This article focuses on how whiteness, in the process of being (re)enacted in its different everyday versions, becomes invisibilised at certain moments while reappearing at others as overly present. The article borrows Widmer's metaphor of race as two types of ‘watermarks’, that of a banknote that stands in to confirm authenticity when needed, and that of the marks left by glasses on a wooden surface. The idea is to consider the experiences of early 20th‐century Galician immigrants in the city of Salvador, Brazil. I argue that understanding this process of (in)visibility helps us comprehend some of the ways in which these immigrants were involved in both confirming and challenging local versions of what it means to be white. This analytical approach allows us to go beyond a homogenised, monolithic and ahistorical portrayal of whiteness, towards a more nuanced one that takes into account the heterogeneous combination of historical and contemporary, global and regional, hegemonic and alternative versions of whiteness.