In the late nineteenth century, Brazil was seen as a huge laboratory for racial experimentation. This view of a country of hybrid races, constructed by countless foreign visitors, was also accepted by the Brazilian scientists working in various teaching and research centers: historical and geographical institutes, museums of ethnography, law and medicine schools. Oddly enough, however, it was these intellectuals, believers in models of racial determinism, who popularized an extremely pessimistic view of the future of this nation made by miscegenation. The challenge faced by the present article is to apprehend the originality of local thinkers and the unlikely juxtaposition of two supposedly incompatible models: liberalism and racism.
