The Italian Colony of São Paulo: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Brazil, Giulia Riccò, 2025, Fordham University Press
When a Brazilian court recently ordered Jair Bolsonaro to pay R$1m in “moral damages” for racist comments while in office, it opened a can of historical worms.
The ruling, coming soon after the former president was sentenced to 27 years in jail for an attempted coup to reverse the results of the 2022 elections that he lost, begs an uncomfortable question.
There is no doubt, of course, that Bolsonaro is a racist and that the comments in 2021 that the federal court of Rio Grande do Sul were judging him for were profoundly offensive.
Bolsonaro had said that the hair of a Black supporter with an afro was a “breeding ground for cockroaches”, and did so while still president, which deepened the gravity of the offence.
There is also no doubt that this noxious rightwing populist, who in his heyday styled himself on Donald Trump while forming a close alliance with that American Caesar, has a long record of racist behaviour and rhetoric.
But the real question that must be asked is about where this racism originates and why the right has resurrected it in a country where many scholars bought into the singular myth that Brazil was a “racial democracy” that had escaped US-style discrimination.
The latter perspective, originating with Gilberto Freyre’s work in 1933 Casa-Grande & Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves) was above all an ideological statement of national identity and never a statement of fact.
It was racial wishful thinking that played into a then contemporaneous spotlight on race across Latin America, when eugenics was being challenged by notions of a “cosmic” mix that could distinguish local national identities from Europe.
The European contrast is of paramount importance here, because there is no doubt that immigration to Brazil from the 1880s onwards was a response to negative perceptions of the Black population among white elites following the end of slavery.
And about 75 per cent of those European immigrants were Latins, particularly from Italy, Portugal and Spain. Between 1880 and 1900 a million Italians arrived, so many that according to Italy’s government, today there are 31 million Brazilians of Italian descent.
Scratch beneath the surface of the recent Bolsonaro case and you will find, therefore, that modern racism in Brazil—a country with the largest number of people of African descent outside of Nigeria—owes much to this Italian diaspora.
This is stated baldly by Giulia Riccò in her book The Italian Colony of São Paulo, an admirable study of immigrant life in a city that has not only represented Brazilian modernity ever since but was also … the home of Bolsonaro.
Riccò writes: “In the late nineteenth century, Brazilian elites implemented an aggressive plan to dilute their country’s Black population. They did so by subsidising the migration of white people from Europe. As a direct result of this whitening project, São Paulo—today the most populous city in the Americas—became home to the largest concentration of people of Italian descent outside of Italy.”
As a consequence, the emergence of what the author calls a “New World Italian discourse” enabled Italians to become the unlikely standard bearers of white racial identity in modern-day Brazil.
Riccò has penned a brilliant and timely study not only of the experiences of Italians in Brazil, but of how Brazilian racial theorists, writers and journalists portrayed them as “vectors of whiteness” that elevated them above other immigrant groups and, of course, Black Brazilians.
As such, the book represents a direct challenge to conventional narratives about the oppression of Italians in the Americas, the association of Italians with cultural and economic backwardness in Europe—and the myth of Brazilian racial democracy.
If we cast our minds back to Bolsonaro, it then becomes clear that the ideas many Italians brought with them, and the soup of racial politics into which they were immersed, continue to seethe.
By the turn of the twentieth century, debates over racial superiority and biological racism in Europe were moving from the realm of scholarship and history to the popular political arena, and in Italy this was compounded by a new nationalist impetus to forge a shared identity.
Given these factors, it was no surprise that racist thought would become a pillar of Mussolini’s fascism in the 1930s as Il Duce explicitly sought to create a racial persona for Italians.
Bolsonaro has expressed great pride in his Italian descent—on his father’s side, he is the great-grandson of Italians from Veneto and Calabria, and his maternal grandparents were born in Lucca, Tuscany, emigrating to Brazil in the 1890s.
Indeed, in November 2021, halfway through his presidency, Bolsonaro made a high-profile visit to Anguillara Veneta, a town of 4,200 people in the Veneto region where his great-grandfather was born.
During the electoral campaign in 2022, Bolsonaro proudly cited the similarity of his campaign slogan to that used by Giorgia Meloni’s victorious post-fascist party in Italy, “God, homeland and family”.
Not long after his electoral defeat and self-exile in the US in late 2022, as accusations against him over the storming of Brasilia mounted, rumours abounded in the press that the defeated president would seek Italian citizenship, forcing a denial by Rome.
His family has inherited his Italian inclinations: in December 2024, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a federal deputy, wrote to Meloni, by now prime minister, during a debate in the country on limiting citizenship rules calling on her to preserve the rights of Italian-Brazilians.
That debate centred on proposals being processed in the Italian parliament considering a limit on citizenship rights by descent granted by virtue of jure sanguinis (right of blood).
In his letter, Eduardo Bolsonaro said such a measure would be “a profound blow to all those who, by right of blood, wish to remain Italian citizens”.
In May this year, an Italian MP Angelo Bonelli declared in the country’s chamber of deputies that Eduardo and another son of Bolsonaro, Carlos, had both secured Italian passports.
Despite Jair Bolsonaro’s affinities with Meloni, political science scholars have compared him most closely with Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, head of the rightwing Lega party.
One of the most dramatic ironies linked to the ascent of rightwing populism in Italy embodied by characters such as Salvini has been the triggering factor of immigration into the country.
Indeed, as interior minister from 2018–19 Salvini was the real architect of Italy’s current hardline anti-immigration policies and rhetoric.
In that respect, what Bolsonaro demonstrates is how italianità (Italianness) is itself a split personality—celebrating emigration while baulking at immigration.
It is a cleavage, of course, defined solely by the outdated and discredited concept of blood as a vector of nationality, something that is clearly still cherished by the Bolsonaros and, undoubtedly, many other Italo-Brazilians.
It is this that helps to explain both the former president’s racism—against the grain of Brazil’s evolution into a multiracial democracy, where whites make up less than half the population—and also Italy’s prominent role in the emergence of the far-right on both sides of the Atlantic,
Riccò alludes to this in The Italian Colony of São Paulo, stating: “One indication of the unique, enduring affinity between Italian citizens in Brazil and Italy lies in the fact that both voted, in large numbers, to elect far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has promised to restore the economic, cultural, and racial primacy of Italy by imposing harsh restrictions on immigration.
“Likewise, Brazil’s ultraconservative former president Jair Bolsonaro—who frequently boasts of his Italian heritage—has won broad support among Italo-Brazilians.
“Hence, Italians on both sides of the Atlantic have played crucial, at times overlapping roles in the resurgence of the global far right.”
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Categories: Brazil, South America