Scholarly attention has frequently turned towards prominent questions about national identity that preoccupied Brazilian politicians and intellectuals during the First Republic (1889-1930) and the first Getiilio Vargas era (1930-45). Thomas Skidmore once said that turn-of-the-century debates about the character of the nation and its people took place 'in the shadow of two determinisms: race and climate'. Intellectuals and elites worried about the connections between the two, and their implications for mental and physical health, criminality and economic development, among other things. One familiar narrative of Brazilian history casts this process as fairly uniform and explicitly national, with Gilberto Freyre and his ideas about racial democracy playing a central role from the 1930s onwards. But the country had just passed through a century of regional upheavals, most rooted in local concerns and some pursuing secession. And in spite of Vargas' centralising initiatives, conversations about identity took on a distinctly regional flavour; Barbara Weinstein has made this point clearly in her contribution to Nancy Appelbaum et al. (eds.), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (North Carolina University Press, 2.003).
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