The term “pardo” is a complex one, more commonly used to refer to Brazilians of mixed ethnic ancestries.

Pardo Brazilians represent a diverse range of skin colors and ethnic backgrounds. The other recognized census categories are branco (“white”), preto (“black”), amarelo (“yellow”, meaning ethnic East Asians), and indígena (“indigene” or “indigenous person”, meaning Indigenous Americans). The term was and is still commonly used, in popular culture and the media, to refer to Brazilians of multi-ethnic backgrounds.

In Brazil, the term pardo has had a general meaning since the beginning of the Portuguese colonization. In the famous letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha, for example, in which Brazil was first described by the Portuguese, the Native Americans were called “pardo”: “Pardo, naked, without clothing”.

The question about race reappeared in the 1940 census. In this census, “pardo” was not given as an option, but if the answer was different from the options “white”, “black” and “yellow”, a horizontal line would be drawn into the “color” box. When the census data was tabulated, all responses with horizontal lines were collected into the single category of “pardo”. The term “pardo” was not used as an option as an assurance to the public that census data would not be used for discriminatory purposes due to rising South European racist sentiment at the time. In the 1950 census, “pardo” was actually added as a choice of answer. This trend remains, with the exception of the 1970 census, which also did not ask about race.

According to geneticist Sérgio Pena, “with the exception of immigrants of first or second generation, there is no Brazilian who does not carry a bit of African and Amerindian genetic”. "The correlation between color and genomic ancestry is imperfect: at the individual level one cannot safely predict the skin color of a person from his/her level of European, African and Amerindian ancestry nor the opposite. Regardless of their skin color, the overwhelming majority of Brazilians have a high degree of European ancestry. Also, regardless of their skin color, the overwhelming majority of Brazilians have a significant degree of African ancestry. Finally, most Brazilians have a significant and very uniform degree of Amerindian ancestry.

The colonization of Brazil was characterized by a small proportion of women among the initial settlers. As there was a male predominance in the European contingent present in Brazil, most sexual partners of those settlers were, initially, Amerindian or African women, and, later, mixed-race women. This sexual asymmetry is marked on the genetics of the Brazilian people, regardless of skin color: there is a predominance of European Y chromosomes, and of Amerindian and African mtDNA.

In daily usage, Brazilians use the ambiguous term moreno, a word that means “dark-skinned”, “dark-haired”, “tawny”, “swarthy”, “Brown” (when referring to people), “suntanned”. Moreno is often used as an intermediate color category, similar to pardo, but its meaning is significantly broader, including people who self-identify as black, white, yellow or Amerindian in the IBGE classification system. In a 1995 survey, 32% of the population self-identified as “moreno”, with a further 6% self-identifying as “moreno claro” (“light brown”), and 7% self-identified as “pardo”. Telles describes both classifications as “biologically invalid”, but sociologically significant.