What is the most vibrant force of contemporary Brazilian culture? No doubt a common response would be: ethnic and cultural mixture. What this response may fail to consider, however, is that national identity has changed over time and has not always had the same formation. Brazilianness, or the vivacious sentiment of being a Brazilian, has evolved throughout the twentieth century and into the contemporary world. It is precisely the phenomenon of transformation of mestiçagem (‘mixture’) into the principal reference for Brazilian identity – an invention soon propelled to a global scale – which Marshall C. Eakin tackles in his new book.

From the late nineteenth century to the present moment, although with most attention given to the in-between twentieth century, the author discusses the formation of what came to be widely considered the national culture as a dimension of the integration of the mestizo or hybrid population. Despite being the majority, this population was not considered of value to the nation and the nation's shared myths, symbols and rituals until the concurrent rise of Gilberto Freyre's Casa-grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933) and Getúlio Vargas’ Estado Novo (New State) in the 1930s. Over most of the nineteenth century, as the author argues, the significant African heritage in Brazilian society was seen more as a problem of backwardness than a source of cultural richness. Ethnic and cultural mixture, moreover, had been rejected as a pathway to the modern nation-state, the construction of which depended on definitive identification between the people and the nation, and unsuccessful attempts at which derived largely from the prevailing evolutionist and racist ideas that oriented nineteenth-century nation-builders.

Investigating the transformation of mestiçagem into the dominant narrative of Brazilian identity, Eakin assumes that ‘race and national identity may be culturally constructed and constantly shifting, but they have very real and meaningful resonance for tens of millions of Brazilians’ (p. 266). By doing so, the author innovates in historiography not through the array of themes investigated, which are already well established by traditional scholarship, but through his approach that focuses on bringing together the nationalistic ideal of mestiçagem and technological and media studies. Becoming Brazilians offers a broad landscape encompassing intellectual and cultural aspects of the process of nation-building, with a sharp-eyed analysis as to how Freyre's thought became the dominant way by which Brazilians perform their Brazilianness in and outside the country. The turning point in the widespread diffusion of mestiçagem has been the increasing usage of the sociologist's thought in government and mass media interventions in literature, music, radio and television. From the 1930s to the 1980s, much more than in the past, identification with national culture was shaped and reshaped. This identity was stimulated by the many television and radio broadcasters that transmitted mestiçagem and African heritage as an ideal of what it meant to be authentically Brazilian.

Once Freyre's thought provided the dominant narrative for Brazilian identity, centred on the origin myth of mestiçagem (intense desire and sexual interaction would permit an enduring and creative interplay between different races and cultures, resulting in a balanced, racism-free society, open to mobility), this intellectual framework was seized upon by mass media entrepreneurs, who sought to use it to generate a growing audience to consume their traditional products (from novelas to soccer matches), while the state advanced the ethical imperative of strengthening cohesiveness and adherence to the imagined community. A consensus between state and mass media was forged in order to promote Brazilian culture and its daily hybrid expressions: concocted food, blended music styles, syncretic religions, mixed-up, flexible symbols and rituals … Starting from the Estado Novo, this discourse of diversity and tolerance reached a new level.

One might argue that Eakin should have paid closer attention to regional diversity in his analysis, instead of focusing on the Rio–São Paulo axis and northeastern culture. An even better account of the theme of contemporary national identity would be possible through pointing out to a greater extent – as fundamental parts of the national identity – the regional elements of Brazilian culture (popular music besides samba; cuisine besides feijoada; literature besides Jorge Amado, and so on, from the western backlands to the coastal east, from northern Amazonia to the southern pampas) that have also been broadcast by mainstream media companies and governmental agencies from the 1980s to the present, in order to successfully accomplish the nationalist ideal of mestiçagem.

There is no doubt that mestiçagem, according to Freyre's thought, includes recognising the equilibrium of regions for the whole body of Brazilian culture. Symbolically, accompanying Freyre's ideas, it is right to affirm that regions come first, and the nation comes later, because the former are the reality of the latter. If the sociologist valued the northeast in his oeuvre – and he did – this was in order to emphasise that the region remains the historical origin of modern Brazilian society and culture, and that its customs are still influential for the population of all, or almost all, other regions. In short, regionalism is not only about ethnic and cultural mixture, but regional mixture as well. In other words, regionalism acknowledges and nourishes ethnic and cultural mixture across regions. If not, how can one interpret the entrance of folk and country music into Brazilian radio and TV charts, broadcast nationally since the 1980s? And what of the effervescent appropriation of this music by mass media companies?

But the author has deep expertise in Brazilian studies and seeks to amplify, in the book's epilogue, his analysis of the linkages between race, regions and national identity across the debate over the imagined community throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to the introduction and the six chapters that make up the book, chronologically organised, the epilogue grapples with the difficult challenge of discussing the status of Freyre's ideas today and in the future. Historians, social scientists and intellectuals, in general, cannot ignore Eakin's words on the future of mestiçagem. They are relevant to the assessment of contemporary policies conducted to respond to racial inequality. For example, is the binary white/non-white affirmative action system suitable in such a heterogenic society as Brazil? Readers will find a contribution to this issue in the book's epilogue.

This reviewer agrees that Becoming Brazilian is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as for non-academic debates. The book has the virtue of providing a compelling synthesis of the history of Brazilian culture with clear and accessible language.