Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980

The resulting message was a varying mixture of references to Portuguese, Western, Latin American, Latin, and African cultural heritages and affinities and to images of international pacifism, antihegemony, tranquil race relations (in implicit contrast to the United States and South Africa), and "tropical industrialization," blended in different degrees depending upon the audience and the political moment in Brazil, Africa, and the world. The considerable strengths of Hotel Trópico rest on Dávila's solid prior scholarship on Brazil's race relations, unprecedented access to comparatively recent Brazilian diplomatic and Portuguese governmental archives, extended interviews with key players over five years, and broad institutional and collegial ties in several countries.