible, valuable, and compatible with hegemonic forms of Canadianness. A marquee at Earlscourt Park advertising BrazilFest included redundancies that addressed cultural insiders and outsiders alike. The Portuguese and English words included on the marquee and other advertisements for the festival are not only translations that make Brazilianness more broadly legible, but they are also rhetorical strategies to unmark Brazilian cultural forms and people. One line of the marquee read: “Samba, BBQ, Churrasco, Beer, Caipirinhas, Music.” BBQ, for all intents and purposes, is the same as churrasco, the Brazilian Portuguese word for grilled meat, which is also used in South American Spanish. Similarly, ‘samba’ and ‘music’ overlap because samba is a musical genre. By separating these terms, however, the sign addresses those who are unfamiliar with samba but are nonetheless interested in music. Similarly, by including beer and caipirinhas, the sign informed passersby that the event will offer alcoholic beverages even if they do not know that a caipirinha is a cocktail made from cachaça, a sugarcane-based, Brazilian spirit.

The message that Brazilian culture and people enrich Canada is also conveyed by the various Brazilian businesses featured at the festival. Some of them, like a remittance company, advertised services for Brazilian and other immigrants. Like the marquee, however, other businesses situated in booths at BrazilFest such as a samba dance company, a Lusophone magazine, and the many restauranteurs serving Brazilian food, targeted a broader clientele. Texts like menus, pamphlets, and signs at booths were often in English and Brazilian Portuguese. At one booth that was selling tapioca (manioc flour), English language pamphlets included nutritional information about it and instructions on its preparation. Other media at these stalls combined Brazilian images, such as the country’s flag, with Canadian ones, like the maple leaf. These media work in combination not only to address Brazilians in Canada and Canadians in general, but to also create and represent a Brazilian-Canadian identity (see also, Román-Velázquez 2014, 2009).

The bilingual, binational branding at BrazilFest was complemented by the presence of local entrepreneurs who highlight Brazilian immigrants’ economic contributions. At the booths located at the event’s entrance, local entrepreneurs sold their wares and advertised their services. Although Diogo, the owner of a successful fragrance business arrived in the 2000s, for him “it seems like it was yesterday.”³ Other vendors like Zélia, a middle-aged woman from São Paulo, were less well-established. She had briefly lived in the U.S. but had now been in Toronto for two years. Selling her crocheted crafts at the festival supplemented the income she earned from working two jobs to support herself and her temporarily disabled husband. Summarizing her struggles, she said, “that’s how the life of an immigrant is.” Zélia’s recent arrival, age, working-class status, and likely, gender, intersect to constrain her ability to benefit from BrazilFest as much as someone like Diogo. The festival nevertheless gave her the chance to earn money, showcase her skills, and reach new customers.

Along with the display of Brazilian businesses and entrepreneurs, BrazilFest’s funding also reveals that in the absence of government funding, entrepreneurial Brazilians are relying on corporate sponsorship to expand their economic opportunities. Although BrazilFest is publicized by the municipal government, it is exclusively funded by Brazilian corporations. The event’s primary sponsor in 2019 was Obrigado, a Brazilian coconut water company with a multinational distribution. The large permanent stage at the center of BrazilFest where musical acts performed, was adorned with banners that combined “BrazilFest” and “Obrigado.” Other corporate sponsors included Pitú, a Brazilian cachaça company, and Contemporânea, a Brazilian musical instrument company.

The festival’s corporate sponsorship shows that Brazilian events are profitable enough to appeal to international corporations. When compared to other ethnic festivals in Toronto, however, it also demonstrates that Brazilians lack access to government resources and are generally excluded from important avenues for funding and legitimacy in the public sphere. For example, the disparities between the Portuguese Festival and BrazilFest suggest that multicultural policies have fostered a competitive climate where ethnic groups harness public resources to further their own interests at the expense of others (Bissoondath 1994; Silva 2011). In contrast, while the organizers of BrazilFest have had to acquire corporate sponsorship, the city’s annual Portuguese Festival receives public funding from Ontario’s provincial government as well as from (inter)national labor unions.⁴

