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By Brazzil Magazine
Most African Brazilians today are poor and most of the poor in Brazil are African
Brazilians. There is an active debate in Brazil over how to explain this situation. On the
one side are those who say that the plight of African Brazilians does not derive from
racial prejudice but from poverty. They point to the fact that slavery existed in Brazil
until just over 100 years ago and that there are still people alive who knew former
slaves; they conclude that a century is too short a time for the descendants of slaves to
have emerged from poverty, no matter how accepting or racially unprejudiced the rest of
society may be. The contrary view is that a century is long enough for much more social
mobility to have occurred than is evident and that racial discrimination is the only
persuasive explanation. Discrimination does not result from poverty, it is argued; rather,
poverty stems from discrimination. There are also some defenders of Brazilian
exceptionalism who agree with this last position, but insist that at least in Brazil, the
state does not share in the blame for the plight of African Brazilians; that although it
maintained slavery far too long, the Brazilian state has not, unlike government
institutions in the United States, formally discriminated against free African Brazilians.
What all sides in this debate forget is that African Brazilians have been free for much
longer than one century. Attitudes and behavior patterns toward free men and women of
color were built up over centuries and had sunk deep roots well before the abolition of
slavery. Moreover, in preserving and building prejudice toward free African Brazilians,
the state always played an important and pervasive role. Present-day cultural responses
and practices must be understood in relationship to this past, and we should be skeptical
of any suggestions that they may be significantly altered merely through the recent
process of democratization and the end of authoritarian rule. This essay, then, focuses on
the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the abolition of slavery in 1888, and on the
role of the state in maintaining free African Brazilians in subservient positions.
How many free persons of color were there in Brazil before the end of slavery? By 1872,
there were 4.25 million free blacks and mulattos, and they accounted for at least
three-quarters of all African Brazilians (as compared to a mere 262,000 or 6 percent of
all African Americans in the U.S. South on the eve of emancipation). Furthermore, at that
same time, free blacks and mulattos made up more than two-fifths of the total Brazilian
population. Nearly a century before that, in 1775, over a third of all African Brazilians
in the city of Salvador (Bahia) were free, in this, the largest entrepôt of the slave
trade in the Americas. In the province of Minas Gerais, a region of gold and diamond
mining that had imported thousands of Africans in the eighteenth century, 41 percent of
African Brazilians were free in 1786. And evidently, free blacks had been present in
Brazil long before that. Even in the mid-sixteenth century, when the slave trade to Brazil
was just beginning, over 7 percent of all blacks in Portugal were already free.
These demographic features resulted from frequent manumission practiced over many
years, and not just of the old and infirm, but of the newborn and the prized as well. Both
cultural understandings and legal provisions made the granting of freedom to children and
adults normal; such acts were regarded as praiseworthy, and foreign visitors were
invariably startled to discover its frequency. Lest we get carried away with admiration
for the Brazilian slave owner, it is essential to note that between two-fifths and
one-half of the adult slaves who were freed paid for their freedom in cash or with the
promise of cash. Thus, many masters, while granting some slaves the opportunity to
accumulate savings of their own, also demanded as payment for granting freedom the rough
equivalent of the price of a new slave. And not just any slave could purchase his or her
freedom; even when paid for in cash, manumission was still considered a concession on the
part of the master, granted to the obedient and loyal, from whom gratitude was expected.
Furthermore, the relatively openhanded freeing of children can be partly explained by the
high cost of credit, which made the investment in childrearing too high in comparison to
the low cost of buying a slave just off the boat from relatively nearby Africa. As well,
far fewer Europeans went to Brazil than to North America, so there were insufficient
numbers of whites or at least too few who were willing to perform those innumerable tasks
that could not be properly carried out by bondsmen.
Still, the rate of manumission was impressive. During the first half of the eighteenth
century, women were freed twice as often as men, despite an overall predominance of males
in the slave population as a whole. The bulk of these women were of childbearing age.
Approximately 45 percent of all those freed in Bahia were under age thirteen, and
relatively few were freed after age forty-five. Whereas mulattos accounted for only 10 to
20 percent of the slaves, they were freed in equal numbers to black. In the city of Rio de
Janeiro in the early nineteenth century we find the same patterns.
Two-thirds of the freed persons in the period 1807-1831 were women and, whereas
African-born men there outnumbered women almost two to one, freedwomen somewhat
outnumbered freedmen even among Africans. Remembering that the free-or-slave status of a
child depended on that of the mother is no wonder that free African Brazilians came to
account for such a large proportion of the population.
In considering the position of free persons of color in Brazil from the eighteenth to
the late-nineteenth century, it is essential to examine the general structure of that
society and the changes it was undergoing. Colonial Brazil, as was true for most ancient
regime societies, was conceptually divided up into estates, reflecting the then general
view that society was not formed by individuals equally protected in their rights and
mobile in relationship to one another, but by castes, ranks, corporations, guilds, and
brotherhoods, layered one atop another or arranged side by side.
