Luísa Bridi Dacroce wins Charles Wood Thesis Award

April 12, 2024

Luísa Bridi Dacroce (MALAS 2023) is the winner of this year’s Charles Wood Thesis Award, for her thesis titled "Asterisked Identities: Navigating Race as Children of Brazilian Immigrants in the United States." Luísa's research sheds light on the Brazilian experience within U.S. Latinx migration and diaspora. She is currently continuing her studies at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at University of Texas at Austin, where she is pursuing a Ph.D.

MALAS first-year Jorgelina Benitez had a chance to meet with Luísa and chat about her thesis and research interests:

As a Brazilian and first-year MALAS student, talking with Luísa made me reflect on my own ethnoracial journey as a Brazilian immigrant in the United States and how personal experiences can influence our research interests within the MALAS program. This conversation emphasizes the power of individual narratives in shaping our academic journey.

JORGELINA: What motivated you to pursue your master’s degree at the University of Florida?

LUÍSA: I wanted to work with Dr. Nicholas Vargas, who is unfortunately no longer at UF. I wanted him to be my mentor and my thesis advisor. I also wanted to research the Brazilian diaspora, and Florida is a great place to start. It's a great place to make connections and find participants. Also, I had friends in the surrounding areas, so I had a support system.

JB: What motivated you to pursue your thesis research topic?

LBD: It was a little bit of “me-search” at first because I wanted to understand being a white Brazilian in the US. I wanted to understand better how other people were navigating the same experiences as me. When I told them I was Brazilian, I noticed many people would be surprised. And they would say, “oh, I thought you were white,” or “oh, but you're white.” So, they were confused. Also, some people would say, "Oh, you're Brazilian, are you Latina? Or not? Are you Hispanic or not? So, those experiences with identity, contestation navigation, and having to negotiate my racial identity motivated me to understand how others, in similar situations, negotiate their own identity in the US ethnoracial hierarchy. Eventually, I became particularly curious about the children of Brazilian immigrants. While doing my literature review, I noticed that there was barely anything about their experiences, so I became particularly curious about how they might navigate this system.

JB: What do you think they expected to hear when you said you are Brazilian?

LBD: Most people thought I was American, and they would say, "Oh, you don't have a thick foreign accent.” I think many were surprised to learn that I'm Brazilian because I'm white. I think a lot of people are surprised to know that there are white Brazilians or white Latin Americans in general, especially in the US. In this country, there is usually a conceptualization of Latinidad that is inherently brown. People are confused when you don't fall under that prototype.

JB: What surprised you about your research findings and/or process?

LBD: When doing my literature review for my thesis, I found a few articles looking at children of Brazilian immigrants' ethnoracial identity. In those articles, none of them identified as Latinos. I wanted to see if my participants would say the same. The previous research was focusing on Brazilians in Massachusetts. So, I was curious if children of Brazilians living in other parts of the country were saying the same. One thing that surprised me was that all my participants identified as Latino/a/e and claimed this identity. I was not expecting that based on previous literature, but it was interesting because it did mirror my own identification.

JB: What were some of the specific characteristics of your group of participants?

LBD: Most of my participants had both Brazilian parents. But there was one whose father self-identified as Brazilian. He was from another Latin American country but was raised in Brazil since he was three. Another participant’s mother was a US-born Latina, and her father was a Brazilian immigrant. They ranged from 18 to 27 years old. I chose this specific generation because I wanted to focus on their experiences with navigating ethnoracial identity having experienced both Brazilian and US ethnoracial systems.

JB: What were the challenges of doing your research?

LBD: Identifying participants was a little challenging because it's a hidden population. You cannot look at someone and say, "Oh, that's a Brazilian. That's the child of a Brazilian.” So, I had to rely on personal networks, snowball sampling, and the Brazilian student associations. So, I reached out to some of those resources. I just asked if they knew any child of a Brazilian immigrant who was already a young adult. I found people in Florida and Ohio, and I did my interviews via Zoom because it was the most convenient way to conduct them given the time constraints of a master's thesis.

JB: How was your experience at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida?

LBD: I was fortunate enough to be at UF at a time when Dr. Vargas and Dr. [Christopher] Busey were also there. They were very formative in building the foundation of myself as a scholar. So, I had the opportunity to connect with great mentors and build essential knowledge for the type of work I wanted to do. I was also fortunate to have an outstanding cohort, and I was able to learn from other people from very different backgrounds and perspectives. So, it was, for me, a beneficial experience. It was very enriching.

JB: What are you doing now? How has your master's degree prepared you for your current work?

LBD: I am pursuing a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. MALAS was very important in helping me define who I was as a scholar. When I finished my undergraduate degree, I was still determining how I wanted to approach research. I knew I wanted to pursue graduate school, but I was not sure how I would do that. MALAS was an excellent opportunity to develop myself as a scholar and determine the type of research I wanted to do. Especially with it being an interdisciplinary program, this allowed me to have contact with different fields and methods and figure out which ones make more sense to me. So, it helped me prepare. It was the foundation for preparing the type of scholar I am and the type of scholarship I want to do.

JB: What advice do you have for current or future MALAS students?

LBD: Keep in mind that it's an interdisciplinary program. It's important to enter the program knowing you must be proactive in finding the best coursework for your project. That's one thing that will be different from a program with a more structured curriculum, and it has its benefits. It has its challenges, too, but mainly it gives you a lot of agency to determine what matters to you. That can be overwhelming, so I recommend working through your goals with faculty and mentors and ensuring that you are on track with what you want to do and following the steps you need to succeed, whatever success looks like for you. And take advantage of your cohort and the community at the center, including the staff. They are wonderful. They're ready to help you with anything you might need. And the students, because it's an interdisciplinary program, you have people from all backgrounds and different points of view in the same classroom or space. It's a great opportunity to learn from and grow with each other. It was really helpful to exchange ideas with my classmates and cohort members to get feedback and think through ideas with them.

JB: What's next for you in your research?

LBD: It's a work in progress. I'm still defining what I want to focus on next. There are several aspects that I find interesting. Several developments could be made to this research, so I'm still trying to narrow down what I will do. Luckily, I still have about four years of the program to do so. However, I want to expand on my thesis and look at the broader dynamics of interethnic relations, ethnic solidarity, and identity politics among Latinos in the US.

JB: Any final remarks?

LBD: I would like to thank the staff, faculty, and my cohort, the people I had the opportunity to meet through MALAS. The community was the most important thing I got from that experience. I also want to thank everyone who helped me navigate the program and finish it. ◆

 

About the Charles Wood Thesis Award 

This award honors the contributions of Charles Wood, former director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, and eminent sociologist who made significant scholarly contributions to a broad range of topics. Dr. Wood was a committed teacher and mentor who took special pride in introducing MA students to the pleasures and demands of research. That effort has been reflected in many excellent theses produced in the MALAS program at UF.

The award recognizes a UF MALAS student who has produced an outstanding MA thesis in the field of Latin American Studies. Up to one award will be conferred for each academic year.

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