In part, these conditions reflect how Portuguese Canadians were able to construct a political base before the neoliberal dismantling of public resources. In addition, the lack of public funding for BrazilFest echoes the racialized exclusion that Brazilians tend to face in the city’s Portuguese-dominated contexts. Scholarly accounts of Brazilian-Portuguese interactions in Toronto suggest that some Portuguese people and institutions in the city interpret the increasing presence of Brazilians as a threat both to their legitimacy as a minority group in Canada and to their more general and, implicitly, colonialist heritage as Portuguese (Silva 2011). For example, Brazilian participation in Portuguese events is generally minimal (and usually limited to music), and some Portuguese Torontonians perpetuate racist stereotypes about Brazilian people and about Brazilian Portuguese linguistic practices (Pacheco 2004; Pereira 2018; Silva 2011).

BrazilFest is thus a site where Brazilian immigrants exhibit their cultural and economic contributions to the Canadian state. An assemblage of texts, images, the built environment, and entrepreneurial Brazilians work together to ethnicize and commodify Brazilian culture in ways that fit with neoliberal multicultural expectations and policies. Such assemblages also show how Brazilians’ incorporation into the Canadian state has been mediated by neoliberal multiculturalism. Those who strive to make their mark on the city have had to accumulate multiple forms of capital without relying on government resources and in the absence of financial and social infrastructures to build a political base. This entrepreneurial model has made it possible and, in some cases, necessary for many Brazilians to commodify certain cultural practices in ways that address Brazilian insiders and outsiders alike. Accordingly, BrazilFest has a dual role: it gives Brazilians a chance to reconnect to their home country and it enables outsiders to learn how to consume and perform Brazilian cultural forms. Brazilian cultural practices thus become relevant to outsiders beyond the context of the festival, a process that potentially transforms these into mainstream forms of cultural capital.

The politics of participation at Brazilfest

When Arilda de Oliveira formally inaugurated BrazilFest in July 2019 she framed the event as a participatory celebration. With a cheerful “bom dia” (good morning), she greeted the crowd of about two hundred spectators, including young families. After acknowledging the festival’s corporate sponsors, she explained that today the audience would learn about Brazilian culture. This would include “things to use in everyday life,” upon which she expanded with the phrase, “levar pra casa,” and translated as “take home.” She defined these “things” as samba dancing, capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art, and forró, a northeastern dance genre that gained national popularity in the 1950s and which gained an even broader, global influence and aesthetic scope during the 1990s (Draper, 2010; McCann, 2004).

Ms. Oliveira’s eagerness to share what she understands as Brazilian culture is a stance that fits Canadian multiculturalism. It also echoes hegemonic Brazilian discourses that have long encouraged ethnic groups to assimilate into mainstream society instead of forming insular enclaves (Karam 2007). In the festival setting, Oliveira and her collaborators generally frame Brazilian cultural forms as legitimate elements of Canadian multiculturalism that non-Brazilians can ostensibly appreciate as well as learn. For example, although Brazilian music and capoeira are generally racialized and/or exoticized in Toronto (Mercier 2013; Pacheco 2004), their inclusion in this family friendly venue can potentially make them more acceptable.

As a participative event, BrazilFest can provide outsiders with new forms of cultural capital. Yet at no point during the festival did I see an acknowledgement that the stakes of performing Brazilianness are unequal. Non-Brazilians do not bear the burden of performing Brazilian culture in simultaneously authentic and profitable ways for them to be accepted in mainstream Canadian society. This is especially relevant to Black Brazilians, especially those who are working-class and from rural areas. Black Brazilians have long had to negotiate significant aesthetic, political, and economic demands in order to successfully gain income, status, and respect from commodifying their cultural practices (Collins 2015; Enriquez 2022b; Goldschmitt 2019; McCann 2004; Sharp 2014). BrazilFest maintains these conditions in a diasporic context. It gives Brazilian immigrants a chance to accumulate and display assemblages of their cultural capital, but it does not challenge the ethnoracial capitalist logics that make it possible and necessary to do so. Instead, building hegemonic forms of capital reasserts their value and upholds ethnoracial stratification (Rosa and Flores 2017; Shankar 2015; Urciuoli 2022).