Under this system, the individual had multiple identities and multiple loyalties
without a single, truly all-encompassing one, except as a Christian (and only marginally,
as a subject of a king)— never as a citizen of a nation. It was what Roland Mousnier
(1973) would have described as a "society of orders," and what Brazilian
historians refer to as a sociedade estamental. Yet interfering with that conceptual
construction was the reality of slavery driven by a profit-oriented mentality. The New
World had provided to a few the opportunities to accumulate wealth, form classes, and gain
power measured by their financial resources, not their status; the tragedy of the slave
trade had introduced a group who had to be controlled by violence more than custom. So
even in colonial times, Brazil does not entirely fit the estamental model.
By 1822, at the very end of the colonial period, and even more so in the ensuing years,
a new philosophy emerged. Nineteenth century elite Brazilians, at least in the cities,
were not immune to the changes sweeping Europe since the mid-eighteenth century, and
keenly felt the pull of a new system of ideas emanating from the world centers of
political and economic power. With the overwhelming impact of the "Age of
Revolution" came the tenets of liberalism and individualism. A new paradigm of the
individual and society informed new political practices. Every free person was now to be a
citizen—at least in theory. A constitutional monarchy was instituted with a
parliament as well as an emperor, and a long list of individual rights was enshrined in
the Brazilian constitution. The new understanding contrasted sharply with the older
corporate one.
The intermingling of these two contradictory views of society, always in tension, had
direct repercussions on the fate of free persons of color. On the whole and in practice,
despite the new ideology, the acceptance of a multilayered social hierarchy continued to
be a characteristic of the Brazilian polity throughout the nineteenth century. The
hierarchical paradigm provided a means of assuring social order, for it diffused social
tension, allowing almost everyone to be (and feel) superior to someone else. There is no
equivalent word in current English usage for the Brazilian concept of condição
(literally, condition), a term used to indicate social quality and precise social place.
The nuanced distinctions of social ranking restrained the threat that freedmen might
otherwise pose, and this partially explains why the manumission of slaves could be
encouraged: freed blacks would easily fit into one of many possible social niches. Nor
were all of them deemed equal to each other. Those born in Africa and those born in Brazil
were clearly distinguishable. Attention to variations of skin color further contributed to
locating people along a continuum of status, some being either darker or lighter than
others. Brazilians took it for granted that people could generally be distinguished, as
one writer put it, "according to the order, scale, or category into which [they were]
placed within society" . This view meant that no one—black or
white—thought himself equal to anyone else; all met within a hierarchy and found
themselves either above or below everybody else.
One proof of the continuity between colonial and national periods is found in the
variations in sentencing for criminal convictions. In colonial times, there was no
presumption of equality. Law would punish an identical crime differently if committed by a
black or mulatto, even a free one, than if committed by a white person. The same was true
for "New Christians" (descendants of forcibly converted Jews), and commoners
were treated differently from nobles. Still today in Brazil, a university graduate is
legally entitled to better quarters and preferential treatment in jail than the rest of
the population.
Nor did national independence end the authority that the male head of household held
over everyone within his domain. It is important to note that a father could, legally at
least, imprison even his own sons, no matter their age, if they lived with him and if he
did it to "punish or correct bad habits or behavior." The law also treated the
property of unmarried sons, again regardless of age, as belonging to their father.
Moreover, a freedman remained in relationship to his or her former master as if in that
household and, thus, under his authority. The law did not consider these two parties as
equal; far from it.
As we look at the legal status of freed and free persons of African descent, we have to
bear in mind this seeming ambiguity that juxtaposed the practices of hierarchy with the
philosophy of legal equality. Historians can draw some initial and general conclusions but
they will not be clear-cut ones, for the dominant groups in Brazilian society have always
dealt with racial issues through a complex mixture of force and co-optation.
Take, for instance, the issue of arming free blacks and mulattos. In colonial times,
there were two simultaneous policies on this matter. On the one hand, laws were passed
forbidding them from carrying any weapon. On the other, separate militia units —
bearing arms — were organized for free blacks and mulattos, commanded by officers of
their own color. In short, it was believed that some could loyally serve in this
corporate body, one so typical of the system of estates, but that individuals outside such
corporations were a threat. After independence, militia units segregated by race were
abolished in the name of egalitarianism, while in practice, men of color were all
relegated to the lowest army ranks. This change was one of the stimuli to a virtual race
war that broke out in Bahia in 1837, to be discussed below. While one institution
characteristic of the corporate society had been abolished, equality did not take its
place.
For, regardless of any law, state officials now acted discriminatorily toward free
African Brazilians in carrying out the military draft. Conscription was used throughout
the nineteenth century (and well before) as a means of disciplining the poor. Although
under nineteenth-century Brazilian law all men of a certain age were legally subject to
forcible recruitment, the list of exempt occupations was long and left only the poor as
truly subject to it. It was common practice both before and after independence for a judge
or chief administrative officer of any locality (capitães mores in colonial
times; delegados after 1841) to round up allegedly unsavory characters and
send them to the army or navy. So it would be significant if the army's rank and file were
predominantly made up of African Brazilians early on. We do not yet have direct evidence
on this point, but in an 1827 list of 271 captured deserters, 222 (82
percent) were free men of color. Even though a judge who sent in three recruits
in 1840 described each one in terms of his malfeasance, he casually noted that two
were mulattos and the other a black. Such examples could be multiplied at length. An
Englishman in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1880 could still report that "the
greater part of the privates in the army are Negroes or mulattoes".
