The National Identity for the Middle Class: Ways to Build a Nation

The rising middle class of the beginning of the Brazilian Republic (1889) began to assert its position with regard to the national identity, particularly using wide-market periodicals. Its ideas of national identity can be seen in articles and other texts produced by educators, medical professionals and journalists who echo the racial ideas generated by the cultural elite of the period. Positivism, social Darwinism and liberalism joined to form the ideology of the middle class. The small number of educational institutions serving the cultural needs of the middle class meant a concentration of ideological thought, helping channel ideas from the cultural and economic elite to the emerging middle class, defining a broad consensus of intellectual thought throughout the Republic (1899-1930).