Although BrazilFest includes various Brazilian cultural forms, the semiotic assemblages at the event homogenize Brazilian culture by failing to address the power dynamics that shape it. Performers, emcees, and informative texts insufficiently contextualized specific cultural practices and products. For example, the festival included northeastern elements like music and food from Bahia. It also featured music associated with the southeast, such as Rio de Janeiro style samba and bossa nova. There was, however, no mention of the socioeconomic disparities between the hegemonic southeast and the racialized and socioeconomically marginalized northeast. Insiders are familiar with how such divides are signaled. Yet the lack of contextualization at the festival enabled outsiders to experience Brazilian national culture as consolidated—rather than contested. At national and regional scales, for instance, scholarly, institutional, and vernacular debates about hegemonic forms of Brazilian culture have long been fraught by the simultaneous celebration of Blackness as an integral part of the nation and the structural subordination of Black people (Collins 2015; McCann 2004; Roth-Gordon 2017; Sovik 2009). The presentation of Brazilian culture at BrazilFest as unified yet diverse, however, is not exceptional since it fits the spectacular nature of most cultural festivals. Like other spectacles, BrazilFest reduces cultural practices to decontextualized commodities and conforms to—rather than challenges—the hegemonic logics that derive from and maintain ethnoracial capitalism. In other words, while BrazilFest seemingly targets the ethnicization of Brazilians, it is up against a complex of structural factors that uphold their racialization.

While BrazilFest exhibits Brazilian immigrants’ contributions to cultural outsiders, some insiders approach it more personally. Júlio and Ana were attending BrazilFest for the first time since recently moving to Toronto from Brazil. As a busy couple they were eager to take time to, as the Brazilian saying goes, “matar a saudade” (kill the longing [for home]). BrazilFest, however, did not fully meet their expectations. Although emcees and performers did not draw attention to who was or was not Brazilian, the couple actively demarcated the boundaries between performers, suggesting that as consumers, cultural insiders have expectations that can conflict with the goals of cultural producers. For Júlio and Ana, the prominent role of non-Brazilian performers was seemingly dissatisfying.

On two occasions I noticed that Ana and Júlio focused on whether performers were Brazilian. One was when a group of women dressed as Disney characters led a children’s singalong. Ana and Júlio wondered whether the leader was Brazilian. She spoke and sang in a non-standard accent, but since she only used English, they guessed she was Latina, but not Brazilian. They were right. I later learned she was Venezuelan. The couple focused on language again while watching a group that played axé music, a percussive Bahian genre, which was widely popular during the 1990s. When the lead singer got to the chorus to “Faraó,” a song popularized by the Bahian artist, Margareth Menezes, Júlio commented that she could not be Brazilian; she was mispronouncing the final syllable of ‘faraó’ (pharaoh), which consists of a phoneme that is absent in Spanish. As the singer continued, it became obvious that she was pronouncing the lyrics in Spanish.

Ana and Júlio seemed disappointed that neither the singalong leader nor the percussion group’s singer were Brazilian. I do not think they expected nor wanted these groups to be comprised exclusively of Brazilians. However, the prominence of non-Brazilians in these groups, seemingly dampened their goal to “kill” their longing for home. In addition to suggesting that cultural insiders have divergent expectations from cultural producers, this example suggests that since Brazilian culture is more than a commodity, festivals are perhaps not the best venue to suit emotional needs like homesickness. Music, food, and other cultural forms are not only commodities but they are also mediated by one’s habitus and are tethered to one’s personal history (Urciuoli 2009, 31). Even particularly “authentic” versions of specific songs or foods might therefore not satisfy insiders like Ana and Júlio. In contrast to BrazilFest, the TD Salsa on St. Clair Festival (henceforth, SOSC) is not structured around nostalgia and authenticity, per se. Instead, SOSC celebrates Latin American cultures within the framework of Canadian multiculturalism.