The fate of the draftee was a sorry one. Conditions in the army and navy remained so
deplorable that the minister of war had to tell a provincial president in 1856 that
recruits should march to Rio de Janeiro "with all security, but not in irons."
Food was inadequate and lodging crowded; floggings were common. Desertion, therefore, can
better be understood as a jailbreak, and the fact that African Brazilians were
disproportionately represented in the ranks can only be seen as the result of prejudice
and a state policy based on racism. Still, the state relied on blacks to fight its wars,
even as it feared them. During the war with Paraguay (1865-1870), for instance, many
slaves were purchased by the government and promised their freedom if they fought loyally.
Since the bulk of the ordinary recruits were also black and mulatto, one can conclude that
color determined who would be used as cannon fodder in that long and bloody struggle. This
was the prize offered to free men of color; this was the benefit of citizenship.
If liberalism undid the color-specific militia units and demoted their officers, it
also weakened one of the principal institutions that built black community in the old
society of estates: the irmandades. These lay brotherhoods and sisterhoods had,
since the sixteenth century, provided a means for people of color, often from particular
language groups in Africa, to maintain solidarity. Like their white counterparts, these
organizations were formed to venerate a specific saint and perform charitable acts, but
they also functioned as mutual aid societies. In Portugal, they often grew up around
individual guilds; in Brazil, even without a strong guild system, they continued to
project the notion of a corporate society. Many were organized exclusively for blacks or
mulattos, some excluded slaves, and some did not allow the African-born; others were open
to all comers, provided they were of "good character." African Brazilian irmandades
tended especially to honor Our Lady of the Rosary. They received state recognition
through royal charters and their leaders were seen as spokesmen for the black community
before government agencies. Members elected their own officers from their ranks.
Frequently, they created funds to purchase the freedom of enslaved members. Irmandades usually
had their seat in an established church where a side chapel was dedicated to
"their" saint; sometimes, however, they acquired enough funds to build their own
church, as happened in Salvador with Our Lady of the Rosary brotherhood. Religious
processions were occasions to demonstrate the ranked order of society, with each irmandade
in its predetermined social place, and each brother or sister ranked ahead or behind
someone else according to the same principle.
In the nineteenth century, the irmandades gradually lost their place as central
organizing institutions of society (to be superseded by political parties or, later, trade
unions), although some of them retained considerable prestige. While the exclusion of
potential members by overt criteria of race or place of birth also seems to have ended, to
be replaced by financial ones, being of color may tend to exclude one from the most
prestigious confraternities even today." The principles of equality and individualism
undermined the appeal of the irmandades. With their decline, the opportunity to
have a voice and be consulted by authorities disappeared. Irmandades had never
spoke for all blacks before the state, but in the nineteenth century, they now spoke for
no one.
One of the most striking innovations of the liberal era was the introduction of
national elections. Elections embody the idea of equal weight in political decisions, the
concept of citizenship, and the belief in the individual. The Constitution of 1824 set up
a system of indirect elections that specifically allowed freedmen to vote, although they
could not be chosen as the electors who would then choose the members of parliament. Other
than this requirement, it made no distinction by race or color, and did not limit the
suffrage to those who were literate. There was only a small income requirement for voting
and, in practice; it was frequently ignored since the local panjandrums sought to gather
as large a following as possible around the ballot box. With reference to the suffrage,
the Brazilian state was far more liberal than contemporary European or North American
ones. Yet the distinction between voters and electors was itself important since elections
seem to have had as one purpose the visible demonstration of social hierarchies: the
provision allowing freedmen to vote, but not to be voted for, publicly affirmed the
differentiation between their rank and that of others.
An important component of the voting public in rural areas was made up of agregados,
that is, farmers who worked the land of others. It was a common practice for landowners to
grant poverty-stricken agricultural workers the right to raise subsistence crops on some
outlying patch of their large estate, in exchange for which these agregados worked
occasionally for the landowner, and proffered allegiance at times of armed struggle
against neighboring landowners as well as loyalty in electoral disputes. As one engineer
described the situation on coffee plantations in 1879, much land was not used by the
planter or his slaves, yet on the "large remaining area,… one notes a great
number of people who settle there with the permission of the landowner or planter and who
are called agregados. These agregados, far outnumbering the slaves, are
impoverished citizens.... By their dependence on the owners these agregados constitute
an enslaved class, which, although not subject to any tribute in money or labor.... are
so, nevertheless, by the electoral tax [i.e., their vote], which they pay at the right
moment at the ballot box, or else risk eviction." Direct evidence on the color of
these men and women is almost totally lacking. But we know that they were poor, that the
poor were likely black or mulatto, and that most nonwhites were poor, so we can reasonably
conclude that most agregados were black or mulatto. Outside the few Brazilian
cities, voters in the first stage of the electoral process were generally agregados.
