Brazil
Page 50
The republican government tried to make Canudos into a great example: the fight of barbarism against civilization; of backwardness against modernization. Antônio Conselheiro’s cranium was part of this state performance. It was brought to Rio de Janeiro where it was dissected by Dr Nina Rodrigues with the intention of corroborating his theory about the link between madness and the mixture of races. But the Canudos campaign had revealed the abyss between the different regions of the country, and it was a warning to the intellectual and political elites that they could no longer ignore the interior. The divide between the government and its people is perhaps most eloquently expressed by Euclides da Cunha in the closing words of Os Sertões: ‘And so this story ends […] We will always remember this page of our history as profoundly moving and tragic; we end its narration hesitantly and without pride. We have watched like one who stands at the top of a very high mountain. And the view from above has left us dizzy.’40
More important than analysing every single revolt of this period – and there were many – is to consider that they were motivated by the same causes: the demand to own land, the desire for justice, and religious fanaticism. They were fuelled by a powerful combination of mysticism and protest. All of them reveal the persistence of polarized power structures, such as those between priests and the faithful; colonels and their soldiers; holy men and their followers; saints and their devotees; brigands and the armed bands that followed them.41 It is no coincidence that during this period armed bands, roaming the backlands and far beyond, gained notoriety. Armed bandits and their gangs, such as Antônio Silvino, Lampião and Antônio Dó, were ambiguous characters. Their form of power represented an alternative to that of the landowners. However, although they could be romanticized as creating a more just and egalitarian way of life, everything they did was based on the traditional model of arbitrary violence. Ignoring all models of citizenship and any idea of equal justice for all, these heroes, or villains of the backlands, are essential to an understanding of the early years of the Republic.
THEM AND US: THE WORKERS GO ON STRIKE
In the 1910s the workers in the country’s incipient industrial sector also began to show their dissatisfaction. Although they were not exclusively responsible for the growing popularity of anarchism among the workers, the immigrants newly arrived from Europe had brought the movement into Brazil, beginning in the 1890s. The political movement was joined by Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and many Brazilians, and was to be the basis for the political organization and mobilization of workers for more than thirty years.
The industrialization process in Brazil began in the 1840s, bringing with it the demand for labour, especially in civil construction and the building of railways.42 From the 1860s, when the first textile factories were opened, Brazilian industry was increasingly concentrated in the central and southern regions of the country. In the 1880s industrialization developed rapidly, accompanied by an increased demand for labour. Between 1880 and 1884, 150 new factories were opened; by 1907 this number had increased to 3,410, and by 1929 there were 3,336 new establishments employing a total of 275,512 workers.43 This labour force was made up of migrants from all over the country – and from the 1860s, especially in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, of immigrants, mostly Italians. São Paulo during this period became the country’s major industrial centre, above all for textiles, and a centre for immigrant labour. In 1912, 60 per cent of the textile workers in the state were Italian, most of whom were from Naples, the Veneto region, Sicily and Calabria.
The immigration from Italy helps explain the association of the workers’ movement in Brazil with anarchism – at least in São Paulo.44 After all, it was the tenet of workers’ organizations in Italy. And, in accordance with the age-old revolutionary tradition, when an Italian anarchist immigrated, it was his mission to propagate libertarian ideas. This thinking was also spread by Spanish and Portuguese immigrants, who took a leading role in the workers’ movement in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The objective of anarchists is to create a stateless society made up of self-governing communities whose daily routine is governed by the principles of freedom, experimentation, solidarity and fraternity. In Brazil the anarchists created associations whose aim was to improve workers’ living standards and to provide them with access to education. They founded a number of newspapers – O Amigo do Povo, A Voz do Trabalhador, A Terra Livre, A Plebe, A Lanterna45 – and their main form of mobilization was through strikes. They were divided into two main groups. The anarchist trade unionists predominated in São Paulo, where their associations engaged mainly in politics. The anarchist communists, on the other hand, believed in insurrection as the best form of revolutionary action. However, on one point they were all agreed: only through workers’ direct and autonomous initiatives would it be possible to abolish capitalism and establish a system of anarchy.
