Van Bemmel, thanks for joining us.  How long does it take a new country to form a national identify and who's allowed to make their voices heard in the nation building process?  Especially in states that, by force or attraction, have brought together divers ethnic and cultural groups.  Where do people, now united by nationality and little else, begin to find cultural common ground?  For the people of such patchwork nations, what mythologies have been tried and tossed or kept in the quest to build a national consensus on identity? Brazil is a case in point.  Brazilians are the result of the collision of the Portuguese, the West Africans they imported and enslaved and the diverse indigenous Amerindian peoples of this very large chunk of the South American continent.  Add to the mix the subsequent waves of immigrants from Europe, the Middle East and Asia.In this episode of Up Close, we ask Latin America Historian, Marshal Eakin, how Brazilians came to see themselves as having something in common with their fellow Brazilians of different culture, racial and class origins.  How long did it take to forge a collective sense of being Brazilian?  And, something that can be asked of all such nations, how do such national identity, once established, evolve and decline?  Marshall Eakin is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University in the United States.  He specialises in Brazilian history and has published numerous historical books on business and industry in Brazil, as well as on the process of nation