Perhaps a more revealing aspect of the Manifesto was the claim that: “Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.” This statement conferred a local imprimatur on a vision that applied, and perhaps still applies, in Europe and North America of far-off Brazil as a kind of natural and human paradise, a place not only abundant, tropical, and permissive, but also one where race has become unimportant — a fantasy, of course, but one worth holding on to. In the same year as Oswald’s Manifesto, 1928, Mário de Andrade published a novel, Macunaíma, which also took inspiration from the group’s expedition. It is a riotous origin myth for his country that rivals Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published a few months later, in its games with gender fluidity, and adds its own episodes of racial slippage for good measure, presenting an ideal of a multiracial Brazil where the Indigenous population, those of African heritage descended from enslaved people, and those with colonial European blood might be equivalent. Mário’s narrative also played to the notion of Brazil as a once-and-future Arcadia, even if its vision of racial harmony was naive at best, and at worst, self-serving and colonial in its own way, given that two of these three groups were historically alien to the country.