Caetano Maschio Santos

Caetano Maschio Santos 

DPhil Candidate 

Affiliation: Faculty of Music
Expert in: Migration and Race, Migration and Culture
Geographic focus:  Brazil, Latin America, Global South  

Caetano's research engages with the recent wave of Haitian immigration to Brazil, a phenomenon linked with Brazil’s leadership of the UN’s Minustah mission and the 2010 earthquake near Port-au-Prince. Habitually known for its ethnic and cultural diversity, in the last years Brazil has seen economic decline and the rise of xenophobic, nationalist and conservative tendencies within its society, leading up to the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Within such a delicate context for Black labour migrants, my work aims to investigate the music making of this Black Caribbean diaspora in southern Brazil as a manifestation of the political aesthetics of migration. Through ethnographic and collaborative musical work with Haitian immigrant artists, I seek to explore issues of hybridity and cosmopolitanism in cultural identities, the (trans)local musical and political agency of these migrants and relations between migration and race in contemporary Brazil.