Brazil
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These parties put Tia Ciata in contact with other personalities of the city. Composers, intellectuals, artists, journalists and publicists, as well as a fair number of rogues, all attended her gatherings. Tia Ciata was an important figure in the candomblé centre run by João de Alabá because she was a daughter of Oxum,56 having been initiated in Candomblé in Salvador. She was also a herbalist and faith healer. The first samba recording took place at Tia Ciata’s house. It was called Pelo telefone57 – and a man by the name of Donga, a composer, registered it in his name at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. In so doing, he secured the rights of a work that was almost certainly a collective composition. Donga’s presumption caused considerable irritation among the group, who protested throughout the city through – among other means – poetry: ‘Oh chutzpah/To claim all around/That this composition is yours!/It is by the good Hilário/And by old Ciata/That’s what you wrote, sir’.
This irreverent atmosphere provided fertile ground for the development of Carioca samba – whose leading lights included Pixinguinha,58 Heitor dos Prazeres,59 Caninha, China, João da Baiana and Sinhô. The mood was also welcoming to the re-emergence of Afro-Brazilian culture, including the Carioca modernists who frequented the same social circle. The frontiers of what had previously been a limited group were now extended to include the poor, mulattoes and blacks, as well as intellectuals and the children of the bourgeoisie.
A fine example of this was the invitation from President Hermes da Fonseca’s wife to the popular singer Chiquinha Gonzaga to sing Corta-Jaca60 during an official reception at the Catete Palace.61 If we were to compare the different modernist groups, the Cariocas were perhaps the most informal and far reaching. In addition to Tia Ciata and Chiquinha Gonzaga, the group included Suzana – the pseudonym of Tina Tati, the owner of a cabaret who had been an activist in the abolitionist movement – and Maria Bragança de Mello, a defender of nudism and student of the occult.
The group was very influenced by artists of the previous generation such as Paula Nei, Pardal Mallet and José do Patrocínio. But it also included important artists like the writer Lima Barreto, the critic Gonzaga Duque, the cartoonist Raul Pederneiras, the poet Emílio de Menezes and Bastos Tigre,62 who earned the sobriquet Don Quixote due to his acidic commentaries. They called themselves the confraria humorística63 and adopted the Café Papagaio64 as their headquarters.65 Organizing performances, finding forums for simulating debates, giving improvised speeches and engaging in general mockery were among the many specialties of this bohemian group. At the Café Papagaio even the parrot – nicknamed Bocage66 – was ill-mannered, squawking obscenities and reciting indecent verses.67 Collectively their notoriety was such that it was said even the parrot had run-ins with the law. If the group made the most of life and had much joie de vivre, they also wrote, and a lot: articles for magazines and journals, novels and works of poetry. After all, modernism is a collective concept, and true to that idea, various parallel projects were taking form.
The modernist movement took different form in different regions. In São Paulo, for example, due to its new role on the national scene, there was much insistence on ‘their particular modernity’. For example, the Bandeirantes were no longer seen as mere wild adventurers, capturing slaves and Indians. Instead, they were transformed into the ‘heroes of a race’, symbols of the Paulista entrepreneurial spirit. In Minas Gerais, the modernists established the early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century baroque churches as the ‘cradle of Brazilian culture’. The idea was to exclude the imperial past, considered ‘artificial and imitative’ and embrace a mixed race country.
The 1933 publication of Casa-Grande e Senzala is equally iconic of the period. The over 600-page tome by sociologist, anthropologist Gilberto Freyre established a new sociological approach to Brazil’s society. Taking on the subject of the relation of ‘the three races’, Gilberto Freyre, a Pernambucan intellectual, portrays the private experience of the casa-grandes of the northeast, which he transforms into a collective identity. The work introduced a new model for Brazil’s multiracial society. The author inverted the old fears of miscegenation and racial conflict through new cultural analyses. The ‘melting pot’ was written as an optimistic myth about the coexistence of the three races in Brazil. In Mr Freyre’s words, ‘All Brazilians, even the blond-haired whites, carry in their soul – and more often than not, in their body and soul – the image or the complexion of the Indian and the African.’68 And he thus transformed the mestizo culture into an integral part of Brazilian society.
In part, because of this well-known book, miscegenation between different social groups – often violent – become a distinguishing trait of Brazilian society, a sort of model of socialization. Not that Mr Freyre’s book ignores the horrors of the past; but he idealized a new civilization based on the model of the casa-grandes of the northeast. In contrast to the urban modernism of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Gilberto Freyre conjures up the colonial sugar plantations of days gone by to describe a national identity founded on coexistence. Social exclusion and social inclusion are opposing forces that balance each other out: the patriarchal master and the faithful slave.69 In his book Mr Freyre leaves the concepts of hierarchy based on racial criteria untouched, while at the same time acknowledging the violence and sadism characteristic of slavery. The novelty of Casa-Grande e Senzala is that it emphasizes the intimacy of the home, tones down the harshness of labour on the plantations, and transforms everything into a cause for optimism, as if a ‘good form’ of slavery were not a contradiction in terms.
