Eli5 how did Brazil become so ethnically diverse?
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I’ve heard that something that influenced its diversity was the fact that an island of Brazil was used as a penal colony / exile colony – this is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general population by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory. So Portugal sent their prisoners including slaves to Brazil during the 19th century and this ethically diverse group ended up staying there.
Colonization by the Portuguese starting in the 1500s, the importation of African slave labor not long thereafter, and a whole lot of immigration from Europe and Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I’m always curious why Brazil didn’t become a power house like the US did? Both had massive populations (relatively for the areas and time), diverse geographies and peoples, and lots of natural resources. Was the jungle really too much to overcome?
Brazil’s Indigenous population was devastated by European diseases, declining from a pre-Columbian high of 2 to 3 million to some 300,000 as of 1997. Meanwhile, when Brazil was a colony of Portugal hundreds of thousands of Portuguese went to live in Brazil. After independence millions more immigrants entered Brazil, mostly from Portugal and Italy, but also from Spain, Germany, Poland and other countries.
In addition, millions of sub-Saharan Africans were enslaved and transported to Brazil. As noted in Wikipedia:
> Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish the enslavement of human beings. By the time slavery was abolished, on May 13, 1888, an estimated 5.8 million enslaved people had been transported from Africa to Brazil. This was 40% of the total number of enslaved people trafficked from Africa to the Americas, according to one estimate.
In comparison, less than 400,000 enslaved people were transported to the United States.
As a result, there are more Brazilians with pure or mixed sub-Saharan ancestry than there are with only European heritage. Whites are a slight minority in the country, slightly under 50%. Indigenous peoples are a very small minority, even smaller than the number of people with Asian heritage.
This applies to the whole of latin america to various degrees and continuous to this day. For example in my hometown (Margarita, an island from Venezuela), it’s common to find locals who are white with green eyes and this is in part due to the waves of tourist who’ve gone there and left a little souvenir in the form of an illegitimate child (myself included haha).
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