There is nothing new under the sun: with each majority election, votes from the Northeast region are pointed out as being motivated by welfarism, if not by the simple and gross denomination of stupidity or, recently, illiteracy. The cover of Veja magazine in 2006 stated that a black woman from the Northeast would decide the election. What has caught my attention is the denomination of xenophobia to the aversion to the northeast, recurrent in articles and reports circulating on the networks today.
Racism is a founding principle of the Brazilian nation project. The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century were under the influence of eugenic and naturalist theories of racial improvement, where one can read the search for the “whitening” of the Brazilian mixed-race population, and the adoption of urban models and new economic parameters. It is in the search for these new urban and economic models that the place of economic and social backwardness in the Brazilian northeast takes root.
In this article, I want to point out where notions that divide the country into archaic/modern divisions are anchored, the first being represented by the Northeast region and the second focused on the Southeast and South regions. Without ignoring the reasons that consecrate this Brazilian historical bias, the focus is on questioning the validity of some representations that involve national identity and alterity in media texts.
In the critique of Eurocentrism, the authors Ella Shohat and Robert Stam demonstrate, through the analysis of the images of Hollywood cinema, that we live inserted in a logic that enshrines the portrait of the white European as the normative aesthetic and as the cradle of the values considered, at the heart of the imaginary. Eurocentric West, symbols of civilizational improvement, such as rationality, logic and formal literate culture. Following this thought, the societies in the past colonized continue to be hegemonically represented from the place of alterity, being possible to identify in these images traces of racism, social hierarchies and cultural prejudices.
In a research published in 2008, I analyzed the media productions of that moment from the critical perspective elaborated by the authors mentioned above to analyze the production of Brazilian cinema located on the axis between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. I highlighted the permanence of a hegemonic position that transfers the vices of the gaze built along a Eurocentric hierarchy on the margins and peripheries of Brazil.
This is how we got used to quick associations: the Northeast is a single compact region, without sociocultural distinctions between its member states, without a trace of urbanity, detached from the habits of modernity, inhabited by caricatured beings, sometimes represented under the seal of the cangaceiro or of the hungry, easy victim of politicians and vote-buying. These generalizations are not exclusive to the Northeast region, if we consider including the North region, for example.
Historical recoveries and communicational work
The Brazilian Northeast was the region that represented the economic development in the first moments of the colonization of Brazil. This production was based on certain premises such as the existence of large properties centered on the hands of settlers who were willing to come to the new land, monoculture, enslaved work, among others. At that time, European emigration to the sugar mills was unattractive, unlike what began to occur with the rise of mining and, later, with the coffee economy.
The centralization of political decisions in the Southeast of the country, followed by the first steps of national industrialization, confirms a situation of regional inequality. The disqualification of a surplus of labor originating mainly from the slave contingent, imbued with racist prejudices born in naturalist thinking and based on official discourses, suggested the racial inferiority not only of blacks, but also of mestizos.
It was also at this moment that the ideas of progress and development were consolidated in Brazil, especially Euclides da Cunha and Os Sertões (1902). The work is pointed out by Albuquerque Jr. a milestone, because with it begins the search for our origins in the sense of understanding what would constitute the national and apprehension of a practically unexplored territory and a little known people, the sertão and the sertanejos. According to Albuquerque Jr., author of “A Invenção do Nordeste” and other arts, “in Euclides appears formulated the pair of opposites that will permeate the discourses about our nationality: the paulista versus the sertanejo”.
At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, under the influence of eugenic and naturalist theories of racial improvement, one can read the search for the “whitening” of the Brazilian mixed-race population, through the adoption of urban models and new economic parameters. With the beginning of the Estado Novo, led by President Getúlio Vargas, one can see the rise of the discourse of conquest and pioneering, when it summons the nation to march towards the hinterland, so that we can conquer our unity, both territorial and territorial. as racial.
Thus, between the 1920s and 1940s, reports of pioneering trips to the so-called “corners” grew. These reports began to be disseminated in newspapers such as O Estado de S. Paulo, for example, and, in this way, the construction of a “place of speech” for the Northeast began, taken as national alterity, as the picturesque and the different. In addition, the issue of migration, resulting from regional impoverishment, gains momentum, and the northeastern migrant, poor and mestizo for the most part, represents a nuisance that is notably opposed to the European immigrant.
This is the context in which the debates around national identity are implemented, in a clear displacement and substitution of models, in search of what, according to Marilena Chaui, would make us full or developed: “the identity of Brazil, built from the perspective of backwardness or of underdevelopment, is given by what it lacks, by the deprivation of those characteristics that would make it full and complete, that is, developed”.
Delay, progress and imagination: is the northeast a foreigner?
However, the electoral map of the Northeast region currently seems to be more the result of the implementation of emancipatory public policies than of the permanence of welfarism. Bolsa Familia, cistern program and investment in education, at all three levels, have transformed the Northeastern context in recent decades and made this population much more attentive, since they have reality and history as parameters for comparison.
Therefore, the denomination of xenophobia to prejudice against the Northeast and its inhabitants seems inappropriate to me. First, for its etymology. Xeno refers to the foreigner. Northeasterners, if we accept the neologism, is a discursive and imaginary national creation anchored in racial hierarchies and in the permanence of the dichotomy between backwardness and progress. Second, by associating the term xenophobia with a native population group, we are inventing new terms and deflating a fundamental struggle. Locating prejudice against Northeasterners as a racist expression is enough to raise awareness of what has always affected us: racism and its derivations.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