Brazilianness and latinidad at the Salsa on St. Clair Festival

Since 2005, SOSC, an annual street festival and parade, has presented Latin American people as part of Canadian multiculturalism. Like BrazilFest’s representations of Brazilians, SOSC depicts Latin American immigrants as people whose cultural practices and skills socioeconomically benefit Canadian society. Nevertheless, these celebratory, ethnicizing depictions fail to undermine the structural conditions that make this festival possible. Capitalism, neoliberal multiculturalism, and the racialization of Latin American people inherent to these processes are reinscribed in how the festival is funded, promoted, and enacted.

In June 2019 SOSC took place on St. Claire Avenue West near the park where BrazilFest would be held later that summer. This part of the avenue has many ethnic businesses and a higher concentration of Latin American residents relative to Toronto as a whole (City of Toronto Ward 9 Davenport, 2018, 23). SOSC builds on this area’s demographic profile to positively depict pan-Latin American identity. The curated photographs on SOSC’s website, for example, construct a wholesome version of multiculturalism by showing smiling crowds of people of all colors and ages dancing against the backdrop of storefronts on St. Clair West.⁵ The crowds in these photographs reflect the diversity of the more than 330,000 people who attend SOSC, most of whom reside in nearby neighborhoods or in the Greater Toronto Area (“Sponsors--TD Salsa in Toronto Festival” n.d.). By almost exclusively using English, however, SOSC’s website undermines this diversity and feeds into hegemonic ideologies that privilege English, and to a lesser degree, French, in Canada and in the global marketplace (da Silva and Heller, 2009).

The centrality of ‘salsa’ in SOSC’s title suggests the event reinforces a growing pan-Latin American identification among Latin American immigrants in Canada (Armony 2018). Salsa, the musical genre and dance works as an index and conduit of latinidad because it began as—and continues to be—a transnational Latin American genre (Flores 2016; Pacini-Hernandez 2010). The festival’s version of latinidad in 2019 did not exclusively feature salsa. It also showcased music and dance from countries like Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil.

During the 2000s in Toronto, events like SOSC emphasized Hispanophone Latin American culture and nations without including Brazilians (Veronis 2006). More recently, by incorporating Brazilian immigrants as part of latinidad, SOSC makes Brazilians more visible and works against hegemonic imaginaries of Latin America that exclude Brazil (Tosta 2004). Nevertheless, SOSC collapses Brazilianness into a minor piece within a broad semiotic assemblage of latinidad. I was not in Toronto during SOSC 2019 yet in my conversations with locals and in my analysis of the event’s official online presence, I found that Brazilianness at SOSC—especially when compared to BrazilFest—was mostly limited to a narrow set of musical groups. These included a troupe of Rio de Janeiro style samba dancers, a capoeira group, and a parading percussion group that combines Brazilian genres with elements from other Afro-diasporic styles. To my knowledge, none of the event’s official food vendors served Brazilian cuisine. And out of the forty-seven photographs in the gallery featured on the event’s website, only four included overtly Brazilian-themed images.

SOSC does not broadly represent Brazilian people and culture, but their inclusion in the festival brings them closer to multinational corporate sponsors and influential entrepreneurs in the city, thus boosting their reputation as economically productive citizens.⁶ Although the event receives some government funding, in 2019, SOSC’s major sponsor was Toronto Dominion Bank (TD Bank), one of Canada’s largest banks and an important contributor to Canadian colonial extractivist projects (Uechi 2017). Secondary corporate sponsors included companies like Grace, a Caribbean-based food brand with operations in North American and the United Kingdom. By funding SOSC and receiving publicity at this festival, which celebrates a minority group, these corporations engage in a kind of identity capitalism. They perform their supposed benevolence while strengthening their power and ability to capitalize on ethnoracialization (Leong 2021).

