The Paradoxes of Ethnoracial Space in São Paulo

In the shadows of a Shinto torii (gateway) in São Paulo’s “Japanese” neighborhood rests the city’s oldest “African” slave cemetery. Such ethnoracial spaces do not accrue naturally in the course of palimpsestic urban change; nor do they simply reflect immigrant settlement patterns in former slave societies. Instead, I argue, they are planned spaces whose construction serves, paradoxically, to reproduce racialized inequities and bolster discourses of multicultural harmony. The paradoxes of ethnoracial space in São Paulo help to explain how popular ideologies of multiculturalism endure despite superlative levels of racialized inequality and anti-Black violence in urban contexts in Brazil and beyond. Through archival research, oral histories, and digital mapping, this project charts the array of planners who produced and destroyed ethnoracial space in mid-twentieth-century São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous, ethnoracially-diverse, and unequal city.