'Visible-invisible' African structural matrices in contemporary Brazil: twentieth to twenty-first centuries.  
Brazil is the nation with the second-largest population of African descent on the planet; it is in relation to this group of people that the most discriminatory twentiethand twenty-first-century statistics have been produced, which is indicative of socioeconomic depreciation. With certain exceptions, the Afro-Brazilian population is the worst-placed population in society and in the territory at large. Being an Afrodescendant in Brazil is a now centuries-old risk factor - a challenge in terms  
of human survival, requiring extra effort to attain visibility in the dominant system and, above all, necessitating additional energy to integrate, and be integrated, into the territory. In this respect, two emblematic contexts are of particular note.  
The demographic question surrounding 'African Brazil' remains unanswered and Afro-Brazilians remain underrepresented because the official racial assessment criteria have led to an underestimation of the actual number of Afro-Brazilian citizens in the country. The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) continues to classify individuals as brancos (white), pretos (black), amarelos ('yellow', i.e., Asian) or pardos ('brown', i.e., 'mulatto'). Those who declare themselves white, black or 'yellow' are considered to be so, and all the 'others' are classified as 'brown'. This institution recently added the category of indios (Indian).
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figure 6. Family photograph of Mr Cbico, his wife Viscência, his mother, and his son Fernando. Salvador, Bahia, 1930s. (Anonymous)