Brazil Essay, Research Paper

August 10, 2000

The sound of soft rain on the window pane woke me up today, aahhhh, August in Sao Paulo. . . After a strong cup of Brazilian coffee, I made my way to Parque Ibirapuera to see the Mostra do Redescobrimento exhibit that commemorates 500 years of Brazilian history since the Portuguese arrival. Redescobrimento – I wonder if this rediscovery is intended to overturn the power relations of the first “discovery”? I keep asking myself, what does the re-discovery reveal and re-veil? I spent most of the afternoon in the “Negro de Corpo e Alma” section of the exhibit. I read parts of a planter’s diary and the original Golden Law of abolition. Through paintings, photos, sculptures, and songs the curators tried to fill the hall with the “ancestral spirits” of Afro-Brazilians. The music candomble and capoeira played over the speakers . . .until someone announced there were five minutes before the building closed. As I walked back to my apartment, I looked around the corners and down the dimly lit streets, I listened intently to the loud persistent honking of rush hour traffic, I looked up at the television antennas and billboards decorating the skyline poking through the low fog . . . I wonder where those “spirits” are on the streets of Sao Paulo?

August 11, 2000

Today it felt like I traveled to the opposite side of the world. I visited the “Immigrant Memorial” housed in the old building where immigrants were first received upon their arrival to the city. As I walked from room to room I felt the eyes of the immigrants in the pictures and in the air watching me, asking me what I though of all this. It was strange to go from yesterday’s exhibit on Afro-Brazilian culture and history to this celebration of industrialization and European immigration – this memorial to, “the men and women, who,” according to the brochure, “with their dreams, will to succeed and hard work, transformed Sao Paulo and Brazil.” The same dates I saw yesterday were on every plaque and every caption: 1850, 1871, 1888. . . but there was no mention of the slave trade, or abolition, or what work and workers Europeans encountered when they arrived from Europe. As I walked down a long corridor, confused and dismayed, I noticed a small plaque underneath a flight of stairs that read: “Immigration should not be seen as a tactic to replace slave labor. Immigration had begun prior to the abolition of slavery.” I was left with a feeling of suspicion, why did they put up this plaque? What were the connections between immigration and emancipation that seemed so painfully missing from yesterday’s and today’s exhibits?

I turned off to the right and entered a room full of factory equipment, machines, sewing machines, a stove, pots, canned foods, soap, wooden furniture, desks, and photos of late-nineteenth century factories in Sao Paulo that covered the walls. Close to the ceiling I noticed a framed poster advertising a 1910 May Day rally. Pictured on the poster was the back of a white worker standing on the skulls of capitalism and militarism, looking out onto the sunlit horizon of “liberdade” as he raised the broken chains of slavery, still attached to his arms, up to the sky.

Vocabulary, n. [. . .] (5) A range of means by which one can apprehend experiences or express ideas or feelings.

Hieroglyphic, n. 1 A sacred character; [. . .] (1) ideographic, each character representing either the object itself or a symbolic idea associated with it.

-Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, Unabridged.

Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language.

-Karl Marx, The Fetishism of the Commodity, Capital Vol. 1.

The epicure who sips his caf? noir with critical daintiness, can scarcely appreciate the care and delicacy of treatment necessary to bring about perfect results, [. . .] Perhaps it would give zest to the enjoyment if he could call up in imagination the graceful little green coffee-trees nodding to the sway of soft breezes under the sapphire skies of their native land: the picture of peasant groups with their ‘homely joys and destiny obscure’; the luxury and extravagance of the rich homes where fazendeiros live like princes; the whir and din of the factory which converts the red berries into the coffee commerce; the eager mart of traders and shippers, and the busy wharves where great ships wait to carry a precious burden across the sears. Every detail of the evolution of this delicious beverage possesses a distinctive charm. The nature and development of coffee affords material for description worthy of the most gifted pen.

-Marie Robinson Wright, The New Brazil, 1901

“Coffee makes everything possible.”

- Popular saying among planters of Western Sao Paulo.

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Throughout the twentieth century Sao Paulo, and the south of Brazil in general, has come to represent all that is modern, profitable, and First World about Brazil. The North and Northeast are associated with tropical Afro-Brazilian culture. Popular explanations for the dramatic difference between the poverty of the North and the wealth of the South without fail rely on pseudo-historical narratives of slow, lazy, mestico and afro-brazilian culture versus the fast, ambitious, euro-Brazilians. The North, and especially the province of Bahia, is associated with a pre-modern and African past, while the South is considered the dynamic and progressive heart of Brazil. Now, Sao Paulo, coffee and immigrants are virtually synonymous in the minds and history books of Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike. Through my examination of immigration I hope to partially address the question Thomas Skidmore posed in his 1993 preface to Black Into White: “How did the emergence of what became the Third World’s first major industrial powerhouse in Sao Paulo relate to the controversies over national identity, popular participation, and the question of Brazil’s racial future?” How did Brazilians come to understand themselves, economic growth, history, time, modernity, and racial identity in such inter-related and regional terms?

