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A year later, Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci sailed to Brazil on a voyage commissioned by the Portuguese crown and returned home with a cargo of hard, reddish wood.
The wood was similar to an East Indian variety called pau brasil, which was then popular in Europe for making cabinets and violin bows.
Still, regional migration and extensive miscegenation (racial inter-breeding) has made Brazil one of the most racially diverse nations on earth.
Aside from the official fivefold regional division of Brazil, a simpler economic distinction is made between the poor, underdeveloped North and the wealthier, more industrialized South.
One is a nordestino (northeasterner) or a mineiro (native of the state of Minas Gerais) or a carioca (native of the city of Rio de Janeiro).
Nevertheless, Brazilians share a national culture—making Brazil a true case of unity in diversity.
One consequence of this attitude is that middle-class and wealthy Brazilians are more likely to have visited Miami, Orlando, or New York than to have traveled to tourist destinations in their own country.
Brazilians are aware of these regional and rural/urban distinctions and closely identify with their place of birth.
Those who consider themselves urban sophisticates—particularly inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—have a long tradition of maligning people from smaller cities and towns in the Brazilian interior, calling them uneducated hicks and hillbillies.
Urban, middle-class Brazilians are generally unfamiliar with the interior of their own country and misrepresent it as a region of unrelenting poverty and backwardness—a stark place of few creature comforts that is best avoided.