Brazil has a substantive native population, though. A lot of the power struggles in the country fall along ethnic lines.

Oh no, self proclaimed natives are not a factor in the story I was telling. Frankly their numbers are actually too small. The victories of the native communities are very recent and rather rare. Consider that Brazil is different from Mexico. The native population was much smaller and much more sparsely distributed. But then you may ask: aren't there a lot of black, brown and native looking people in Brazil? Yeah. But that's where Brazil is also different from the US.

When you consider racial relations in a country like Brazil you must understand that the model has the same assumptions as in the United States, but it follows a different path. The foundation is white supremacy. The assumption of the superiority, desirability and even the fetishization of european-christian cultural norms, which for most of our history meant catholic christianity. But unlike the United States, the portuguese colonies were built on minority european communities. That lead to a different sort of social order.

Let me tell you a little story. During the American Civil War there was this judge, I think, from Virginia. He sold off his posessions and moved to the Empire of Brazil. He settled with his fortune, bought a bunch of slaves and invested his fortune in a farming estate. From what I remember he sent two letters home. In the first he'd proclaim that Brazil was the future of civilization, that slavery would eternally remain an institution in the country. He exaggerated of course, but his feelings didn't come from nowhere as Brazil would only abolish slavery in 1888. The second letter, a few months later, he proclaims the opposite. Brazil is a twisted nation. His reasoning? Blacks could be soldiers and police down there. Of course one imagines that the real reason for his pessimism is due to the fact that his farm mcfucking failed. But the culture shock is self evident. This isn't an isolated event either. During the Christie Question, when the British Ambassador threatened war on us, one of his complaints was that british sailors who went drunk and became rowdy not only were taken to a normal prison, but were escorted by black bailiffs.

So from an american perspective you can fall into a pitfall of putting Brazil and the US on a spectrum and saying that Brazil is less racist, somehow. Remember however that we took decades more to abolish formal slavery, and know that we never truly ended informal slavery in the country. Only a few months ago the most expensive vineyards in the country were caught practicing slavery. So what gives? It's simpler. These societies are just different. If whites are a minority for centuries, then instead of the One Drop Rule you've got a caste system. You don't prohibit mixed marriages, you encourage them so as to whiten the population.

So why did I tell you all of this? Because the same thing happened to the natives. Unlike Mexico or Perú, the portuguese colonies would slowly either settle or enslave different native tribes, which were much less numerous than elsewhere. That was our version of the american frontier. So when a Brazilian says they are black or brown, or even white, odds are they have something of native in them as well. But their self identity is brazilian.

Furthermore, given that Brazil is a class society, the divisions of class are felt in that assimilation process as well. The traditional elites of the state of São Paulo are mostly white today. They've married with white people for a long time. One of them includes the queen of Sweden. And they generally descend from a native chief called Tibiriçá. Who was a portuguese ally. Though his case was rarer, what happened generally is that whenever the jesuits would set up shop and settle down weaker or defeated tribes from the frontier, the leader of that tribe was elevated into the colonial order. He went from chief to patriarch in a quasi-nobiliarchical system. He built alliances with colonial governors and colonels. He was the 'first' of the village, and ruled his people together with a jesuit 'tutor'. If, for an example, the native patriarch fought against colonial authorities against some decree of public works (where the natives of his village need to build a ditch or a bridge somewhere), he's not just doing it for the good of 'his people', he's doing it because thats the people whose labor he has some rights to.

Our system of white supremacy is more insidious, diabolical even. Assimilationist and whitening in character. Best symbolized by the horrible expression. 'A black man with a white soul'. So of course, racial struggles are present in every period of the last 200 years. But with most people integrated into that class system we end up in a situation where in pivotal moments of time the minority rights groups were either sidelined, or empowered only as part of a larger populist project. Things only began to change after the fall of the military regime in 1988.