A (Black) American Trapped in a (“Nonblack”) Brazilian Body: Reflections on Navigating Multiple Identities in International Fieldwork

Though qualitative researchers have examined the influence of their positionalities on their research in the United States, less is known about how such positionalities play out when conducting international race research. From October 2007 to October 2008, I conducted fieldwork in Governador Valadares (GV), Brazil, a small city in Minas Gerais, to examine the racial conceptions of 49 Brazilians who migrated to the United States and subsequently returned to Brazil. I aimed to learn how migration influenced these individuals’ understanding of racial classification, stratification, and relations in both countries. Furthermore, as GV has historically been Brazil’s largest emigrant-sending city to the United States, I wanted to explore if this extensive emigration and return migration to GV had also altered race relations there.1