THE ‘DAY AFTER’: BLACK POPULATIONS AFTER ABOLITION
As soon as the euphoria following the 1888 lei áurea had died down, the shortcomings of the measure emerged. Although the law ended slavery, it did not address the social inclusion of freed slaves and their descendants, who had little chance of competing for jobs with other groups, above all with the white population, be they Brazilians or immigrants. The idea, according to Rio Branco, the Minister of Foreign Affairs – in an unfortunate double entendre – was to erase the ‘black past’. There was a verse in the 1890 republican anthem that went as follows: ‘We can’t believe that in the past there were slaves in such a noble land …’ ‘The past’ was just a year and a half prior, but no one seemed to remember.
Although in reality, in the early years of the Republic, there was a real fear that new forms of slavery and/or other racist policies could be introduced. The newly freed slaves had to live with the heavy burden of the racially deterministic past. There was a reversal in expectations, since new criteria determined legal and social justice norms. These included race, religion, ethnicity and gender. According to opinion at the time, the lack of professional and social success of black and mestizo Brazilians was a biological problem, inherent to race, and not rooted in history or the recent past. Henrique Roxo, a doctor at the national asylum, stated in a speech given at the Second Latin American Medical Congress (1904) that blacks and pardos should be seen as a species ‘that had not evolved’ and had ‘remained backward’. According to Dr Roxo, although every race carried a ‘hereditary burden’, in the case of these groups it was ‘exceptionally heavy’, leading to idleness, alcoholism and mental illness. He also included social issues in his argument, blaming the ‘hurried transition’ and the disorderly growth of the cities.
The fact was that Brazil maintained its image as a mixed-race giant which seemingly required care. Brazil was the only Latin American country to participate in the First International Congress of Races, in July 1911. The director of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, João Batista de Lacerda, was sent to London to represent the country. A scientist, he presented an article at the Congress entitled ‘Sur les métis au Brésil’, in which he drew curious conclusions: ‘It is logical to suppose that by the beginning of the next century the mestizos will have disappeared, an event that will coincide with the parallel extinction of the black race from among us.’70 The text argued that the future would be white and p
eaceful, with blacks and mestizos disappearing to make way for a structured civilization that was increasingly white. But his thesis was greeted with pessimism in Brazil, and not for the reasons one might expect. On the contrary, it was thought that a century was far too long to wait for Brazil to become definitively white.
The anthropologist Roquette Pinto, president of the first Brazilian Congress of Eugenics (1929), also foresaw a country that would be increasingly white: by 2012 the Brazilian population would be 80 per cent white and 20 per cent mixed race; there would be no blacks or Indians. The predominance of such arguments diverted the post-abolition debate away from the legal question of equality and access to citizenship. Instead, discussions were based on biology. Science accommodated history and transformed social hierarchies into immutable data. There were two parallel processes at work: an emphasis on the so-called inferiority of the blacks and mestizos, and an attempt to eliminate the country’s history of slavery and its legacy. Thus a class of ‘sub-citizens’ was created, which included the inhabitants of the interior as well as the slum dwellers in the cities. The life in these slums was brilliantly depicted in the 1890 novel O cortiço (The Slum) by Aluísio de Azevedo.71 The writer portrays these communities as a bomb ready to explode, not only due to the mixture of the inhabitants – Portuguese, Spaniards, former slaves, and free negroes and mulattoes – but also due to the upheavals caused by the rapid urbanization and the hurried expulsion of the poor from their homes.
The newly freed slaves faced prejudice against both their race and their history as slaves. Lima Barreto wrote in his diary, ‘In Brazil the mental capacity of blacks is discussed a priori, and that of the whites posteriori’, and he concluded with frustration, ‘It’s wretched not to be white.’72 After abolition, black people were treated with a kind of silent and perverse prejudice that had a considerable impact on their lives, based as it was on a hierarchy constructed according to gradations of colour.73 Non-whites were thought to be lazy, immoral and socially disorganized.74
‘Freedom was black, but equality was white.’ While white elites enjoyed equality and citizenship and were allowed to vote, former slaves were supposed to be content with the mere right to come and go. A good example was their keenness to acquire goods forbidden to them during captivity. The traveller Louis-Albert Gaffre narrated how, immediately after abolition, black men and women used their modest savings to buy shoes, an accessory that would have been impossible for them to own while slaves. Although the demand for these items was large, the customers were disappointed with the results. As slaves they had gone barefoot, with calloused feet in direct contact with the ground. That made it hard for them to adapt to ‘such a modern custom’. Witnesses related how in the city streets and in the fields they saw black people carrying pairs of shoes: not worn on their feet, but carried over their shoulders, as a shoulder bag or a trophy. Freedom, in any case, meant the possibility to buy and use what one wanted, and to have a name and identity.