Not by coincidence, between 1906 and 1908 the number of strikes increased. The working class were reacting to the appalling working conditions. There were no restrictions on child labour nor on the number of hours in a working day. They also had to fight for better wages and for the creation of trade unions and political parties to represent them. Children worked in the factories starting at the age of five – and boys and girls under the age of eighteen accounted for half of the total workforce. The industrial census of 1919 also reveals the large number of women employed. The presence of women and children working in the factories led to lower average wages, and the situation became even worse during the years of the First World War.
The workers became an important component of public life of Brazil. They began to establish trade unions, then federations of trade unions, as well as other kinds of organizations. By 1906 they had founded a trade union centre with anarchist sympathies – the Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB). Between 1900 and 1920 approximately four hundred strikes were organized in the fight for better working and living conditions (salary increase, workers’ protection, decreased hours, right to organize). Other strikes were explicitly political in nature: against the First World War and in solidarity with the struggle of international workers. In 1902 the first major strike took place in Rio de Janeiro, in a shoe factory. The next year the city was witness to the country’s first general strike, which included painters, typesetters, hat makers and other sectors. It was suppressed by the police. In 1904 there was another major strike, coordinated by employees of the Santos Docks Company and supported by typesetters in São Paulo and dockworkers in Rio de Janeiro. In 1906 one of the largest railway strikes in Brazil took place in São Paulo, motivated by the constant abuse of local workers and a reduction in their wages. In 1907 the first general strike in São Paulo took place, demanding an eight-hour working day. The movement soon spread to other cities in the state of São Paulo, including Santos, Ribeirão Preto and Campinas. Workers in the food industry and the metallurgy factories had started the strike. Shoemakers and typesetters eventually joined. Finally, there were as many as two thousand workers taking part. However, despite the great surge of activity, in a country where the system was based on political patronage and there was little interest in political representation for the majority, strikes continued to be the target of police repression. A number of immigrants were expelled from the country for being ‘anarchists and troublemakers’, and many Brazilian workers were arrested and beaten under the same pretext.
The strength of the anarchist movement can be explained by a series of factors: the crises of 1910 and 1913, unemployment and longer working hours. In 1917 between 50,000 and 70,000 workers in Rio de Janeiro went on strike and in São Paulo almost the entire working population walked out. Although there were few concrete results at the time, the activity helped workers to mobilize and form trade unions later on.46 And the movement did not lose its momentum: between 1919 and 1920 there were sixty-four strikes in the city of São Paulo alone, and a further fourteen in the interior of the state. On 1 May 1919 between 50,000 and 60,000 people joined in a
protest in Rio de Janeiro, including industrial workers, anarchists and communists. Similar numbers turned out in São Paulo, including bakers, textile workers, shoemakers, typesetters and industrial labourers.
Beginning in the 1920s, the violent repression of workers by the police reduced the number of strikes and weakened the power of the trade unions. In 1922, with the creation of the Communist Party, founded mainly by former anarchists, the leadership of the workers’ movement gradually passed to the communists. The internal divisions between the anarchists and communists decreased their ablity to mobilize. The first two strikes of the 1920s – the textile workers in São Paulo and the railway workers in Rio de Janeiro – were a failure. But the workers’ movement had come to stay. It grew and become increasingly organized and complex in the following decades.
