The Monument to the Three Races — officially, Monument to Goiânia — is in Praça Doutor Pedro Ludovico Teixeira, the civic square of Goiânia, a city of 1.5 million in the Central-West area of Brazil. The bronze and granite monument, 7 meters high, was created by the artist Neusa Moraes in 1968.
The monument was built to honor the immigrants who built Goiás, portrayed by an indigenous person, a white man and a black man brought over in slavery. Goiânia is a planned city, founded on October 24, 1933 to serve as the new state capital and administrative center.
The official publicity of the city describe this mixing of the races as miscigenação — miscegenation between the white, black and indigenous ethnicities — a word now usually considered by English speakers as pejorative. This myth of the harmonious mixing of the races, although useful for nation-building, glosses over the reality of the brutal conquest of what is now Brazil by raiding parties/explorers who were sent to the country to subjugate the people and exploit its resources.
