The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
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The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822376156 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2015 |
| Series: | Radical Perspectives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 472 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
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The Color of Modernity
São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
By Barbara Weinstein
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7615-6
CHAPTER 1
PAULISTA MODERN
Now, if in addition to its opulent agriculture, São Paulo begins to achieve substantial industrial development, very soon there will be an enormous economic imbalance between this province and those of the North. And then separation will be inevitable, unless this province wants to become a California-type colony, exploited by the intransigent North for its own interests and through the strength of its representation in Parliament. —Diário Popular, 1887
"At the present time there is no one who would call into doubt the prosperity and the socio-economic expansion of the province of São Paulo, where each day, great enterprises, inspired by the most noble initiatives, appear as if by magic." Thus observed a columnist in the Rio daily, O Jornal do Commercio, in March 1887. This quotation, and the one that serves as the epigraph for this chapter, might seem entirely unremarkable given São Paulo's well-established reputation as the "engine" of the Brazilian economy, but the timing and location of these comments make them especially noteworthy. The foregoing flattering description of São Paulo's socioeconomic progress appeared, not in a newspaper from that province, but in the leading business daily of the Court (as Rio would be known until the fall of the monarchy in 1889). Judging from this statement, the perception of São Paulo as Brazil's economic "miracle" was not just a product of inflated self-regard, but an idea already circulating beyond the regional borders, and as with the quote that opens this chapter, the article in the Jornal do Commercio implies that São Paulo's prosperity and promise consisted of more than the mountains of coffee beans produced by the fazendas that stretched throughout the western region of the province (the latter geopolitical designation being replaced by "state" with the founding of the First Republic).
Second, and perhaps even more striking, is the dateline of the two articles from which these quotes originated. Both appeared in March 1887; by then São Paulo had emerged as the leading hub of Brazil's coffee-exporting economy, but it was hardly the preeminent and diversified economic center that it would later become. The year 1887 was also one of unusual turbulence in the province, as the remaining enslaved workers began fleeing the paulista coffee zones en masse, forcing the hands of those politicians who were still wavering on the question of abolition. And the notion of São Paulo as a center of industry was, at that point, little more than wishful thinking. True, the rapid expansion of coffee plantations into the Paulista West, from the 1850s on, and the construction of new railroad lines, urban services, and port facilities offered tangible evidence of economic effervescence, but these trends hardly provided incontestable indicators of modernity or incontrovertible proof of something new and different occurring in São Paulo. The economic prosperity of this "second founding"—the dramatic transformation of São Paulo city and state that began in the 1870s—rested largely on the traditional pillars of Brazilian wealth and power: the big plantation and enslaved African labor. Historians of slavery and abolition have toiled tirelessly to lay to rest the myth of the progressive planter, showing that most paulista fazendeiros clung tenaciously to their slave workforce and only embraced alternative sources and forms of labor once the massive desertions of the plantations made emancipation a fait accompli. Moreover, the city of São Paulo, despite its strong signs of dynamism, had a population that barely totaled sixty-five thousand in the final years of the empire—roughly a tenth the size of Rio de Janeiro, the imperial capital.
Why this apparent discrepancy or disproportion between São Paulo's still arguably modest material achievements and these claims of regional opulence? Why this seemingly premature projection of São Paulo as representing something novel, even exceptional, on the Brazilian socioeconomic landscape? Although no historian should expect to find a perfect coincidence between the discursive representations of economic conditions and the material "reality" to which the sources refer, it seems difficult to ignore a puzzling prematurity in these congratulatory depictions/predictions of São Paulo's ascendancy. Later paeans to São Paulo's greatness would highlight the initiative and industrious character of the povo paulista; perhaps what these opening quotes indicate is "industry" and initiative of a different sort. I would suggest that such portrayals stem from the imaginative and productive ideological labors performed by members of the paulista elite—ranging from leading coffee planters to prominent liberal professionals and men of letters—who sought to distinguish themselves and their home province, early on, as not only more prosperous but also more "progressive" than other provinces/regions of Brazil.
One might argue that São Paulo's provincial capital had long enjoyed a degree of prestige incommensurate with its size and economic significance. As the home of one of only two law schools in imperial Brazil (the other located in the northeastern city of Recife), at a time when these schools effectively functioned as Brazil's main centers of higher education, São Paulo had an intellectual and academic cachet that set it apart from other small and sleepy provincial capitals. And there were elements of São Paulo's colonial history that could, with relative ease, be composed into regional myth. One of the most eminent and oft-quoted visitors to Brazil—Auguste de Saint-Hilaire—back in the 1820s had obligingly declared, in response to regional tales of colonial exploits, that the paulistas of centuries past were a "race of giants," a remark that provided priceless raw material for future generations of regional chauvinists. Even so, this hardly seems a sufficient explanation for the precocious emergence of a discourse of regional difference and superiority. Indeed, Saint-Hilaire expressed his flattering, if fanciful, estimation of colonial paulistas in sharp contrast to his portrait of the rustic and penurious independence-era provincial capital. And at least one historian of regional identity notes that the cariocas (residents of Rio) who came to study law in São Paulo during the middle decades of the nineteenth century found the "city" to be unrefined, provincial, and lacking in culture or entertainment, and were in the habit of calling the paulistas "caboclos," a term that signified rustic farmers of mixed racial backgrounds.
