WP361 My language is the barrier: Reflections on English, corporate belonging and racialised exclusion in Brazil

I am British. I speak English, and Brazilian companies pay me to teach it. But Brazil does not really need my language. So why does it keep demanding it?

The question came out of two jobs: working in finance in London and São Paulo, and teaching business English in corporate immersion programmes in Brazil. In finance, English was everywhere as a hiring requirement. It was rarely a working language. Decisions were made in Portuguese. Clients were Brazilian. Boards were Brazilian. But “fluent English” was required from candidates whose professional life would be conducted almost entirely in their native language. The hirers were often not fluent themselves.

English in much of Brazilian corporate recruitment works the way a dress code does: it does not make someone competent, but it makes them legible as belonging. That much is visible from the job adverts alone. What the interviews in my research reveal is something the dress code analogy cannot reach. Interviewees did not describe surface compliance. They described freezing, avoidance, the voice that drops, the candidate who does not apply at all. These are responses of the body, and the sections below return to them in participants’ own words.