In her insightful and well-documented book, Barbara Weinstein discusses how São Paulo's regional identity has developed and manifested in the twentieth century, particularly between the occurring of two historical events. The first event is the failed Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, in which the state of São Paulo stood against the presidential takeover of Getúlio Vargas in 1930. The second event, in 1954, is the 400-year anniversary of the foundation of the city of São Paulo, a public occasion in which paulista pride was displayed quite powerfully. Weinstein uses these two events as markers of an identity process that São Paulo has crafted around the image of its own modernity and progress, something that, from the perspective of paulista official discourse, had not been equally attained in the rest of Brazil. She illustrates how the construction of paulista identity as ‘modern’ was particularly possible due to its imagined opposition to less-developed northern and north-eastern Brazilian ‘others’. These people were racialised as less economically dynamic, traditional, and, most significantly, as darker-skinned (or more typically Afro-descendant) than paulistas. Paulista regional pride, in fact, has been inextricably entangled with notions of whiteness and industriousness, largely drawing from the experience of Portuguese pioneers (bandeirantes) and Italian immigrants.

Weinstein's choice of events is very effective for two reasons. The first reason is that the ‘white’ and ‘modern’ regional pride displayed in the celebrations of 1954 in São Paulo widely recalled the memory of the Constitutional Revolution of 1932, when the pro-Vargas north-east represented a political enemy. Consequently, there is some general continuity of identity between the two moments, even though the mainstream discourses circulating in 1954 tended to be relatively more inclusive than those of 1932, showing a better recognition of São Paulo's diversity and cosmopolitanism. The second reason is that the period between 1932 and 1954 approximately coincides with the Vargas era, a crucial time for the consolidation of racial mixture as the most powerful of Brazil's national symbols. The epoch Weinstein considers, in this sense, helps explore how the paulista ‘white’ identity could develop in relational terms with Brazil's national, mixed-race identity and its regional/racialised components.

In building her reasoning, Weinstein not only observes how the creation of a paulista identity discourse has relied on processes of essentialisation, but she also carefully highlights its inherent ambiguities. First, Weinstein criticises this identity construction as being imbued with mistaken and reductionist representations (including colour-related ones) of regional/national others, and reminds us that Afro-descendants were far from absent from the political and economic life of São Paulo. Second, she shows that paulista identity between 1932 and 1954 also made convenient use of ‘racial democracy’ and mixture in order to portray São Paulo as inclusive, tolerant and truly progressive. Weinstein finally purports that the construction of paulista identity should not be essentialised as fully oppositional to a national Brazilian ‘other’. Instead, she demonstrates that this identity was built through an ambiguous game of inclusion and exclusion, identification and differentiation, deployed both internally and externally to the paulista regional setting. These margins of ambiguity, however, do not refute the evidence that the paulista identity championed between 1932 and 1954 was more typically structured on ideals of whiteness and European legacy. It is not coincidental that the participation of Afro-paulistas in the construction of official regional identity was allowed only within certain boundaries, as it occupied a subaltern place and functioned to serve a fundamentally white-centred identity.

Weinstein's book relies on relevant and diversified sources, ranging from literature to the media and iconography. Its great merit lies in its effort to explain the construction of São Paulo's regional identity in all its complexity, and in relation to multiple geographical scales of identification (i.e. local, regional and national). In this sense, The Color of Modernity represents a great contribution to studies of identity and race in Brazil and Latin America as a whole. Another merit of the book is showing courageously how trends of identity continuity can be historically identified without embracing a defence of essentialism and permanence. Nonetheless, I would add that the ambiguities through which a white racialised identity has deployed its supremacy in São Paulo can be observed on a larger scale in Brazil, although the degree and nature of the racialised references used in public discourse may differ from region to region. This observation is particularly relevant in recent decades, during which the implementation of policies in favour of Afro-Brazilians has not automatically dismantled historical constructions of white superiority (not even in ‘African’ Bahia). Perhaps Weinstein could have engaged with these ideas in her introduction and conclusion, setting out the vivid links between her historical analysis and contemporary discourses around national identity in Brazil.

If I had to select any weaknesses in this book, I would say that it felt too long, and that a shorter monograph would be more enjoyable for the reader. Despite the elegance of the reasoning and its overall clarity, I am not sure that Weinstein really needed all 343 densely-written pages to make her point convincing, and her argument risks sounding repetitive at times. In fact, some sections of the book, particularly those engaging less directly with ‘race’, could be nicely used for journal articles so to make the text more concise. On a different note, deeper reflections on how the native-Indian ‘other’ was (mis)placed in the construction of a paulista identity would make this book an even more outstanding piece of research, considering Weinstein's efforts to unravel the entanglements between race and notions of modernity in Brazil. Weinstein accounts for this area more or less explicitly when she discusses the memory of Portuguese pioneers (bandeirantes) and the genealogy of a white regional tradition in São Paulo. Such references, however, could enjoy better consideration and continuity in the text. Otherwise, an inherent risk is to leave native-Indian invisibility somewhat unchallenged.