No one contributed more to the consolidation of this myth of racial brotherhood than the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre . In the early 1930s he advanced the view that somehow the Portuguese colonizers were immune to racial prejudice, that they intermingled freely with Indians and blacks. If Brazilian slavery was a not entirely benevolent patriarchy, as some people liked to believe, the mulatto offspring of the sexual contact between master and slave was the personification of this ideal. The mulatto was the archetypal social climber, transcending class boundaries, and was upheld as a symbol of Brazil and the integration of the nation's cultures and ethnic roots. "Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned and fair-haired one," wrote Freyre in his seminal work, Casa Grande e Senzala, "carries about him in his soul, when not in soul and body alike, the shadow or even birthmark, of the aborigine or negro. The influence of the African, either direct or remote, is everything that is a sincere reflection of our lives. We, almost all of us, bear the mark of that influence." The myth has endured, even in the minds of those who are also prepared to admit its flaws: "I believe in our illusion of racial harmony" said the singer Caetano Velosa, in an interview in early 2000. Accepted with, if anything, even less questioning outside Brazil than within, the concept of a racial paradise in South America was eagerly grasped. For those outside Brazil struggling against the Nazis or segregation and racial violence in the USA, it was a belief too good to pass up. "Whereas our old world is more than ever ruled by the insane attempt to breed people racially pure, like race horses or dogs", wrote the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in exile in Brazil, "the Brazilian nation for centuries has been built upon the principle of a free and unsuppressed miscegenation, the complete equalization of black and white, brown and yellow" ( Brazil - Land of the Future, 1942). Brazil was awarded an international stamp of approval - and its international image is still very much that of the happy, unprejudiced melting pot. Anomalies were easily explained away. A romanticized image of the self-sufficient Indian could be incorporated into Brazilian nationalism as, deep in the forested interior and numbering only a quarter of a million, they posed no threat. Picturesque Indian names - Yara and Iraçema for girls, Tibiriça and Caramuru for boys - were given to children, their white parents seeing them as representing Brazil in its purest form. Afro-Brazilian religion, folklore and art became safe areas of interest. Candomblé , practised primarily in the northeastern state of Bahia and perhaps the purest of African rituals, could be seen as a quaint remnant from the past, while syncretist cults, most notably umbanda , combining elements of Indian, African and European religion and which have attracted mass followings in Rio, São Paulo and the South, have been taken to demonstrate the happy fusion of cultures.