it starts with Gilberto Freyre, but he is like Brazilian Nietzsche in that a lot of his work was interpreted or attacked without his input. a lot of people took it to mean that he claimed racial mixing would create egalitarianism and perfect democracy, but that's pretty reductive.
salazar, the portuguese dictator in the 20th century, really liked what he had to say in terms of abolishing color lines of the peoples of the portuguese empire (read: europeanization, physically and mentally). the portuguese were very strange in their colonial expeditions, though not nearly as brutal as belgium or france or england. instead of killing, they were encouraged to marry and have children with the local peoples, because Salazar wanted everyone to adopt a Portuguese identity regardless of what continent they were from. he based that on portuguese history - when Napoleon was coming for Dom Pedro in the 1800s, he fled to Brazil and established it as the Empire of Brazil, the seat of the Kingdom of Portugal. so while it was a colony, it WAS portugual - not like the US and French Canada at that time, which were just tributaries of England and France, respectively. so it wasn't a stretch for a later portuguese dictator to say that african branches of his empire were just as portuguese as lisbon and braga (especially because they'd lost brazil by then, so they needed to recoup territory badly).
so if you had to choose, yeah, it's a lot better than what belgians did in congo by a million miles, but at its core was erasing local culture and supplanting it with portuguese culture.
from him you should read The Masters and the Slaves, it's antiquated but it's the centerpiece of his work. if you branch out from there, you'll cover a lot of ground