Nevertheless, during the first 30 years of the twentieth century, Brazil saw increased intellectual production relating to race, with an emphasis on research on blacks in order to understand physical, intellectual, social, and cultural differences. Authors such as Nina Rodrigues (1935), also a medical doctor, reinforced the thesis of the biological inferiority of Africans, while Oliveira Vianna (1932) defended the idea that Brazilian society would become white after a few generations of blacks and coloureds marrying lighter-skinned partners.  
Meanwhile, the negative image of blacks in comparison with the positive image of the indio (Indigenous person), represented as a hero in literature, public monuments, visual arts and all elements of Brazilian identity in the period between 1860 and 1920, influenced the Brazilian choice to claim Indigenous ancestry to explain darker skin, as a strategy to avoid association with blackness  
(Shaden, 1977, pp. 321-32; Rocha, 2006, pp. 203-20; Ribeiro, 1977). This phenomenon was to persist throughout the twentieth century, and is similar to the situation in the Dominican Republic (Candelario, 2007).