If we can see nonwhites participating in politics in this limited way, it should also
be noted that within a patronage system such as this one, the state delegated to local
potentates control over free blacks and other poor. Local judges, police commissioners,
officers in the National Guard, and other vicinal authorities dealt with them and watched
for signs of unrest. It was with these officials—mostly planters or ranchers,
probably slave owners—that nonwhites negotiated on a daily basis and it was through
them that free blacks encountered the state. Since there was no secret ballot, and the
protection of a patron was crucial to an individual's success and even safety, it is not
surprising that only the wealthy or wellborn were chosen as electors. Thus, the bulk of
free African Brazilians were pretty much excluded from participation in politics at a
higher level, although as we shall see, a few exceptional men of color did manage to enter
the political arena.
The actions of African Brazilians were circumscribed in more specific ways as well. In
1835, a famous revolt of Africans broke out in Salvador. It has mostly been portrayed as a
rebellion against slavery, but a large proportion of the participants were freedmen.
Indeed, it was precisely that it was led by men without masters that particularly
frightened the white elites. It is, therefore, not surprising to discover that once the
revolt had been put down, stringent new laws were passed in that province that overtly
relegated freedmen and free blacks and mulattos to a legally inferior status, albeit
recognizing subtle differences between them and the slaves.
With the principle of liberalism on one side and the heritage of hierarchical social
order on the other, Brazilian elites were often puzzled as to the right course of action.
One example of this is a provincial law in Bahia regarding ganhadores— porters
and stevedores—a group that had been prominent in the 1835 revolt. The legislators
took it for granted that these men were people of color, for the first article of the
regulation specified that it would apply to all "whether slave, free, or freed"
(the fact that ganhadores were almost always African-born — that is, either
slave or freed but never free—does not invalidate the significance of this
legislative expression). All ganhadores were henceforth to be registered on a
single list and were required to wear on their right wrist a copper bracelet with their
registry number engraved on it. The overseer of each gang, mandated to be a free ganhador,
would also wear diagonally across his chest a black leather belt with a tin badge
bearing the number of his group. If any ganhador failed to comply with these rules,
his masters, if he were a slave, would be fined; if free, he would be forcibly employed at
public works for a period deemed equivalent to that fine. No similar legislation applied
to occupations in which whites predominated. Yet it is true that ganhadores ostensibly
were singled out because of their occupation, not because of their color.
As long as slavery endured, the distinction between enslaved and free blacks remained.
Even then, however, there was a tendency to see free African Brazilians, especially those
of darker color, as if they were slaves. It was not uncommon for people of low status,
regardless of color, to be flogged or kept in stocks; still, it is symptomatic that, in
1802, when an official was accused of torturing a freed black man (preto forro), he
dismissed the accusation by saying that all he had done was to keep him in wooden stocks
from Thursday until Sunday morning and then have him join some slaves in sweeping the praça
in front of the jail. He saw no contradiction between the free status of the subject and
his treatment as if a slave, since their color was the same.
Reenslavement was a constant fear among the freed and even for those born free. To be
sure, sometimes the state played the role of defender. For instance, one sixty year-old
woman and all her children and grandchildren were threatened with enslavement when someone
claimed that she had never been free, but rather, had simply declared herself so when her
mother's mistress died without heirs or an executor. In this case, a judge ruled in her
favor, for she could show a baptismal record in which she had been labeled free. Others
may not have been so lucky. The effects of their fear were apparent. When the government
announced plans in 1851—the year after the end of the slave trade —to carry out
a census, many African Brazilians concluded reenslavement was its true purpose. In various
parts of the northeast, "free mulattos, blacks, and half-breeds [pardos, pretos, e
cabras]" formed groups of 400, 200, or 80, "all armed" to resist. Plans
for the census had to be abandoned. Leaving aside whether any such program of
reenslavement was actually contemplated, it is significant that people of color believed
this a likely action. They can only have come to that conclusion by their reading of
official attitudes toward themselves.
As well, if they acted violently to avoid reenslavement, it means they saw a real
difference between their own status and that of slaves. This point may seem obvious, but
it is often overlooked by those who wish to portray the sad fate of free people of color
by equating it to that of slaves. The historical actors themselves knew better. And
historians may also find objective data to verify that they were right. For example, table
I reveals how the dependency ratio in Bahia parishes in 1788 differed by race and
status. The lower this figure, the greater was the likelihood of infant mortality and/or a
short life expectancy. In the population of free people of color, there were nearly twice
as many dependents (under fifteen years of age or over forty-four) than among the slaves.
The free could and did legally buy and sell real property and bequeath it to others, even
in colonial times, when one might imagine otherwise. Whereas sumptuary laws were sometimes
passed to prevent those of lower status from displaying their wealth too ostentatiously,
no law prohibited them from holding it. (Poverty, of course, did prevent most of the freed
or free people of color from acquiring such property.) As well, the free could legally
testify in court and often did so. Most of all, they could move from place to place. Their
status was markedly different from that of the slave, even if lowly.
