Traditionally Brazilian mixed bloods were called mamelucos , mulattoes and cafuzos. The word mameluco, replaced by caboclo in the 20th century, described a person of (American) Indian and European descent. Mulatto is a black-white mixture. The rare people of Black and Indian ancestry were known as cafuzos. A denomination taking into account the product of another ethnic mixture was lacking.

Professor Raimundo Nina Rodrigues used the above-mentioned designations in his medical paper "Os mestiços brasileiros" (The Brazilian Mixed Bloods), published in 1890, and gathered "under the inconvenient designation of pardos", the "complex mixed bloods associating the characters of the three races ". In spite of these ethnic denominations, the first census of the Republic, carried out in 1890, used as a criterion for classification only the "expressions" Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos considered to be popular: branco (white), negro, caboclo ("as a synonym for Indian", according to the anthropologist) and mulatto.

Pardo was not incorporated in the traditional Brazilian ethnic denominations. The Census of 1920 did not check the ethnic origins of the population and that of 1940 took only the "qualities" --i.e., the colors-- black, white, and yellow into account. However, the instructions of this Census recommended: "In case this qualification will not be possible, make a horizontal line in the space reserved to the answer". According to Arthur Ramos, the results collected were the categories as follows: white, black, yellow and pardo. The word pardo resumed its old meaning in the Census of 1940 -- brown.

In 1945, the Ministry of War adopted a classification similar to that of the 1940 Census. The color "yellow" did not figure in it, but the pardo category was split into two: pardo-claro (light brown), reserved for the "descendants of the Negro or mixed race" and pardo-escuro (dark brown) for mestiços [1] "with a predominance of the Negro race". This classification was based on phenotype (appearance): pardo-claro was used when the physical features of the individual were "strikingly marked" -- as opposed to the moreno [2] category, for those having a "light complexion and of white ancestry", according to Arthur Ramos. By the way, Brazilian mestiços identify themselves in the main as morenos.

Arthur Ramos made a reference in Le métissage au Brésil (Race Mixture in Brazil), published in 1952, to the pardo category, as defined by Nina Rodrigues, but he remarked: "By virtue of the difficulties in the determination of this type and still by the fact that the statistics do not draw an essential distinction between the mulatto and the pardo, it would be preferable to include this category in the class of the mulattoes." This decision marks the end of pardo as an ethnic term in Brazilian social sciences. Actually, Professor Edgar Roquette-Pinto had already used between 1928 and 1933 the classification of which Arthur Ramos made use in his anthropological investigations, except for the cafuzo category (used by Ramos) in that cafuzos were "numerically insignificant". However, the term pardo is found in the UNESCO report Race and Class in Rural Brazil (1952), edited by American anthropologist Charles Wagley. The authors of this report considered pardo to be a "convenient Brazilian term" once it was "used for people of all racial mixtures".

Unlike social scientists, the Brazilian Census bureaux did not take the traditional mixed-race denominations into account in the 20th century. Like the Census of 1940, the IBGE (Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics) adopted the pardo (brown) category after the 1976 National Household Sample Survey (PNAD). As Nina Rodrigues remarked in the late 19th century, the "term [pardo] has against itself the very accentuated tendency to have among us a generic meaning equivalent to that of mestiço".

As pardo is still today officially synonymous with brown or mixed race, people of mixed black, white and Indian descent will be called mestiços multiétnicos -- or multi-ethnic mestizos [3] in English -- so that a mestiço identity taking account the three major cultural heritages of Brazil can be developed. As Arthur Ramos pointed out, "this mixed blood who, by virtue of the mixture equivalent to the three races, would be the Brazilian product par excellence, is much more numerous than one really assumes".

There are mestiços multiétnicos everywhere -- even in the Amazon and the north-eastern sertão (hinterland), where the influence of the African heritage is not very important. Some references are made to them in the papers of some authors of the UNESCO report Race and Class in Rural Brazil. In the paper "Race Relations in the Arid Sertão", Ben Zimmerman notes that "mulattoes" in the sertão "can seldom be identified as the result of a simple cross between a Negro and a white. Often they have a Mongoloid feature or two", i.e., Indian traits. Charles Wagley, on the other hand, remarks in his paper "Race Relations in an Amazon Community" that "there are numerous individuals who list ancestors of all three racial stocks in their family tree and other who combine physical traits thought of as Caucasoid, Negro and Amerind." A place must be reserved for the multi-ethnic mestizo in the mestiço category.




Notes

[1] "Dark" or "brown".
[2] "Mixed blood", "(racially) mixed" or "multiracial".
[3] Translation based on the passage "Lara integrated the three spiritual currents that constitute the Venezuelan mestizo -- the Spaniard, the Indian, and the Negro" of the book Venezuela by Karl Weidmann.