The aim of this essay is to bring into the historiographical debate the issues of ambivalence and racialism which are a constitutive part of Brazil's racial imaginary since the 1930's. Bearing this in mind I propose that Brazilian identitary ambivalence is an alternative tool to face European and North-American models of modern identity. Nevertheless, the Brazilian racial ambivalence finds its limits when confronted with the dilemmas of integration of black Brazilians after their emancipation. We aim to show it, through a comparative analysus of two historical figures, the "jew" Stefan Zweig and the "mulato" Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira, as examples of the paradoxal condition of Brazilian racial identity.