
Free Comparis
on C
ontrast
EssaysIn terms of racial compositi
on, immigrati
on, internal migrati
on, and regi
onal c
oncentrati
on by race, the four countries vary substantially. Brazil and the United States have a number of demographic characteristics and trends in comm
on: both countries increased their populati
on greatly by large-scale immigrati
on from overseas; until the mid-nineteenth century immigrati
on was mostly involuntary and from Africa; thereafter it became voluntary and was mostly of European and sec
ondarily of Asian origin. The pattern of regi
onal c
oncentrati
on and internal migrati
on by race was also similar in Brazil and the United States. In both countries the Negro populati
on was heavily c
oncentrated in a major regi
on (the Northeast in Brazil, the Southeast in the United States), and starting in the late nineteenth century there was a progressive dispersi
on of the Negro populati
on to other regi
ons. When we examine racial distributi
on macroscopically, we note an increasing spacial homogenizati
on by race, although in the United States and to some extent in Brazil this regi
onal dispersi
on was accompanied by local c
oncentrati
on by race in urban working-class slums. Both Brazil and the United States are predominantly "white" according to the respective social definiti
ons of that term, even though this was not true for Brazil prior to the twentieth century.