The Seduction of Brazil

Antonio Pedro Tota’s book is rich and challenging. It is not, however, altogether convincing. He seeks to show how the United States tried to Americanize Brazil in the early 1940s. It may seem odd to complain that a Brazilian scholar fails to provide enough on the South American side of the equation, but as I read the book, I certainly wanted to know more about ordinary Brazilians’ responses to this effort or even the larger Brazil-ian political and economic contest during World War II. The Brazilian reception of Americanization under an ideologically ambiguous regime which chose to ally itself with the United States was complicated. Tota wisely notes that the primary competing model of modernity for many influential Brazilians at the time was a German one.That the United States wanted to expand its markets in Latin America is undeniable. It had an added incentive to do so in a time when the “American way of life” was in peril because of the prolonged Great Depression. That the United States itself had long been a major Brazilian market, however, goes largely unexamined. Meanwhile, as Tota makes clear, as war began in Europe, Getúlio Vargas was still playing hard to get. I am puzzled by Tota’s neglect of the most important development in US relations with Brazil during this time period: US funding for the creation of a state-owned steel plant at Volta Redonda. During the war, as it turned out, US strategic interests trumped economic interests.The book is at its best when it is more grounded, particularly in the sections on Nelson Rockefeller and his role as the coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, the public relations wing of the Good Neighbor Policy during World War II. Rockefeller had a genuine fondness for Latin America as well as a larger regional vision that frequently has been lacking in US policy makers. Unfortunately, Tota exaggerates Rockefeller’s stature within Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign policy team. And despite the star power of many Hollywood legends associated with this effort through the newsreels that the office produced and through personal appearances in the region, one has to wonder how effective US “soft power” was. Not surprisingly, Rockefeller’s power declined at the same time that Latin America as a whole was beginning to lose its importance, as the war progressed and US concerns became truly global ones. Perhaps, by this point, one might suggest that Brazil had been seduced and abandoned. These analogies, however, can only take us so far; if one is to criticize the United States for wooing Brazil, one has no cause for regret when it turns its attention elsewhere.The book is more suggestive than conclusive, beginning with an evocation (rather than an explanation) of how the “thumbs-up” gesture introduced by North American pilots in Natal became as Brazilian as, say, bossa nova. Teachers of undergraduate classes on the history of Brazil or US– Latin American relations may find the book worth assigning. Certainly many North American readers will be surprised to know that the United States ever seduced Brazil. Having first been introduced to this idea in my earliest trips to the country back in the 1980s, I can imagine using the book to help my students understand a particular kind of Brazilian (and Latin American) perspective. But for a definitive word on what clearly was a complex (and only partially intentional) phenomenon, we will need more and deeper archival research and a more nuanced perspective. The Americanization of Brazil certainly never was complete, and future historians will have to take into account the fact that US influence and Brazilian nationalism, both economic and cultural, developed simultaneously

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