In fact, country life and city life now had more drawing them together than they had separating them. Perhaps the best illustration of this phenomenon is the relation between the war at Canudos and the favelas (shantytowns) that had begun to develop on the outskirts of the cities. The first shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, near the port, on the Morro da Providência (Providence Hill), was built by soldiers returning from the Canudos war. It is said that the former soldiers, whose wives prepared meals for the entire regiment, camped outside the War Ministry with their families, demanding to be provided with homes. These campsites, which began as temporary lodgings, became permanent. A similar process occurred in the other favelas that were beginning to be built on the hillsides around the city. Favela was the name of a hill at the centre of the battlefield in Canudos – the Morro da Favela – which in turn had been named after a plant that grew abundantly in the scrublands. The word has since become synonymous with ‘shantytown’. It is ironic that a word originating from the location of a war between the elite and the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the interior, should now be used throughout the country to refer to the communities that are the greatest symbol of the divisions in Brazilian society.47
ANTHROPOPHAGITES UNITE: MODERNISM AND A NEW WAY OF BEING BRAZILIAN
The dissatisfaction was generalized and not limited to any one group. The 1920s marked a turning point in Brazil with the emergence of new customs and attitudes that were to influence future generations. But along with the widespread disappointment with the Republic, there was also hope for the creation of a modern Brazil. Intellectuals and artists began to question the country’s cultural traditions and to confront republican institutions. They began to increasingly challenge the status quo. These new voices firmly believed that all citizens had the right to participate in society.48
The pivotal year in this process was 1922, when two major and contrasting events took place. The first was the celebration of the centenary of Brazil’s independence; the second was the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which took place in São Paulo. This event was of fundamental importance in understanding a generation that made a radical break with the established culture, which was essentially academic. Until 1922, cultural standards had been determined by the Academia Brasileira de Letras (ABL – Brazilian Academy of Letters). Founded in 1897, the Academy was the brainchild of a group of intellectuals and public figures, the most important of whom were Machado de Assis, Graça Aranha, Oliveira Lima, Rui Barbosa and Joaquim Nabuco. The Academy was based on the French model, the Académie Française. The Brazilian Academy had forty members, all of whom were well-known intellectuals, considered a kind of ‘intellectual, moral and political framework’ for the nation.49 But with the passage of time this group became stultified and increasingly out of touch with the vanguard, the symbolists and modernists, and, above all, with the bohemians who met in bars and bookshops in Rio de Janeiro.
Various forms of modernist art began to appear simultaneously, revealing novel forms of artistic expression and a new outlook. The 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna acted as a catalyst for this movement, a forum for new ideas that challenged the status quo. This symbolic event took place between 11 and 18 February 1922, in São Paulo’s beautiful neoclassical Teatro Municipal (the opera house). It was organized by intellectuals, including authors Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade; painters Tarsila do Amaral, Di Cavalcanti, Anita Malfatti and Victor Brecheret; and the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Graça Aranha, who was a member of the Academy, was also one of the organizers of the event. Paulo Prado, an intellectual and coffee planter, helped to finance the event. A very important aspect of the Semana de Arte Moderna was the rejection of the imported artistic movements and theories and their influence on Brazilian art. These artists and intellectuals believed it was high time that Brazil created its own national art forms. The intention was to overhaul the artistic and cultural status quo and adopt a Brazilianized form of the European vanguard: Italian futurism, cubism and expressionism.
Although the Semana de Arte Moderna had very few immediate consequences – on the contrary, it was highly criticized – over time it became very significant and famous, especially insofar as it has been associated with the Brazilian avant-garde and with modernism. In 1924, Oswald de Andrade published Poesia Pau-Brasil,50 a book advocating a uniquely Brazilian form of poetry. Then, in 1928, he published his Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagic Manifesto) in the first edition of the Revista de Antropofagia.51 Oswald de Andrade was a cosmopolitan figure who came from a wealthy family. On his visits to France he had been impressed by the experimentation of the avant-garde. He became familiar with African and Polynesian art, read about psychoanalysis, and made contact with the local intellectuals. The Manifesto Antropófago was foundational for the Brazilian modernist movement and the key work for an entire generation of artists. The book is a mixture of lively references to Rousseau, Montaigne, Picabia and Freud, and exposes the contradiction between two distinct contemporary cultures: the primitive (Amerindian and African) and the Latin (European). Contrary to the Romantic Indianism of the nineteenth century, the idea was not to present a process of peaceful assimilation, but one of conflict, stemming from the tension inherent in the confrontation between the two. This opposition would lead to one swallowing the other, as expressed in the ironic aphorisms ‘Tupi or not tupi, that is the question’ and ‘I’m only interested in what isn’t mine.’ In other words, this was the antithesis of the artistic movements of the empire.
