I’m certainly no expert on the Civil War, but somehow I stumbled upon this strange bit of forgotten history. Following the South’s defeat in the Civil War, there were many high-profile Confederates who needed to get out of the country, as well as Southern Confederates who just didn’t want to live in the US anymore. While some of them were invited to emigrate to Mexico, the bulk of them (between 10 and 20,000) emigrated to Brazil. At the time, Emperor Dom Pedro II wanted Southern American immigrants to bring their cotton industry expertise to the Brazilian cotton industry. So these Southern Confederates settled around Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities and still live there to this day, some five generations later. Their descendants have intermarried with Brazilians and most speak Portuguese, but there are still some who speak English fluently and even some who have maintained an affinity for the secessionist politics of their ancestors, thought not necessarily the institutionalized racism and views on slavery that define the South’s position in the Civil War in our modern retellings.
You can read the whole history in this excellent Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederados
There’s also a great Washington Post Article from 2009:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/17/confederados-forge-new-cultural-identity/
Also a travelogue about the festival in my favorite Southern magazine, Garden & Gun:
http://gardenandgun.com/article/lost-confederados
Anyways, every year the confederados (descendants of the original Confederates in Brazil) gather to put on the Festa Confederados, which features dancing in antebellum skirts and Confederate soldier uniforms, fried chicken and BBQ, bizarre recordings of Civil War banjo music, prominently displayed Confederate flags and lots of strange stereotypes. I don’t think there’s much remaining of any true traditions from the South; most of the festival seems to be a recreation of sorts (some of it based on scenes from Gone With the Wind, according to the Garden & Gun article). But it’s still pretty interesting that there are so many people remembering their American Confederate ancestry in Brazil. Here are some videos I dug up online:
“Confederates in Brazil”, a great mini-doc on the confederados
News Video on the Festas Confederados
Video of “folk dances” from the Festas Confederados
