During the nineteenth century, intellectuals interested in race theories had their attention drawn to the newly independent societies in Latin America. Some of them were particularly curious about “mixed-race” people in Brazil, and tried to predict the potentialities and problems of a nation with such a “mixed” population. Taking this into consideration, from 1870 onwards, Brazilian authors who rejected a foreign view on the Brazilian society and its people, engaged in a debate on how to produce knowledge about the social formation of Brazilian people and its psychology. Associated to the first faculties and institutions for history and ethnography, they produced the first theories on nationality and the characteristics of the population, drawing on the positivist, determinist and evolutionist theories coming from Europe. Thus, the literature of the 1870-1930 period in Brazil, result in establishing a typology among the population in which qualities such as a superior moral character, as well as praise to work, progress and education were associated to certain groups and seem as lacking in others (mainly composed by brown and black people). In this paper, I refer to this literature and argue that ideas of progress and entrepreneurship, which entered the social imaginary of Brazilian people not only through the sociological essays but also trough the social romances from these decades, ended up constituting strong sources of attachment to a desired superior cultural identity. Therefore, I examine how the continuous repetition of racialized concepts help on the constitution of a hierarchy of cultural identities. In addition, I briefly comment on the continuities between ideas coming from the positivist and evolutionist theories and the ideas of meritocracy coming from the neoliberal ideology, present in more recent debates in Brazil.