TABLE I
Dependency Ratios in Salvador, Bahia, 1788, by Color and Status
Free whites 143
Free pardos 125
Free blacks 173
All free colored 133
Pardo slaves 85
Black slaves 67
All slaves 69
Source: Schwartz 1985, 359.
The number of those under fifteen or over forty-five years of age per 100 persons aged
fifteen to forty-five.
Occasionally a white man could even be made subordinate to a free man of color. In one
case, a preto, (black) muleteer was placed in charge of a royal mule train. The
viceroy found it essential to stress that, despite his color, he should be "treated
with manners... making sure he is content and satisfied, providing him with food for
himself and the slaves who accompany him, since this is the only way that the service can
be completed in time with necessary regularity". In other words, the viceroy
recognized that other officials were likely to mistreat the muleteer if not forewarned. In
another instance, when a white soldier refused to take orders from a mulatto sergeant,
saying that "he could not stand to serve in a company under a black [negro],"
an officer spoke up for the sergeant: "although he is a light-skinned mulatto [pardo
disfarçado], he is a man of exemplary conduct," while the complaining soldier
was a bad lot. Presumably, if the sergeant were darker and the soldier better behaved, the
complaint would have been taken more seriously; the defense was not that race was
irrelevant.
The fate of the mulatto who aspired to better himself was not easy. In one district,
men refused to serve as juízes ordinários (a kind of justice of the peace)
where the notary scribe was a light-skinned mulatto. He was so light-skinned that it had
to be explained that he was a "pardo and so understood and reputed by his own
people and his parents [homen pardo e por tal tido e reputado pellos delle e das sua
ascendencia]. Another man who sought the position of scribe and notary for a town
council was denied the appointment on the grounds that "he is a pardo.... son
of a woman who was born a slave; this circumstance alone seems enough to produce some
intrigues between him and the officers of the council.… who have some vanity
respecting genealogy and know that all the scribes of other towns in this district are
white men."
So we see that although the state sometimes played the role of protector, most of the
time, it reinforced the prejudices of white Brazilians, acquiesced in maintaining a
hierarchy based on color, and acted to prevent the absorption of free African Brazilians
into society on an equal basis with whites.
But another side of the question has to be considered, for there were some men of
"color" who rose within the political system. Many observers have commented on
the well-known Brazilian technique of co-optation in which some African Brazilians are
allowed to succeed, thus "proving" that Brazil is a racial democracy. As one
politician maintained in 1880, "We enjoy full democracy in Brazil.... We live with
everyone; we sit the freedman at our table and rely more on the trustworthy freedman than
on many Brazilian citizens." Trustworthiness was the key. To those who demonstrated
loyalty and commitment to the general contours of that society, much could be given —
but only to them. This same phenomenon can be looked at differently, that is, from the
point of view of the upwardly mobile individual who took advantage of every opportunity
offered by the ideology of the dominant class, without necessarily buying into that
ideology. His actions may not spring from the success of the dominant group's attempt to
impose a cultural hegemony, but from a clear-eyed weighing of alternatives on the part of
the subaltern.
In either case, there are several examples of freeborn mulattos (as distinct from
freedmen or free-born blacks), especially light skinned ones, who succeeded in
nineteenth-century Brazil. While these are exceptions to the rule, they display the outer
boundaries of the possible; some of them not only made it into politics, but even into
high positions. Perhaps the best known was Antonio Pereira Rebouças (1798-1980). He was
born in the province of Bahia, the legitimate son of a Portuguese tailor and a mulatta
ex-slave. With only an elementary formal education, he taught himself Greek, Latin, and
French, and read voraciously. A man of unflagging energy, he became clerk to a lawyer and
eventually learned so much law that his employer recommended he be allowed to take the bar
exam —which he easily passed. When Brazil's political fate lay in the balance, with
the Portuguese army in the capital city of Salvador hoping to reassert colonial rule,
Rebouças astutely sided with the planter elite plotting independence and not with the
Portuguese officials who were then offering freedom to those slaves who joined the
loyalists. Rebouças was named a member and secretary of the planter-led insurgent council
meeting in an interior town, and when the Portuguese were finally driven out, he was
rewarded with the prestigious Order of the Cruzeiro and appointed acting president of the
neighboring province of Sergipe; that is, he became the preeminent authority there,
directly representing the emperor. When in 1837 radical elements in Salvador declared a
republic, he decisively sided with the forces of order and the emperor, even though the
war had quickly become a racial one, pitting the white planters against the free blacks
and mulattoes of the city. Once the legalist forces regained control of the city, they
slaughtered over 1000 men, mostly those of color, impressing another 1,500 into the
regular army to serve in other provinces and sending a shipload of free Africans (together
with one mulatto and a Brazilian-born black) to Africa. There is no record that Rebouças
regretted his choice or saw those black and mulatto victims of repression as his fellows.
He went on to serve in both the provincial and national legislatures, taking an active
part in politics until his death. Although late in life he advocated the abolition of
slavery, he had himself at one time or another owned several slaves. In these ways, he
acted as did others of his class, and for us to expect race solidarity to predominate must
surely be a form of racism itself.
