Producing the Middle Class: Domestic Tourism, Ethnic Roots, and Class Routes in Brazil

This article analyzes the role that ethnic tourism plays in the formation of the middle class and the interaction of rural and urban residents in this process. Drawing on ethnographic data from Festa Pomerana, a German festival in Pomerode, Brazil, the article illustrates how the maintenance of ethnic roots is part of a larger process of constructing Brazil's middle class. It adapts the root/route metaphor established by previous scholars to analyze the formation and maintenance of certain segments of the middle class in Latin America. It argues that middle-class Brazilians' consumption of German and other ethnic traditions through domestic tourism helps perpetuate ethnic roots at the same time as it provides semirural hosts and urban tourists with routes to middle-classdom. This work highlights the role of domestic tourism in the construction of middle-class identity in less urban regions of Latin America and its interplay with middle-class identity in larger urban spaces.