DO SOUL FOOD À MANIÇOBA: UM RELATO ETNOGRÁFICO SOBRE A IMERSÃO CULTURAL DE ESTUDANTES AFRO-AMERICANOS NA CIDADE DE BELÉM, PARÁ.

The Minority Health International Research Training (MHIRT) Program annually sends two students from minority groups from Southern US universities to conduct researches in Brazilian cities. The three pairs of African-American students sent to the city of Belém between 2013 and 2015 to carry out research in the Laboratory of Tropical Medicine at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) are the focus of this ethnographic report, which intends to investigate their strangeness towards the Brazilian racial reality. The methodology used in this paper is qualitative and bibliographical, based on semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with the African-American students, as well as on the literature on the issues raised in the field work. Thus, we investigate the students' estrangements about their experience of living in the most expensive perimeter of Belém, their presence in the most whitened and elitist course in UFPA, their socializations in the city and their findings about the origins of the traditional cuisine of Para. The ethnographic discussion raised by this paper examines the differences and similarities between racial relations of Brazil and of the US, countries which constructed very different ethnic and national identities, even though both were founded by the hands of slaved black Africans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]