The land

Low rural incomes, limited landownership, and variable climatic conditions have continued to drive migration in Brazil. In addition, large-scale commercial agriculture in the South and Southeast has limited the number of jobs available to unskilled rural laborers, causing whole families of poor sertanejos (people from the sertão) to flee to frontier areas or cities. The North and Central-West regions have the highest net influx of population, especially in the Federal District and Rondônia. Parts of the Southeast and South have also received large numbers of migrants, particularly São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro states, which have also benefited from foreign immigration. Some rural families from the southeastern state of Minas Gerais and the southernmost states of Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná have moved to an agricultural frontier arching from Rondônia and northern Mato Grosso to western Bahia. Many other migrants to the frontier have come from the Northeast, particularly from the state of Piauí, in the heart of the drought region. Families in Maranhão have been leaving its eastern half, which is also in the drought quadrilateral, and moving into its western half, which is a zone of rainforests.

Urbanization

Brazil’s rural settlement patterns were largely defined by the mid-20th century, after which the country began a headlong drive toward industrialization: This transformed Brazil from essentially rural to urban, led by the cities of the Southeast and South. By the turn of the 21st century, government statistics described more than four-fifths of the population as urban and less than one-fifth as rural; however, according to an alternative set of definitions, about three-fifths of the population could be described as urban, nearly one-third as rural, and about one-tenth as partly urban and partly rural. In 1940 less than one-third of a total population of 42 million lived in urban areas; by the end of the 20th century about 18 million lived in the São Paulo metropolitan area alone, which ranked as one of the world’s most populous cities. In addition, by that time the highly urbanized state of São Paulo had about one-third of Brazilian industry, a gross domestic product greater than that of many countries, and a population rivaling that of Argentina.

Rio de Janeiro has Brazil’s second largest metropolitan population. Other major urban areas include Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Porto Alegre, Fortaleza, Curitiba, and Recife—each with millions of residents. Slightly smaller are Brasília, Belém, Manaus, Goiânia, and Campinas. Rapid urban growth has produced a series of physical and social problems, while the demand for housing has raised urban land values to staggering heights. As a result, members of the middle class have been increasingly forced to live in minuscule apartments in densely packed high-rises, while the poor are confined in nearby favelas (“shantytowns”) or in residential areas that may be several hours away from their workplaces. Brasília and Curitiba, unlike most Brazilian cities, have benefited from large-scale urban planning.

Indigenous people

Brazil’s Indigenous populations adapted to their environment before European contact. They built dugout canoes and sailing rafts called jangadas (still used along the northeastern coast), slept in hammocks (which many people in Amazonia now use instead of beds), produced pottery and works of art, and cultivated tropical crops, corn (maize), and cassava. Although they did not develop empires such as those of the Andes and Mesoamerica, semisedentary groups established hierarchical communities along coastal areas. In Brazil’s early colonial period the Tupiniquim allied themselves with the Portuguese and the Tupinambá with the French. The Indigenous peoples and the first European settlers generally benefited from trade, and mamelucos served as important go-betweens, but Europeans, including Jesuits who established missionary settlements, introduced diseases that drastically reduced the Indigenous population. When colonizers began to enslave Indigenous people, many fled the coastal areas and took refuge in remote and distant areas—in the forested regions of the Tocantins and Amazon basins or in the savannas of Mato Grosso. From the 16th to the 18th centuries the Portuguese launched entradas (expeditions to expand territory and enslave Indigenous people) from São Paulo and some northeastern towns. Over subsequent generations, many Indigenous populations on the coast blended with their European or African counterparts, whereas Native peoples in the interior carried on a protracted struggle against encroachments—a struggle that intensified in the mid-19th century and continues today.

Although Brazil’s Indigenous people constitute a statistically marginal part of the national population, they form hundreds of different cultural groups. They reside in each of the country’s five principal regions, and more than 60 percent live outside Indigenous territories. Their numbers are greatest in the North, with roughly half of Brazil’s Indigenous population in Amazônia. Principal Indigenous peoples include the Yanomami in Roraima state, Mundurukú in Pará and Amazonas, the Kayapó and Kayabí (Kaiabi) in Mato Grosso, the Guajajára and Fulnio in the Northeast, and the Kaingáng in the South and Southeast.