One way to puzzle out the apparently premature claims of regional greatness is the very timing of São Paulo's emergence as a leading zone of coffee production. In her classic study of slavery and the early coffee economy, Emília Viotti da Costa emphasized precisely this factor to explain the paulista fazendeiros' greater disposition to adopt new production techniques and experiment with other forms of labor. Having taken up the enterprise of coffee production at a moment when slavery was widely regarded as headed for extinction, the paulista planters simultaneously sought to prolong the institution's lifespan and to identify measures and strategies that would allow their fortunes to thrive even after abolition. With coffee prices booming and the Paulista West (in contrast to the older, nearly depleted Paraíba Valley coffee zone) offering seemingly endless stretches of rich, purple soil (terra roxa) for its production, the paulista elites had a palpable incentive to think beyond their immediate material circumstances. No extraordinary entrepreneurial proclivities were necessary to ascertain that a rigid reliance on established routine—whether economic or political—might shortly prove injurious to their individual and collective interests.
Returning to my earlier insinuation of "precocity," Edward Said offers us a way of understanding why the imaginative labor involved in crafting discourses of regional superiority or paulista exceptionalism began well before there were measurable markers of São Paulo's prosperity and modernity, or even before there was any consensus on what constituted modernity in this context. In his now classic study of "Orientalism" among nineteenth-century British scholars and opinion-makers, Said insisted that this discourse about the "Other," which helped to define Britain's (superior) place in the world, predated the heyday of the British Empire. In other words, it was not a post hoc reflection or justification of British imperialism, but rather an enabling rhetoric that helped constitute Britain as an imperial power.
On a considerably less global scale, I would argue that the same applies to discourses of paulista regional identity. In this vein, we need to consider the political conjuncture in which the paulistas found themselves, and how the constraints and opportunities of that conjuncture shaped the regional identity that emerged in the final decades of the Brazilian Empire. It is important to take into account not only the rapid and robust growth of São Paulo's economy—the diffusion of plantation agriculture, the massive influx of labor via the internal slave trade, the multiplication of railroad lines—but also the evident and much-remarked signs of economic stagnation or decline in other regions of the nation that had dominated Brazilian politics for most of the imperial era. This lent an increasingly regional character to the two main imperial political factions, the Conservatives and the Liberals. Regarding the monarchy as ensuring both order and the enduring influence of their home bases, elites in the provinces of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro remained stalwarts of the centralist Conservative Party. In contrast, booming provinces such as São Paulo and Pará (a center of the Amazon rubber trade) became bastions of decentralizing sentiment, whether framed by liberal or republican precepts, during what proved to be the waning decades of the Brazilian Empire.
In an earlier era, the provincial political elite might have simply pushed for more prominent positions in the emperor's court and heavier representation in the inner circles of the imperial bureaucracy. But by the late 1860s the impact of a protracted war against Paraguay, the growing pressure to initiate a process of slave emancipation, and the escalating dissension within the Liberal Party made the emperor and his court less attractive as a pole of political power. Instead, paulista elites expressed their discontent with the perceived imbalances in the distribution of political power either by promoting a more federalist and decentralized national structure or by advocating the abolition of the (centralized) monarchy and the installation of a republican-federalist system of rule. Both political visions encouraged a celebration of regional character and a conflation of regional and national greatness. Moreover, a political reform that federalized not only politics and administration, but also fiscal resources, had the additional advantage of allowing the provincial government to retain a larger share of revenue generated by the coffee boom, and to dispose of those funds in a way that would suit the interests of the planter oligarchy. By the mid-1880s, an intensified discourse of regional exceptionalism even produced a small but significant separatist movement that called for the creation of a "pátria paulista."
In his brilliant study of the historical imagination within São Paulo's "lettered" circles during the decades from 1870 to 1940, Antonio Celso Ferreira informs his readers that he intends to "follow the textual meanderings of the invention of a regional tradition, not as some kind of false consciousness, destined to serve strictly functional purposes—in such a case, ideological ones—but as an expression of an imaginary, in this case a historical one." This interpretive approach both acknowledges that all constructions of the past are, to some extent, an act of imagination, and allows the historian to move beyond merely debunking the self-congratulatory "myths" that paulista elites devised about themselves during this period. I agree with Ferreira that it is more productive to consider, first, what elements made a particular narrative or interpretation (or myth, if one prefers) viable and meaningful to those involved in its construction and dissemination, and why it resonated with a larger public. But unlike Ferreira, I would also insist on asking what ideological work that image or interpretation performed, even though a particular producer of images or narratives may have had no expressed or deliberate ideological purpose.
