"The Italian Colony of São Paolo is a groundbreaking study of Italian immigration to Brazil and the formation of Italian ethnic identity within a multiracial society marked by a large Black population and a legacy of plantation slavery. Giulia Riccò draws on a rich array of voices - including elite Italian travelers, literary modernists, working-class Black Brazilians living alongside Italians, middle-class Italo-Brazilians with fascist leanings, and labor-oriented working-class Italo-Brazilians. She shows that Italians in Brazil succeeded in positioning themselves as exemplars of Mediterranean whiteness, in contrast to Italians in the United States, who often faced stigmatization due to their imagined closeness to Blackness." - Christopher Dunn, Tulane University, author of Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil "The Italian Colony of São Paulo offers illuminating perspectives on the Italian presence in Brazil, on the wider history of Italian migration, and on what that history can tell us about racial politics in a variety of locations, including Italy and the United States. With originality and analytical depth, the author delivers a powerful critique of ethnicity and its politics, significantly enriching and repositioning the growing body of work on Italians in the Americas." -Loredana Polezzi, Stony Brook University "Riccò has penned a brilliant and timely study not only of the experiences of Italians in Brazil, but of how Brazilian racial theorists, writers and journalists portrayed them as "vectors of whiteness" that elevated them above other immigrant groups and, of course, Black Brazilians." - The Latin American Review of Books