SANTA BÁRBARA D’OESTE, Brazil — On a stage festooned with Confederate flags, a singer was belting out “Dixieland Delight” by Alabama near an obelisk honoring the Americans who fled to this outpost in the aftermath of the Civil War.
“We’re
not racists,” said Cícero Carr, 54, an engineer whose
great-great-grandfather hailed from Texas. Wearing a fedora featuring
the rebel battle flag, he explained in Portuguese, “We’re just revering
our ancestors who had the good sense to settle in Brazil.”
At
the annual celebration of Brazil’s self-described Confederados one
scorching Sunday in April, Confederate flags adorned the hoop-skirted
gowns of young belles and the trucker caps worn by beer-guzzling bikers,
as well as the graves of pioneers with surnames like McAlpine, Northrup
and Seawright.
The commemoration reflected the resilience of what some historians call the lost colony
of the Confederacy in this region of sugar cane fields and textile
factories. Unencumbered by the debate raging in the United States over
whether Confederate symbols promote racism, the Brazilian descendants of
the American settlers, many of them clad in Civil War uniforms, mingled
at food stands offering Southern fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits.
The motto of the organizers: To Live and Die in Dixie.
The
presence of the Confederados in the interior of São Paulo State dates
to an effort by Emperor Dom Pedro II, a staunch ally of the Confederate
States of America during the Civil War, to lure white immigrants to
Brazil. Thousands of Southerners took him up on his offer, moving here
in the 1860s and 1870s.
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