ONLY RECENTLY HAVE BRAZILIANS arrived in significant numbers in Canada. Between 1956 and 1991, approximately 15,000 Brazilians entered Canada. Many were not native-born Brazilians but Europeans who had migrated after the war and were now reuniting with kin. However by the 1990s, native-born Brazilian immigrants were 99 percent of the total. The lack of Brazilian emigration is partly due to the extraordinary size and economic variation within Brazil itself. Brazilians often chose to move within their own country. Moreover, migration is an expensive process and in Brazil those who could afford the journey preferred not to move partly because of the key role that close kinship relations play in Brazilian society.

Although Canada did not open an embassy in Brazil until 1942, economically there have been strong ties during this century. Brazilian Traction Light and Power Company (now Brascan) was founded in 1899 by Canadian engineers and investors such as Zebulon A. Lash, his son Miller, Sir William Mackenzie, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, E.R. Wood, and American Fred Stark Pearson – all of them interested in the railway and hydroelectric possibilities in Brazil. For a century Brazilian Traction has helped build Brazil’s urban infrastructure and thus it has also been a conduit through which a small segment of Toronto’s elite has established connections with Brazil, including marriage and children. Despite this link and others such as Alcan Aluminium and Massey-Ferguson, social and cultural ties were still limited between the two countries. It was not until the severe economic crises of the 1980s that the Brazilian middle class began to migrate to Canada in modest numbers. A number of working-class immigrants who sought economic opportunity and a strong social safety net in Canada also arrived from the state of Minas Gerais, a region between Brazil’s industrial southeast and its agrarian north.

Most Brazilians have chosen southern Ontario’s urban centres as their home, particularly Toronto. The city has offered work possibilities not only for the wealthier and educated classes but also for the working class who came in the late 1980s. Cleaning office buildings or working in construction and petty service industries provided employment for them. The significant Portuguese community in Toronto ensured important linguistic familiarity and job opportunities for some Brazilian immigrants whose official language is Portuguese. Yet the economic crisis of the early 1990s discouraged many Brazilians who entered after the economic crisis in Brazil in the early 1980s. Before 1986 there were few Brazilian organizations in Canada. The most prominent was the women’s organization, Samambaia Club, composed mostly of the wives of Canadian businessmen. The Grupo Brasil formed in the 1970s helped middle-class Brazilians ease their nostalgia for the homeland. In 1966, Anna Maria de Souza founded the Brazilian Carnival Ball that celebrates, in the midst of Toronto’s winter, the popular African-influenced Catholic holiday. Especially known for its music and samba dance, the Brazilian Carnival Ball has become a major event on the social calendar of Toronto’s elite, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities and transcending its ethnic origins to become an English-speaking high society event.

Other associations have focused on such practical links between Brazil and Canada as BRASILNET’s interest in creating commercial ties and the Brazilian-Canadian Association’s interest in promoting culture. Among the many Brazilians in Canada, leisure time is spent watching futebol (soccer) or learning copeira (an athletic form of self-defence introduced to Brazil by African slaves). Several masters have set up academies to teach the sport in Halifax, Toronto, and Hamilton.

Brazilian music and dance have become quite popular in Canadian cities. Toronto has several professional bands such as Banda Dá, Banda Lua, San Sebastian Band, and Banda Sur. Women vocalists lead many of these. The band Unidos do Canada often performs in the Caribana festival. Two Portuguese-language newspapers, founded in the early 1990s, served the Brazilian community: the Abacaxi Times (founded in 1992) and Hora HNews (1993). Now defunct, they have been replaced by Brazil News (1996). Although language, sport, and Carnival tie the small Brazilian settlement together, business and class interests are generally more important than any sense of cultural solidarity. Yet Brazilian culture has had far-reaching influence on the Canadian imagination and that influence should only increase as national economies and peoples become more integrated.