An even more egregious example of a person of African descent—although
remote—who made it in the white world and defended slavery is the Baron of Cotegipe
(1815-1889). His grandson and biographer, alleges an Indian great-grandmother and other
sixteenth-century Indian ancestors, but contemporary abolitionist newspapers accused him
of turning his back on his own kind. The son of a prominent landowning family, he came,
through marriage, to own several more sugar plantations with numerous slaves. He entered
local politics soon after finishing law school and was elected to the national congress at
the age of twenty-seven. By 1853, he had joined the cabinet and was named a senator
(a lifelong post) in 1856. Other cabinet appointments followed, culminating in the
prime ministership in 1885. In this post, Cotegipe successfully defeated the effort
to include more liberal provisions in a bill designed to free slaves once they turned
sixty-five. When, in the last months of 1887, slaves took matters into their own
hands by fleeing the plantations en masse, he advocated harsh punitive measures. Cotegipe
accused the abolitionists of being anarchists and got the police in the city of Rio de
Janeiro to disrupt one of their meetings. After the resulting riot led to his dismissal as
prime minister, he continued to argue vehemently against any move to end slavery and,
after its abolition in May 1888, he proposed that the slave owners be compensated.
If he ever acknowledged his color, he certainly showed no solidarity with the slaves.
And in this he was not alone. It is generally believed that most mulattos preferred to
assert their European background whenever possible and to identify with whites insofar as
they were allowed to do so.
Francisco Salles Torres Homem (1812-1876), a politician and newspaper editor, was less
conservative. He is best known for his early virulent attacks on the monarchy and his
later abrupt switch, when he became its staunchest defender. For such a somersault, he was
rewarded with a place in the cabinet as finance minister in 1858, a post he
occupied again in 1870, and the title of visconde de Inhomirim. According to
one author, writing in 1894, his mother was a black street vendor; but another
contemporary limited himself to saying that he came from "a family of modest
means". He was particularly known for his conservative fiscal principles,
which endeared him to the planter elite and offended the emerging group of industrialists.
Unlike Cotegipe, however, this mulatto, though far from an abolitionist, did argue for
emancipation and supported the "Free Womb" law of 1871, which declared
free the children born thenceforward to slave mothers.
A more critical stand was taken by the mulatto Francisco Otaviano de Almeida Rosa
(1826-1889), a prominent publicist and reform politician. The son of a Rio de
Janeiro physician, he graduated from the São Paulo law school, and was named
secretary to the governor of the province of Rio de Janeiro at the age of twenty-two. Five
years later, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, a position he secured again on
various occasions, after which he then entered the life-tenured Senate. As a vehicle for
his liberal ideas, he used the Correio Mercantil, a daily newspaper that he edited.
He was sometimes called on to head difficult diplomatic missions abroad. He had a hand in
almost every liberal advance of the era, forcefully contributing to the passage in 1871
of the "Free Womb" law. Later, he became an outright abolitionist.
None of these men offended the powers that be. Some, like Cotegipe, allied themselves
unequivocally with the forces of conservatism, while others advocated reform. All of them
participated in government and were allowed to do so because they did not threaten its
fundamental principles.
Yet a distinct group, especially as the empire itself began to stumble and alienate
some powerful people, took more radical stands. In doing so, they often found an outlet in
the press, thus helping to form a civil society that debated public issues outside the
administration. Editorial offices became virtual political clubs, where men gathered to
discuss issues and policies. These institutions emerged from the growing urban middle
class trained at law and medical schools, the pharmaceutical college, the engineering
school, or the military academy, and not so much from the planter class. Such men could
make a career through talent, hard work, and luck. Among them were several mulattos who
took up the cause of abolition, and their role merits attention. What characterizes them
as a group was that they did not enter the apparatus of the state, but remained outside it
as critics. Although outside government, they were successful in working to secure a
change in the law and, in doing so, moved skillfully not only to occupy the space the
state allowed them but to amplify it. Neither repression nor co-optation would silence
them.
Three examples can be cited. One of them was José Carlos do Patrocínio, (1853-1905).
The son of a slave-owning priest-planter and a free-black fruit vendor, he began work in a
charity hospital at age fifteen and eventually got a pharmacy degree. Since he could not
secure a position as a pharmacist, probably because of his color, Patrocínio sought
employment as a tutor in the families of well-off whites. In one of these households he
was well received and ended up marrying the daughter of his employers. Meanwhile, he had
begun writing for the newspapers and, when he quit one such job because of his disgust at
the editor's conservatism, his father-in-law bought him a paper of his own, A Gazeta da
Tarde. Patrocínio transformed it into the premier abolitionist newspaper of the time,
using as his motto, "Slavery Is Theft!".
Another mulatto abolitionist, André Rebouças (1838-1898), was the son of the
Rebouças mentioned earlier. The younger Rebouças heard his father's tales of how he had
suffered racial discrimination but kept his peace in order not to acknowledge the slight.