‘Anthropophagy’ was now the key word, and the aim was to produce a new literary language that ‘had not been catechized’. Oswald de Andrade developed the concept to show how, in Brazil, the practice of cultural anthropophagy would lead to the ‘swallowing’ of other cultural traditions and the emergence of new ones. Foreign influence would be ‘devoured and vomited out’, thus creating a truly national culture. This process included a return to the traditions of Amerindian and African art.
One of the finest examples is the 1928 novel Macunaíma by Mário de Andrade. In it he narrates the story of a hero ‘with no character’ who travels all over Brazil searching for an amulet– the muiraquitã – that brings good luck. The central character jumps from one location in Brazil to the other, making geographical reality illusory. The book became a classic upon publication with its description of the misadventures of its Brazilian hero. This impish hero rejects all universally accepted norms of behaviour: he lies, wheels and deals, and causes harm to others; but at the same time he is lovable, and sensitive to the point of shedding tears. In a central metaphor, this Brazilian hero, who was a ‘jet-black’ man, turns into a white man, one of his brothers is transformed into an Indian, and the other brother becomes a black man (although the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet are white). As the author concludes: ‘And there in the cave, sheltered from the sweltering sun, the three brothers made a very beautiful sight, one blonde, one red and the other black, standing tall and naked.’52
Thus Macunaíma represents a fertile period of reassessment of Brazilian culture.53 The novel incorporates Indians, hillbillies, backlanders, blacks, mulattoes and whites, many of whom had previously been ignored in the arts
. Mário de Andrade, who lived in São Paulo and never went abroad, was, without doubt, the most significant figure in this process of ‘Brazilianizing Brazil’.54 This is not to say he was xenophobic or averse to foreign values. Rather, his aim was to create a unique language in which to represent the history and culture of his country. The author and his novel were icons of this new movement in which Brazilians began to reflect on Brazil and capture it in art. Not only did the novel deny the defeatist, previously held prevalent views on race, it transformed the presence of mixed races and of African Brazilians into a fundamental characteristic of the country – and its great good fortune.
Although São Paulo was undoubtedly at the centre of the movement, it is important to put the city’s role in perspective. Senador Saldanha Marinho came up with the catchphrase of a whole generation who adopted modernism as a means of expressing their cynicism: ‘This is not the republic of my dreams.’ He was a founding member of the Republican Party, a signatory of the manifesto of 1870, and one of the group who drew up the 1891 Constitution. The sentence expresses the cynical viewpoint of the intellectuals, especially in Rio de Janeiro. They would meet in bars and cafés and considered the city their stage, all the while developing their satirical, hilarious style of writing. It was a bohemian group, shabbily dressed and adept at drinking and arguing away the evening in the bars of Rio de Janeiro. In contrast to ‘good boys’ of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the clean-cut intellectuals of São Paulo, this group of liberal professionals set out to shock the public. Not only that, they also associated with dubious crowds, such as those that used to meet at the house of Tia Ciata.55
Born in the town of Santo Amaro da Purificação, in Bahia, Tia Ciata (Aunt Ciata) was the leader of a group of Bahian blacks who lived in the Carioca district of Saúde, near the docks. The tias were older Bahian women who took the leading role in communities. Hilária Batista de Almeida (Tia Ciata) was the most well known among them. She made Baiano delicacies and her stall was the most famous in the city. She also made dresses for the baianas of the carnival clubs and walked through the streets of Rio de Janeiro dressed in those flowing, white Baiana dresses. At the weekends, groups gathered at her house to sing and dance. According to João da Baiana, an assiduous member of the group, there was dancing in the living room, samba in the back rooms, and drumming in the yard behind the house.