While SOSC has a higher public profile, it resembles BrazilFest in its focus on cultural consumption as a participatory process. Whereas Latin American events in Toronto during the 2000s encouraged people to appreciate the region’s cultures (Veronis 2006), SOSC ostensibly teaches people how to enact them too, specifically through dance. As the event’s website states, SOSC is “the only festival where people do more than just eat and watch entertainment—they take part in non-stop dancing in the streets!” (“About-TD Salsa in Toronto Festival” n.d.). Toronto’s then-Mayor, John Tory, was interviewed in a YouTube video embedded on SOSC’s website. In it, he comments that the festival’s participative aspect is important because it brings people together in an era when “people don’t see their neighbors as much as they used to” (TD Salsa on St. Clair Festival Celebrates Diversity and Brings People Together! 2019).

The live and virtual semiotic assemblages at SOSC show that the event is not about bringing Latin American people together for their own sake; instead, it also addresses outsiders to demonstrate that Latin American immigrants enrich the mainstream. This approach parallels BrazilFest, but on a larger, more commercialized scale that includes multiple nationalities. SOSC makes Brazilian immigrants more visible in Toronto’s public sphere but only to a narrow extent. It provides a venue for Brazilian musicians and dancers, but this is not enough to compensate for Brazilian immigrants’ general lack of political power. SOSC expands latinidad by incorporating Brazilian culture but at the cost of maintaining Brazilianness as a relatively exotic and primarily musical commodity (see also Mercier 2013).

Many of the organizers of and participants in festivals like SOSC and BrazilFest likely experience these events as sites to foster community and contest the ethnoracial stigmatization and exclusion that they face in Canada (Veronis, 2006, 2007; see also Lord 2020). Similarly, a more longitudinal and in-depth analysis of these festivals would likely uncover shared experiences among members of these communities and thus more details on how constructions of pan-Latin Americanness in Toronto are debated and contested (see, for example, Ramos-Zayas 2012; Rosa 2019).

Based on my analyses, however, the semiotic assemblages at SOSC and its mostly corporate sponsorship suggest that the event’s counterhegemonic potentials are largely undermined by a commercialized form of strategic essentialization that stems from and reinforces ethnoracial capitalism. Paradoxically, in producing a dense assemblage of signs of latinidad, SOSC flattens and reduces national identities into consumable—and learnable—kinds of cultural capital: Brazilian music, Mexican food, Colombian folk dancing. SOSC thus reproduces hegemonic discourses that transform Latin American nationalities into seemingly interchangeable, depoliticized, and ahistorical products (Dávila 2001, 2012). SOSC’s marketing and corporate sponsorship also uphold the otherness and implicit inferiority of Latin American culture and people relative to mainstream Whiteness.

Cultural commodification: continuity and change

BrazilFest and SOSC give a sense of how cultural commodification has changed since the early 2000s. It is now channeled through entrepreneurial policies, practices, and discourses that shape how Latin American immigrants are interpellated by the state and influences how they represent themselves to each other and the mainstream. Entrepreneurship is an increasingly important strategy by which ethnoracialized groups legitimize their inclusion in society and accrue various forms of capital. As the festivals suggest, part of this legitimization is predicated on making ethnoracialized cultural forms accessible and valuable to the public in ways that uphold Whiteness as hegemonic. Together, these processes contribute to the naturalization of ethnoracial capitalism.

BrazilFest and SOSC encompass different goals, perspectives, and cultural forms. The degree of overlap between how they semiotically represent and commodify ethnoracial difference, however, suggests that although ethnoracialized people occupy varying roles and positions in society, they nevertheless “orbit around Whiteness in shifting, yet colonially patterned ways” (Rosa 2019, 3). These patterns, which are scaffolded by ethnoracial capitalism, are especially relevant among immigrant populations who are structurally vulnerable to racialization (Maghbouleh 2017; Walia 2021). In order to track how ethnoracial capitalism reproduces these colonial patterns and other forms of inequality, we must therefore continue to analyze processes of cultural commodification.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This fieldwork on which this article was based was funded by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education. Special thanks to Dr. Claire Wendland for providing feedback on a draft of this article. Thanks also to Dr. Jonathan Rosa for helping me to think through this topic and other adjacent subjects. Portions of this article were presented at the 2019 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies Speaker Series, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for the Humanities.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for the research discussed in this article was provided by a 2018 Fall Competition Award from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education (OVCRGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

ORCID iD

Falina Enriquez

Notes

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