André had entered the military academy and was a student there when it was
transformed into Brazil's first engineering school in 1858. After graduation, he
traveled to Europe to complete his professional training. He examined bridges, canals,
tunnels, railroads, dock works, and factory buildings, seeking out the leading engineers
of his day. Back in Brazil, he founded or directed a number of enterprises, ranging from
railways to harbor works, and was employed as an engineer in the construction of wharves
and waterworks. He also taught at the engineering school. André Rebouças believed Brazil
should export nothing but manufactured goods, instead of remaining a supplier of
foodstuffs and raw materials. He joined an abolitionist society early on and helped
organize an abolitionist group among the engineering students. One of the few
abolitionists to look beyond the end of slavery, he proposed a vast land reform, calling
simultaneously for the "emancipation of the slave and his regeneration through land
ownership".
A final and even more radical example is that of Luís Gama (1830-1882). His
mother was an African-born freed woman who participated in the revolt of 1837 in
Bahia that Antonio Rebouças had helped quell. She was deported to Africa as punishment.
When his Portuguese father fell on hard times, he sold Gama into slavery, and the boy was
taken to Rio de Janeiro and then to São Paulo city, where he worked as a house servant at
a boarding house. Befriended by a boarder, he learned to read. At age seventeen, he ran
away, enlisted in the army, rebelled at its discipline—which reminded him of
slavery—and was dishonorably discharged. He then found employment as a typesetter and
soon began to write articles himself, signing his column, "Afro." Eventually he
became a newspaper editor, joining those who advocated the complete abolition of slavery.
Gama also proved in court that he had been born free. In doing this, he began to learn the
lineaments of lawyering and soon put his knowledge to work for other African Brazilians.
In the 1880s, he was especially successful in getting the courts to acknowledge that all
Africans imported to Brazil after 1831 (when the slave trade was first declared illegal)
were legally free along with their descendants.
Although these men were exceptional, they demonstrate the complex way in which the
Brazilian elite dealt with people of color. The state was deeply involved, as we have
seen, in maintaining and perpetuating racial discrimination. At the same time—and
even, it might be said, as one way of doing so—it admitted into the ranks of the
powerful some light-skinned mulattos. This practice helped in the effort to construct the
myth of a racial democracy in which a person's color was allegedly not held against him or
her. The reality was quite different. The bulk of the free blacks and mulattos were
discriminated against at every turn, and this was even truer once slavery was finally
abolished in 1888.
The declaration of a republic the following year culminated the process of instituting
a liberal state in Brazil. The new constitution was modeled on that of the United States,
and Rui Barbosa, the champion of liberalism, was in its first cabinet. Already in 1881,
liberals had instituted a new electoral system with direct elections for congress, but
restricted the suffrage so as to exclude the poor and even the lower middle class and
imposed a literacy requirement on those who would subsequently register to vote for the
first time. As only 21 percent of the free could read and write (1872), this
exclusion bore even deeper. Even in the capital city, where education was most advanced,
only 60 percent could read and write as late as 1906. Thus, African
Brazilians were effectively denied citizenship, all in the name of liberal reform.
Even beyond legal provisions, the fate of African Brazilians worsened. Now that all
were legally equal, the elite felt it imperative to search for other means to maintain
inequality. They found the answer in racist doctrine. Before the abolition of slavery,
there had been relatively little overt and systematic racist thought expressed in Brazil.
Slavery was seen as a necessary evil, not a positive good. Hardly any writer argued that
slavery was good for the blacks or that it was the only fate to which they were suited. On
the other hand, there was already an implied racism even in the positions of those many
abolitionists who argued that slavery should be ended because it kept away white European
immigrants from whom Brazilians could gain so much-especially their genes.
After abolition, however, "scientific" racism came into full vogue. This
doctrine had already become a predominant one among European and North American
scientists, and Brazilians now hoped to imitate Europe and North America in all aspects of
their "progress." The spread of European colonialism and the rapid growth of the
United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought supposedly irrefutable
proof of the validity of a scheme that placed the so-called primitive African at the
bottom of the scale and the "civilized" white European at its top. As a
successful propagandist of the new truth, no one exceeded Herbert Spencer, who transformed
Darwinism into a doctrine applicable to society. Human societies, he said, developed
according to the same rules of differentiation and organization, as did living organisms.
It followed that natural selection and the survival of the fittest were inevitably the
guiding principles both within particular societies and between nations. Just as "the
struggle for existence has been an indispensable means to evolution" in the animal
world, so too with "social organisms." He argued that since differing races
exhibited differential abilities to survive and dominate, some were destined to triumph
over others. Spencer was immensely influential in Brazil.
Brazilian intellectuals tended to ignore the Europeans' condemnation of race mixture
and spoke instead of how Brazil would move toward progress through a steady
"whitening" of its population. They simply ignored the fact that such a process
must inevitably imply a "darkening" of some. Race, for them, was not immutable,
and Brazil, far from being condemned to subservience, was destined for a bright
future—only a bit later, after the continuous process of race mixture along with
immigration from Europe and the alleged reproductive weakness of blacks had had time to
work their magic. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906), possibly a mulatto himself, adopted
the ideas of Cesare Lombroso to argue that blacks had innate criminal tendencies. In the
1920 and beyond —even as scientific racism was waning in Europe and North America,
and several Brazilian thinkers had begun to denounce it-we find that F. J. Oliveira Vianna
(1883-1951), a prolific writer, was propagating the gospel of "whitening." He
tried to show with census data that there were increasingly fewer blacks and contended
from a racist basis that this was all for the good.
