How a small Brazilian town became an unlikely battleground over Confederate memory

By Jordan Brasher, Visiting Assistant Professor of Geography, Macalester College

There were no antebellum hoop skirts at the site of Brazil’s annual “Festa Confederada,” or Confederate Festival, in 2024. Flag poles that once flew the Brazilian flag alongside the red, white and blue rebel banner of the American Confederacy stood barren.

Since 1980, the Confederate Festival – a series of cultural performances and culinary experiences combining Brazilian traditions with those of the American South – has occurred each April in rural São Paulo State.

The festival celebrates a mass exodus of white American Southerners to Brazil following the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1890 – dates that roughly reflect when the U.S. and Brazil, respectively, abolished slavery – 8,000 to 10,000 white American Southerners migrated to the country. They were fleeing the vanquished Confederacy and Reconstruction – the federal government’s effort to reintegrate the South and its 4 million newly freed Black people back into the United States.

Southern fried chicken and barbecue is typically served at the Confederate Festival alongside Brazilian side dishes such as “farofa,” or toasted cassava flour. Traditionally, ornately dressed performers cover American country songs and dance the two-step. They present the flags of the 11 Confederate states for thousands of Brazilian tourists and descendants.

But in an international echo of a movement that has gripped the United States in recent years, Confederate symbols are now getting banned in Brazil, too.

Charlottesville echoes in Brazil

I am a geographer who analyzes the history and meaning of Confederate symbols in the U.S. and abroad.

I have been studying Brazil’s Confederate Festival since 2017. That’s when a white supremacist murdered the anti-racism protester Heather Heyer at the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The rally opposed the city’s planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Heyer’s death had consequences over 4,000 miles away in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, Brazil – a country with its own fraught history of racism. In 2018 and 2019, Black civil rights activists picketed the Confederate Festival.

The event, organized by the Fraternity of American Descendants – a nonprofit Confederate descendants organization founded in 1954 to maintain “the historical and cultural heritage of North American immigrants to Brazil” – had been held largely without controversy for over three decades.

“We indignantly and vehemently repudiate the symbols present at the Festa Confederada,” the protesters said in an April 18, 2019, statement written by a local group called UNEGRO and signed by over 100 other civic groups in Brazil.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the festival to shutter. And, soon, George Floyd’s murder reignited a global wave of outrage against symbols of racism and colonialism.

A battle over memory

Since 2015, when the Black Lives Matter movement erupted nationwide, at least 113 Confederate statues have been removed from cities across the American South.

But other removal efforts have been thwarted, usually by state lawmakers. To keep Confederate statues in place, many Southern states have either passed laws protecting them as historic artifacts or dusted off and enforced old preservation laws.

For example, when Birmingham, Alabama’s mayor tried to remove the city’s Confederate monument in 2019, he was blocked by the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017. After a lengthy court battle, the city agreed to pay the state a US$25,000 fine in exchange for the right to remove the memorial.

Similar “statue statutes” in Tennessee, Georgia and elsewhere continue to frustrate local efforts to remove monuments that glorify a chapter of American history that many people find painful.

Protesters in Durham, North Carolina, refused to wait for the state to repeal its preservation law. In 2017 they toppled a monument erected in 1924 “in memory of the boys who wore the gray” themselves.

Commemoration ‘with respect’

Around the same time, a similarly contentious debate was roiling the Brazilian city of Santa Bárbara d’Oeste.

Soon after Heyer’s death in Charlottesville, UNEGRO organized a public debate with the Fraternity of American Descendants on the meaning of the Confederate symbol. The two sides did not find much middle ground. The 2018 and 2019 Confederate Festivals maintained their display of Confederate iconography, and UNEGRO protested them.

Eventually, UNEGRO asked the city council to revoke the fraternity’s event permit if it kept using the Confederate symbol.

In January 2021, council member Esther Moraes proposed a new law prohibiting the use of symbols “that support movements or institutions identified with racist or segregationist ideas” at public events.

Moraes did not oppose the Confederate Festival itself, she emphasized.

“Everyone has the right to commemorate their ancestors,” she said, “but they should do it with respect for the history of other people and the descendants of slavery. Ours is the only city in Brazil where the Confederate symbol flies at a public festival.”

Closed-door debates and public hearings followed. In February 2022, the Fraternity of American Descendants hosted the son of Brazil’s then-president, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right ally of Donald Trump. Following his private tour of the group’s museum, Eduardo Bolsonaro accused leftist critics of the Confederate Festival of “rewriting memory.”

City officials passed the law banning Confederate symbols from public events in June 2022 anyway. The Fraternity of American Descendants issued a brief statement that its Confederate Festival would not take place in 2023, then went quiet.

In April 2024, instead of its traditional festival, the group held a picnic “open to descendants and friends of the Fraternity of American Descendants.”

The smell of barbecue wafted through the air as Brazilian descendants of the American South filled their plates against a backdrop of Brazil’s first Baptist church.

On the stage where country line dancers once performed, few traces remained of the red and blue paint that had emblazoned it with the Confederate emblem. The stage was gray.

In November 2024, the Fraternity of American Descendants announced plans to rebrand and relaunch its flagship festival, likely for April 2025. The Confederate Festival will now be called “Festa dos Americanos” – Festival of the Americans – and stripped of all Confederate symbols.

“The institution, feeling that it created discomfort for the city and its Black residents, decided to change its position,” said Fraternity of American Descendants President Marcelo Dodson.

‘This symbol miseducates’

Removing symbols of slavery is not, by itself, enough to repair old harms or eliminate ongoing racism. Neither, evidence shows, is simply replacing them with new memorials to past victims.

Yet removing Confederate names, flags and symbols from public spaces at least cracks open the door for a path forward into a different future. It presents countries an opportunity to grapple with history, instead of repeating or ignoring cycles of violence and harm.

My research on Confederate iconography and other work in critical memory studies suggests that interventions focused on alternative commemorations – such as candlelight vigils, public performances, and truth and reconciliation commissions – can help repair a society.

“We have a commitment to the younger generation,” said UNEGRO leader and historian Claudia Monteiro on the day Santa Bárbara d’Oeste banned Confederate symbols. “This symbol miseducates them.”

Jordan Brasher, Visiting Assistant Professor of Geography, Macalester College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.