Bye Bye, Barbie.(native Brazilian model Suyane Moreira represents more acceptable ethnic beauty)(Brief Article)

It's hard to imagine, but Suyane Moreira didn't always like what she saw in the mirror. Sure, she was pretty enough, the sort of pretty that can stop a conversation. And with her cinnamon skin, the curtain of raven hair and deep, black, come-hither eyes, who wouldn't notice? But until recently Moreira mostly saw what wasn't there. "I wanted to be blond and blue-eyed," she says. Her girlhood idol was Xuxa, the wildly popular children's TV-show host, and Brazil's answer to Barbie.

No longer. Ever since she started strutting for Ford Models late last year, this reedy youngster from a drowsy village in northeastern Brazil has refashioned her attitude. Moreira, who turns 19 in September, has posed for Italian Vogue and the British fashion bible ID and will soon debut on catwalks at New York and London. She knows it's a steep climb to that glamorous aerie where Brazilian ubermodel Gisele reigns. But when Moreira consults the looking glass these days, she sees what was there all along: a striking young woman whose burnished skin and angular features tell of deep indigenous roots. "I am proud to be Indian," she told NEWSWEEK recently. "I like the way I look."

In Brazil's complicated social taxonomy, Moreira is a cafuza--the progeny of African and Indian ancestors. Her late father, a nightclub singer, was black. Her mother is a descendant of ...