The term Caboclo is the Brazilian equivalent to the Mexican racial concept of a Mestizo, or the Canadian racial designation of a Métis; a person of mixed Native American and European ancestry.
In the Brazilian national racial narrative the two main races focused on are whites and blacks, with those of Indigenous descent and culture often overshadowed.
However, the Caboclo’s were Brazil’s first racially-mixed group, starting from the 18th century when the Portuguese king, Joseph I of Portugal, encouraged intermixing between Portuguese colonizers and Native Brazilian women.
Much of the Caboclo population was centered in the Northeast of the country, until Brazil’s first and second rubber boom, when white and Caboclo people from that region were compulsorily drafted to harvest rubber in the Amazon. These people were not permitted to leave the Amazon and were forced to settle there permanently.
This resulted in more miscegenation between people of European and Native descent, distinguishing it from the North-Eastern region where people of African and mixed black descent were far more common. For this reason, most of the Caboclo’s of today are located in the northern states of Brazil such as Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, and Tocantins.
As mentioned above, people of Amerindian and mixed Amerindian descent are often overshadowed in Brazilian society. This has gone as far as to cause erasure of the Caboclo’s by the Brazilian government. On the Brazilian census the official category for people of mixed-race ancestry is “pardo” (brown), and since most mixed-race people in Brazil are of European and African descent, certain government agencies group all pardos as Afro-Brazilians.
Thus many Caboclo’s who have no African ancestry at all are presented as Afro-Brazilians, and issues concerning them alone as a racial minority group are ignored by the state in favor of the Afro-descended minority groups.
(Source: tumblr.com)
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