With racism as the accepted and acceptable ideology of the republican elites, ex-slaves
and African Brazilians generally faced heightened discrimination in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps the clearest evidence was the use of state funds to
subsidize massive immigration of Europeans to take the slaves' place in field and factory.
The government paid for the passage of the immigrants, housed and fed them and their
families on arrival in Santos or Sao Paulo, and managed a placement office to find them
employment. Nothing was spent, meanwhile, on the education or placement of the ex-slaves,
not to mention their transport or food and lodging. As well, the ex-slaves demanded too
much in exchange for their labor: they desired to be independent and especially insisted
that their women and children should not labor for someone else. On both counts the
immigrant underbid them. As a planter-politician observed in 1888: "It is evident
that we need laborers . . . in order to increase the competition among them so that
salaries will be lowered by means of the law of supply and demand". Supply and demand
would now substitute for the stocks and the whip. The result was that on the coffee
plantations of west-central Sao Paulo by 1905, two-thirds of the agricultural workers were
European. The ex-slave was relegated to agricultural labor in less prosperous areas in the
states of Rio de Janeiro or Minas Gerais. Frequently they became agregados. A
coffee planter admitted in 1896 that European immigrants "contributed greatly to
rescue our fazendeiros from their dependence on the freedmen". Meanwhile, in
the cities, black workers found it hard going for the same reason: the state had financed
the importation of cheap laborers from Europe. By 1902, go percent of industrial workers
in São Paulo city were European (although this was hardly the case in Rio de Janeiro,
which at that time, was the major industrial center).
Eventually these immigrants began to follow the example of the ex-slaves and demand
more for their labor. Strikes broke out. Sometimes, as in 1891, African Brazilians were
brought in as strikebreakers and then dismissed soon after. Not surprisingly, the labor
movement in São Paulo was principally led by immigrants, although in Rio de Janeiro some
mulatto leaders emerged. By the 1920, labor leaders in Sao Paulo were at last beginning to
recognize blacks and mulattoes as fellow workers to be recruited into union ranks. The
state itself began to see the immigrant as a threat, while the Brazilian
"national," that is, man of color, was now increasingly described as loyal and
hardworking. Finally, in 1927, the program of subsidized immigration was suspended.
In 1930, a new political regime was instituted in Brazil. When Getúlio Vargas seized
power in that year, he turned his back on liberalism, which he saw as a bankrupt ideology
that had made Brazil the maidservant of the industrialized nations. Although done for
entirely nationalistic reasons, one of his measures powerfully aided African Brazilians:
he decreed that two-thirds of all employees in the growing industrial establishments of
the country should be Brazilians. While often evaded, this law greatly helped to open the
way for blacks and mulattoes into the urban workforce. By the 1940, more than half a
century after the abolition of slavery, the urban proletariat fully included people of
color.
This could not be said for middle-class professionals, not to mention the elite, who
continued to be overwhelmingly white. A few African Brazilians who had made it out of the
working class organized the Frente Negra Brasileira in 1931. It set as its goal the
election of black candidates to the Constituent Congress convened in 1934. But its
attempts to mobilize black voters fell on deaf ears; the class division between its
leaders and the mass of blacks was too large. And the literacy requirement for voting
excluded most African Brazilians from the ballot box. In 1937, Vargas tore up the new
constitution, openly declared a corporatist state, and outlawed all political parties and
political activity generally. Caught up in his prohibition was the fledgling effort to
organize blacks politically. Then as later, it was argued that any political movement that
focused on the plight of blacks was racist and, therefore, incompatible with the
principles of a racial democracy that allegedly sustained the Brazilian state.
During the democratization period that succeeded the Vargas dictatorship (that is,
1945-1964), black leaders concentrated on building racial pride through cultural projects,
particularly the theater, and made little progress toward enlisting the state in any
effort to rectify past wrongs, despite the passage in 1951 of a law specifically
prohibiting racial discrimination in education, employment, and public accommodations. The
ensuing military dictatorship (1964-1985) usually considered protests against racial
discrimination as subversive of the established order, defined again as one of racial
harmony. The end result is that most nonwhites have been excluded from full participation
as citizens in the Brazilian polity. Little has changed in this regard since colonial
times.
Looking back over the last two centuries, several points are clear. Free men and women
of color have been present in large numbers for a very long time, not just since the end
of slavery. The state played an active part in discriminating against African Brazilians
both before and after abolition, albeit occasionally co-opting the most loyal and
agreeable among them; this practice did enable a handful of light-skinned mulattos to rise
socially or politically. But far from ever being the land of racial democracy, Brazil has
always been a racially divided nation, a heavy burden it still bears today.
This text was excerpted from Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil,
edited by Michael Hanchard, Duke University Press, 1999, 226 pp
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