Xuxa was once Brazil’s biggest TV star. Now many are wondering whether a thin, blond, white woman was the right idol for such a diverse country.
By Ana Ionova
Reporting from Rio de Janeiro
Aug. 15, 2023, 12:01 a.m. ET
…In the 1980s and 1990s, Maria da Graça Xuxa Meneghel, known universally as Xuxa (pronounced SHOO-shah), was Brazil’s biggest television star. Generations of children spent mornings watching her play, sing and dance for hours on her wildly popular variety show.
“I was a doll, a babysitter, a friend to these children,” Xuxa, 60, said in a wide-ranging interview. “A Barbie of that time.”
… Like the famous doll, Xuxa, too, is thin, blond, blue-eyed and white. …
But now Brazil is in the midst of its own real-life Barbie reckoning of sorts — and Xuxa is at the center of it, thanks in part to a new documentary series about her that has become a national sensation and renewed questions over diversity, beauty standards and sexualization in her show.
Many, including Xuxa herself, are questioning whether the narrow ideal she represented was always a positive force in a country with a majority Black population and where a national debate is brewing over what is considered beautiful and who has been erased from popular culture.
Brazil has a majority black population?
A 2019 study added up all the genetic studies done of ancestry in Brazil, weighted the results by some scheme and came up with:
The weighted mean proportions of European, African, and Native American ancestries were 68.1%, 19.6%, and 11.6%, respectively.
According to the latest census, Brazilians self-identify as 48% white, 43% “pardo” or mixed (which can include Amerindian as well as Euro and black — are there Brazilians who are mestizo but not noticeably black? There are Argentineans like that.), 8% black, 1% Asian, and tiny bit indigenous.
If you decide that the American One Drop Rule applies to Brazil, then 8% black plus 43% pardo does indeed add up to a 51% majority, but traditionally nobody in Brazil thought that way. Maybe they do now, though, as the whole world gets Americanized by the imperialism of the English language?
“I didn’t see it as wrong back then. Today, we know it’s wrong,” Xuxa said of the beauty standard she portrayed to Brazil’s youth.
… But Brazil and its cultural gatekeepers are embracing new definitions of beauty that celebrate natural curls, curvaceous bodies and darker skin tones.
Oh, great, more obesity. Just what the world needs more of.
The lack of Black faces on Xuxa’s shows “inflicted deep wounds for many women in Brazil,” said Luiza Brasil, who wrote a book about racism in Brazilian culture, fashion and beauty.
… While much of her audience was Black and Latino,
Oh, boy. Was her audience “Latino” at all or were they “Lusitanic”? By official U.S. government rules, Brazilians are not of Latino ethnicity.
Or maybe, hand-wavingly, everybody in Brazil is, more or less, of Latino ethnicity?
But “Latino” is being used here in a racial not an ethnic sense, as different from white and different from “Black.” Presumably, they mean Amerindian or mestizo. But The New York Times evidently does not have those useful words in its guidelines. (I’ve seen literary and travel writing in the NYT using those words, but seldom news reports.) The Times talks about race all the time, but doesn’t permit itself a vocabulary to explain what it’s talking about.
Xuxa was a descendant of Italian, Polish and German immigrants, resembling the princesses and dolls flooding popular culture in the 1980s.
“Here I came — white, blond, tall, long legs,” she said. “I think that’s probably why it worked really, really well.” …
“These women are still praised as the ideal,” said Ms. Brasil, who is Black. “And we are still on the margins, far from this blond, white, almost childlike beauty that has hurt us and plagued us for so long.”