As it was, there was more continuity than disruption of customs established prior to abolition. Above all, in the rural areas freed slaves joined the ranks of the poor – a situation that was in no way new. What was new was the nomadic lifestyle that much of this segment of the population adopted. This vast group, made up of hillbillies, backlanders and caboclos, established temporary plantations and then moved on, working as cattle herdsmen, muleteers, horse trainers and newspaper deliverers in the south or raising cattle in the northeast. This explains their parsimonious lifestyle. They owned few personal items and generally did not raise livestock.75 Black workers mixed with the peasant population, adopted the lifestyle of the hillbillies and caboclos in the state of São Paulo, worked on farms in Minas Gerais and on sugar and cotton plantations in the northeast. They preferred not to settle down and lived with the ‘minimum essentials’. Their production of food and trade goods was geared towards a small surplus.76 And their social life was restricted to rural neighbourhood and village gatherings.
Whereas some commentators harped on what they considered mestizo apathy and depravity, as if they were emblematic of an ailing country, there were also chroniclers who praised what they saw as a ‘pure rural lifestyle’. In 1914, in an article entitled ‘Urupês’ in the Estado de São Paulo, its author Monteiro Lobato77 created the character Jeca Tatu, who supposedly came from the hillbilly prototype of the Paraíba Valley. Juca Tatu became one of the best-known caricatures of the poor in the Brazilian imaginary. In spite of many obstacles and setbacks – his adoption as a child, political upheavals, widespread drought and famine – the caboclo was ever resilient. In one of his speeches Rui Barbosa used Jeca Tatu as an example. ‘Who, after all, are the Brazilian people?’ he asked. That squatting caboclo, whose vote could be bought for a drink in the bar or a roll of tobacco, or that gentleman who reads books in French, smokes cigarettes and frequents the theatres and the Italian operas?78
Political debates were filled with this type of question in the final years of the First Republic, which ended in 1930. The government’s projects to modernize Brazil were one side of the coin, and the other side was very different. The poor populations of Brazil lived in wattle-and-daub huts in Minas Gerais; cavern homes in the Chapada Diamantina; slave-built refuges in the northeast; and huts on stilts along riverbanks. In these places the rules of society were ‘caboclo’, characterized by rites of respect, but also by violence. They planted their own food: manioc, corn and beans. On special occasions they ate chicken or dried meat with coarse flour, pirão, angu and paçoca.79 They practised a very Brazilian kind of religion, a generous dose of Catholicism combined with Afro-Brazilian practices and immigrant traditions: a mixture of spells, witchcraft and prayers. This, then, was the other side of the coin.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND AMERINDIANS: THE ‘BARBARIANS’ (STILL) AMONG US
Among the groups ignored by the Republic were the Indians: they were systematically excluded from all government plans and policies. During the empire the interest in the indigenous peoples had been more rhetorical than pragmatic, with the Indians featuring as heroes in Romantic novels rather than being the subject of any practical policy. In the Republic their exclusion was even more complete.80 An example of this was the massacre of the Kaingang to make way for the Brazilian North-Western Railway. At the time, the director of the Paulista Museum, Hermann von Ihering, argued in the press that these groups should be exterminated.
The process of the demarcation of Indian lands – for the Guarani, Xavante and Kaingang tribes – began in the west of São Paulo in 1880. Although the first two groups were ‘integrated’, at the price of being culturally decimated, the Kaingang tribe resisted invasion of their lands. The confrontation reached its height in 1905 when the construction of the railroad began. The Indians resisted for a long time, forming what at the time was called the ‘Kaingang wall’. The situation was only brought under control in 1911 after the government had virtually annihilated the group, and with the intervention of the Indian Protection Service (SPI). The man at the head of this institution was Cândido Mariano Rondon, a military officer who, among other activities, constructed telegraph lines between Mato Grosso and Goiás. The federal government was worried about the isolation and vulnerability of the borders. Cândido Mariano Rondon was responsible for incorporating the Amazon region into the country, not only through telegraph lines running from the central west to the south of Brazil, but also by mapping the area and venturing into unknown territory to make contact for the first time with the Indians.
Demarcation policies for Indian lands varied according to region. Some regions were considered new – like Amazonia, rediscovered because of the demand for rubber. Other regions had been colonized long before. By the time the Republic was founded, the situation of the indigenous peoples was no longer linked to labour. It had become a matter of landownership. In regions settled during the colonial period, the order was to secure village borders, whereas in the newly claimed territories and along the waterways, despite the us
e of Indian labour, the objective was to conquer new land. The government’s justification was concern with the ‘settlers’ safety’. These policies per se were not new, but they had never been implemented with the explicit collusion of the government. The instructions were clear: either exterminate the ‘savage’ Indians, or ‘civilize them and incorporate them into society’.81 Despite the provisions of the republican constitution, it was to take a long time before a practical policy of protection and inclusion would be put in place.
CRISIS IN THE LAND OF FAVOURS
During the First World War a series of events had a considerable impact on the country. The first of these was the economic crisis caused by the reduction of agricultural exports due to constant droughts and fluctuations in the price of coffee. The second was the arrival of more immigrants – a rapidly increasing number following the war – and the consequent growth of the cities. The combination of these factors led to the emergence of a powerful new group of liberal, urban professionals. Furthermore, the process of ‘import substitution’, implemented during the war years, resulted in an increased number of small shops and industries run by minor retailers, artisans and industrialists.