More than 740 scattered Indigenous territories have been demarcated since the promulgation of Brazil’s 1988 constitution, which entitles Indigenous communities to territory that they historically occupied. The combined area of these territories represents nearly 14 percent of Brazil’s land area. Other Brazilians and the government do not always respect the territorial reservation boundaries: Garimpeiros (transient miners) have trespassed in several locations, leading to violent confrontations in the 1980s and ’90s and a renewed challenge between 2018 and 2022. Some Indigenous groups, such as those along the Xingú River, have increasingly used technology and social media to document and communicate their histories and the modern challenges they face.

Africans

Brazil’s people of African descent can trace their roots to diverse regions in Africa. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the slave trade brought more than 4.8 million Africans to Brazil, particularly from West Africa and Angola. Many were taken to the sugarcane plantations of the Northeast during the 16th and 17th centuries. During the 18th and 19th centuries, gold and diamond mining in Minas Gerais and coffee production in Brazil’s Southeast, respectively, continued to fuel the transatlantic slave trade. More than one million known disembarkations occurred after 1826, and a brutal intranational slave trade developed after 1850 that transferred the bulk of Brazil’s enslaved population to the Southeast.

Most enslaved people worked as laborers and domestic servants, but some escaped and fled into the interior, where they established independent communities or mixed with Indigenous groups. These communities were known as quilombos, and those in existence in 1888 when Brazil abolished slavery achieved some success in gaining land rights under Brazil’s 1988 constitution in territories known as quilombolas. Some enslaved people also achieved freedom through manumission, particularly skilled laborers or artisans living in urban areas. After abolition a large proportion of the formerly enslaved people left areas where they had been held captive and settled in other agricultural regions or in towns. The Northeast retained the heaviest concentration of negros (Brazilians with African ancestry). From the 1860s to the 1920s, Brazilian manufacturers hired millions of European immigrants but largely avoided employing the descendants of enslaved people, who remained at the margin of Brazil’s economy. By the turn of the 21st century an increasing number of individuals were using education to attain upward mobility.

European and other immigrant groups

Brazil has been an immigrant-receiving country in its modern history, but the makeup of that immigrant population has changed considerably. When Brazil was a Portuguese colony, Portuguese were found in all societal classes, and many sought to obtain wealth quickly as plantation owners or merchants. As such, many Brazilians had some European ancestry at independence, and European immigration continued in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Millions of Europeans came to Brazil between 1870 and 1930, and the bulk of them settled in Brazil’s Southeast. The state of São Paulo even subsidized immigration for families to work in coffee cultivation. European immigrants also constituted a large share of the industrial labor force and population in such cities as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Italians, followed by Spanish and Portuguese arrivals, made up the largest European immigrant group, but notable numbers of Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and Slavic groups also arrived. Many European immigrants benefited from a “whitening” immigration strategy and racial and regional prejudices, which enabled them to find jobs more readily than Brazilians, particularly those of African descent or those migrating from the Northeast.

Europeans dominated this earlier wave of modern immigration, but other notable groups included Chinese immigrants who were brought to work on coffee plantations in the mid-19th century, and the first boat of Japanese immigrants arrived in 1908. Japanese immigration expanded after World War I. São Paulo is now home to the world’s largest Japanese-descended population outside Japan. Lebanese, Syrians, and Jewish refugees also arrived during this first wave of immigration. These immigrant groups did not fit neatly within the European, African, and Indigenous triad of Brazilian identity; consequently, they added to Brazil’s ethno-racial complexity.

Although immigration had dwindled by the late 20th century (less than 1 percent of Brazil’s population was foreign-born in 2000), it increased in the 21st century, and Brazil has become a node of Latin American migrants, with notable populations of Paraguayans, Bolivians, Haitians, and Venezuelans. Urban centers mostly in Brazil’s Southeast and South continue to attract these immigrants.