It may seem natural that tensions emerged once regional elites "began to sense a contradiction between their degree of economic power and their degree of political power," but such tensions require a good deal of ideological labor to be "sensed" and translated into unifying and compelling discourses of regional identity—or in this case, paulista superiority—that can transcend, or at least paper over, political, spatial, and intellectual divisions within a particular regional society. Again, the discourses favoring regional autonomy that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s reflected the rapidly changing profile of São Paulo within the Brazilian nation, but they also predated that city/state's transformation into the engine of Brazilian economic growth and modernity. In other words, these regionalist discourses were not only reactive but productive; they not only indicated changing circumstances but enabled those transformations to occur. Tying together disparate political positions and social attitudes, regionalist writings fostered a discourse of paulista exceptionalism that bolstered demands for increased provincial autonomy, and thus for greater control over the region's revenues. This, in turn, facilitated such crucial initiatives as massive provincial subsidies for European immigration once the threat of abolition appeared imminent and unavoidable, and the valorization of coffee stocks when prices on the world market threatened to plummet. Regionalist discourses not only offered paulistas a language with which to understand and explain the rapid changes occurring in their region, but also helped to shape the form and direction those changes would take, and even to produce the political and fiscal reforms that enabled those changes to occur. And further heightening the efficacy of this discourse of paulista superiority was an increasingly pejorative representation of "Other" regions of Brazil, viewed as wracked by degeneration and decline, concepts that, in the late nineteenth century, inevitably evoked notions of racial difference.
In the subsequent sections of this chapter I draw on developments in such diverse spheres as mainstream politics, public commemorations, history writing, labor recruitment, artistic expression, and travelers' accounts to explore the ongoing formulation and circulation of discourses that imagined São Paulo as whiter and more modern than the "Other" Brazil, and that increasingly conflated region and nation. These discourses of exceptionalism cannot be traced to a single social stratum, political organization, or economic interest group, but rather constituted an emerging paulista identity that could be claimed and invoked in a wide (but not unlimited) variety of contexts, and shared by segments of the regional population that might, at first glance, appear to have little else in common. To this end, the final section of the chapter focuses on some key political developments of the 1920s to highlight the considerable dissonance within São Paulo with regard to the existing republican order, and thereby call into question any interpretation of ensuing political conflicts as simply attempts to restore the "old regime."
Becoming the Povo Bandeirante
In a much-cited essay on the construction of regional identity, Pierre Bourdieu argued that regionalism is perforce "a performative discourse, which aims to impose as legitimate a new definition of the frontiers and to get people to know and recognize the region." In many locales throughout Brazil one can observe the folkloric or theatrical elements that typically enable the recognition and enactment of regional difference. Centers of Gaúcho Tradition in Rio Grande do Sul encourage locals to dress and dance in a distinctive "gaúcho" manner; Amazonians celebrate their region's unique cuisine and indigenous myths; nordestinos—and other Brazilians seeking a timeless fragment of brasilidade—venerate their folkloric musical traditions, "naïve" artistic styles, and popular poetry. The architects of paulista identity, in contrast, seem to have had few such performative elements at their disposal. But this is not because São Paulo, as a regional space, is literally deficient in the aspects of regionalism that Bourdieu cites as crucial to the cultivation of regional loyalties. It is not simply that there is no regional cuisine, or folktales, or customary dress, music, or dance—after all, these are always to some extent invented, and it is not unimaginable that zealous promoters of paulista regional culture could have "recuperated" any number of "authentic" cultural practices that would have enabled the performance of paulista identity. For example, in São Paulo, as elsewhere in Brazil, there was a literary and artistic tradition of romanticizing the caboclo or caipira—a rustic man of mixed racial heritage whose homespun wisdom and virtues symbolized the "authentic" national character. Even now, every year in the month of June, paulista children dress and dance as country folk and eat roasted corn around a bonfire during the Festival of São João, a celebration of the caboclo/caipira tradition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Color of Modernity by Barbara Weinstein. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. Paulista Modern 27
Part I: The War of São Paulo
2. Constituting Paulista Identity 71
3. The Middle Class in Arms? Fighting for São Paulo 110
4. Marianne into Battle? The Mulher Paulista and the Revolution of 1932 161
5. Provincializing São Paulo: The "Other" Regions Strike Back 192
Part II: Commemorating São Paulo
6. São Paulo Triumphant 221
7. Exhibiting Exceptionalism: History at the IV Centenário 267
8. The White Album: Memory, Identity, and the 1932 Uprising 296
Epilogue and Conclusion 331
Notes 345
Bibliography 419
Index 445
What People are Saying About This
"The Color of Modernity is a pathbreaking work. Barbara Weinstein's exhaustive research and nuanced analysis of twentieth-century Brazilian political and social history will substantially reshape the field. The Color of Modernity will be required reading for all students of modern Brazil."
"The Color of Modernity is a major work in the history of modern Brazil and an important intervention in social theories of race, modernity, regionalism, and nationalism. Barbara Weinstein's history of the construction of regional identity in twentieth-century São Paulo offers a model for building cultural theory from rigorous empirical research in social, political, and intellectual history. It is a work of startling originality by one of the preeminent historians of modern Brazil."