Beginning in the 1870s coffee production became the dynamic and growing industry of Brazil, replacing sugar as the dominant commodity. By the 1870s Sao Paulo had the third largest slave population in Brazil, after Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. At the time of abolition then, in 1888, it was in fact the South of Brazil that had the largest slave populations. However it was also during the 1880s the European immigration to Brazil reached its height. Between 1880 and 1910 a discourse on European immigration to Brazil became the dominant way that politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and entrepreneurs in the South of Brazil, and in the province of Sao Paulo in particular, envisioned and expressed a modern history and future of Brazil, that was used to simultaneously erase slavery and Africa from Brazil’s history while producing a new vision of civilized, democratic, capitalist, white Brazil, effectively erasing blacks from Brazil’s future. The development and use of the discourse of immigration was inextricably tied to the dramatic social transformations taking place. The discourse responded to, shaped, reflected, and attempted to contain the changing social relations.

My choice of studying the region of Southern Brazil broadly, and Sao Paulo in particular, has many reasons. Firstly, Sao Paulo and the southern provinces became the economic center of Brazil at the turn of the century. Secondly, between 1821 and 1932 four and a half million people emigrated from Europe to Brazil and over half of those immigrants went to Sao Paulo. Thirdly, the southern economic, political, and geographic region of southern Brazil the 1880s and 1930 was extremely powerful. According to Joseph Love, “In Brazil we can generally equate political regions with the nation’s component states; this is especially true for the South [The provinces of Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo, Espirito Santo, and Rio Grande do Sul].” He continues to argue, “decisions made at the state level have played a major role at a critical phase of national political integration. More concretely, from 1889 to 1930 the Brazilian state governments served as regional centers of power; they assumed decision-making responsibilities in the areas of social and economic services before the federal government was willing or able to accept such burdens.” This was especially true for ideas and policy about European immigration.

European immigration to Brazil had two major phases. The first, from approximately 1820 – 1870, was overwhelmingly German, and immigrants were predominantly artisans or small landowners. The 1870s were transitional years in European immigration. Both the Brazilian economy and the kind of European immigrants were changing. Although they had already gotten a few glimpses of potential social conflict based on experiences such as the worker uprising in 1857 on Senator Nicolau Pereira de Campos Verguieros plantation and in Rio Claro, southern planters had high hopes for immigrant labor. The late 1870s marks the beginning of the expansion of coffee production, in Rio, Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo, Santa Catharina. Beginning in the late 1850s and early 1860s Paulista planters began to increasingly “experiment” with introducing immigrant laborers on their fazendas, both free wage laborers and contract laborers. The labor intensive nature of all aspects of coffee production made the demand for labor in an ever-expanding economy that much more urgent for Paulista coffee planters.

The number of Europeans arriving in Brazil rose consistently throughout the 1880s and dramatically increased after abolition in 1888. Immigrants’ experiences on plantations and in rural or industrial work did not match what they had been promised by recruiters and Brazilian propaganda. Furthermore, immigrant labor organizing, strikes, abandonment of plantation work, emigration back to Europe or Argentina did not reflect the high hopes of Brazilian elites and planters. At the same time an increasing number of slaves were gaining freedom, through self-purchase, abandoning plantations, and the government emancipation fund. During the 1880s and 1890s the transformation to wage labor took deep roots in Sao Paulo.

The majority of studies on the transition to wage labor and immigration in Brazil are narrowly constructed economic histories. At times, these histories will acknowledge the existence of “racist ideas” or modernization dreams among elites. However, the center of the argument remains that immigration was a conscious and successful attempt by coffee planters to flood the labor market and drive wages down. In their article, “The Introduction of Free Labour on Sao Paulo Plantations” Michael Hall and Verena Stolcke argue “what induced planters to introduce free labour in the first place was their increasing awareness that slavery was doomed.” Thomas Holloway similarly explains the importation of European workers as “motivated by the same goal as that of the 16th century slaver: overcoming the shortage of manpower, so that the natural resources of tropical America could be used to respond to demand at the center of the world economy.” Hall, Stolcke, and Holloway all assume that by the mid-nineteenth century the majority of Brazilian planters deemed slavery doomed. Furthermore, they tacitly accept, again with some acknowledgment of racial prejudices of elites, that a natural response to abolition was the replacement of slaves with European immigrant workers. These assumptions, in one quick sweep, mask a critical and unresolved problem in the history of Brazilian emancipation and transition to wage labor; namely the complex interrelationship of black freedom movements, European immigration, capitalist growth, labor control, scientific racism, and the ideology of elite fantasies of modernity and progress. Furthermore, the separation of the question of race and the question of labor in an analysis of emancipation and immigration, replicates the “disappearance” of slaves and the purposeful break planters and elites, sought to achieve at the turn of the twentieth century. This break of course is a myth, but nonetheless powerful. Elites believed immigration and modernity would disappear threats to their profits and political control, the threat of racial degeneration, and contain social conflict immanent in the rise and expansion of capitalist relations.

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