The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics
408
The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics
408eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/26/2015 |
| Series: | The Latin America Readers |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 19 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil's Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life, also published by Duke University Press.
Paulo Knauss is Professor of History at Universidade Federal Fluminense (Niterói, Brazil) and the author of Rio de Janeiro da pacificação: Franceses e portugueses na disputa colonial.
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The Rio de Janeiro Reader
History, Culture, Politics
By Daryle Williams, Amy Chazkel, Paulo Knauss
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7506-7
CHAPTER 1
Colonial Rio
The history of Rio de Janeiro as a European colonial city begins in the sixteenth century. A human history of the region, however, begins earlier. A variety of allied Tupi-speaking clans, living in small villages situated among subtropical forests and wetlands, settled the region of southeastern Brazil that would give rise to a world metropolis that the Portuguese named São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro (Saint Sebastian of Rio de Janeiro). Numbering more than fifteen thousand at the turn of the sixteenth century, the Tamoios lived on the shores and islands of Guanabara Bay. These native peoples hunted, fished, and cultivated manioc, beans, and peanuts in cleared woodlands. Their human footprint produced substantial secondary-growth forests.
Although indigenous Rio was not physically or spiritually "conquered" along the lines of Aztec Tenochtitlán and Inca Cuzco, Portuguese mariners and clerics, alongside other Europeans, aspired to dominate and Christianize the natives and their lands. The outsiders' demands for brazilwood exacted a heavy toll on the landscape and its indigenous peoples. War and epidemic disease caused substantial disruption to Tamoio lifeways. In the hinterlands, thousands of Indian or other ethnic groups were forcibly settled in villages (aldeamentos), where they could be more easily overseen and converted to Catholicism. Many were periodically drafted into Rio's early colonial labor market.
The large bay that Europeans initially mistook for the mouth of a great river gave the future city its curious name, Rio de Janeiro (River of January). That name stuck as an artifact of the misapprehension typical of the colonial enterprise in the Americas. Significantly, a variant of Tupian terms for "sea" also stuck, and the European settlers adopted the word "Guanabara" for a bay surrounded by impressive topographic features, many named after Catholic saints. A river that ran from the Tijuca forests into the bay acquired the toponym "Carioca," understood by many linguists to be Tupi for "white man's house." Rio's spectacular "natural" landscape was born from this combination of indigenous local knowledge, the aspirations of early modern Europeans, and the expansion of the Christian faith.
Portuguese sailors are believed to have first entered Guanabara Bay in 1502, two years after the first contact with Amerindians residing near present-day Porto Seguro, Bahia. Although precious metals were not found anywhere near the bay, the width and depth of the body of water, its multitude of small islands and inlets, and the bounty of nearby forested lands made it attractive for colonial enterprise. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese experimented with various largely unsuccessful modes of indirect dominion over lands between the Atlantic Ocean and the line of demarcation drawn in 1494 between Castile and Portugal. In 1549 the Portuguese Crown assumed direct control of all Brazil under a form of royal administration that paralleled measures taken by Castilian rivals elsewhere in the New World. Throughout Portuguese America, the Crown confronted the immense challenge of establishing stable, orderly settlements, principally near the Atlantic coastline. Indeed, the first governor-general prohibited settlers from venturing into terra firme without formal permission. The population of colonial Brazil remained largely coastal until the eighteenth century, when a mining boom summoned waves of settlers and slaves to the interior of the southeast, bolstering Rio's wealth and prestige as the coastal city closest to the mining district.
Portugal's European rivals also sought a foothold in Guanabara Bay. Ships of many flags sailed along the Brazilian coast, stopping in the bay to rest and restock. Brazilwood, the source of a prized dyestuff, was especially important for French trading expeditions. The French Crown actively opposed having been overlooked in the division of the New World between the Iberian powers, and French interlopers forged alliances with the Tamoios. Together, the two groups prevented Portuguese governor Tomé de Souza from disembarking at Guanabara Bay in 1552. In the absence of secure Portuguese dominion, the bay became the site of France's short-lived South American colony, known as France Antarctique. The French enterprise, commanded by Vice Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, included Huguenots seeking refuge from the religious strife of the Counter-Reformation. The presence of Protestants in the midst of a nominally Catholic realm gave the Portuguese justification to mount a successful campaign to expel the Villegagnon colony. On March 1, 1565, the city of Rio was officially established by Portuguese commander Estácio de Sá, who had been sent to put the definitive brake on French pretensions in southeastern Brazil.
The Crown of Portugal administered its vast American colony from Salvador da Bahia, the seat of the viceroyalty. Yet much of Brazil played a marginal role in the larger global empire ruled from Lisbon. In its first half century of formal existence, the city of Rio was a forsaken place. The first settlement at the base of Sugarloaf Mountain was little more than a provisional fort. Once permanent occupation moved to the Morro do Castelo, a true colonial city took root around the church dedicated to Saint Sebastian, patron saint of the city. Upon nearby hills named São Bento, Santo Antônio, and Conceição sprouted homes and churches. As the risk of another French incursion abated, colonists came down from the hills and settled the lands with better access to water. With the labor of Indians, enslaved Africans, and Portuguese exiles, among others, dirt streets, rudimentary squares, convents, churches, and storehouses grew up. Dwellings for Rio's poorer residents were humble houses with beaten earth floors. Those who were better off constructed multistory buildings, called sobrados, whose upper floors were used for the family's dwelling and the ground floor for a shop, storehouse, or slave quarters. Small rural plots, called chácaras, grew the foodstuffs that fed the city and built the local economy.
The three main religious orders to take on the Christianization of Rio — the Benedictines, Franciscans, and Jesuits — were instrumental to colonial urbanism. The Jesuits were especially prominent land- and slaveholders in and around the colonial city. In the construction of places of worship and seclusion, the patronage of the arts, and learning, the Society of Jesus and other orders exerted great influence over the aesthetic and intellectual development of urban life. By the late seventeenth century, an ornate Baroque style helped transform the first improvised chapels into resplendent temples, including the Igreja da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco da Penitência, located atop the Morro de Santo Antonio and the Benedictine monastery that sat atop Morro de São Bento, right above the bay. Church influence extended to much more than the built environment and sacred art. The Christian faith formed a fundamental part of daily life for Rio's residents. Private lives were devoted to prayer, devotional work, and Catholic moral codes. Public life revolved around the annual cycle of feast days and the observance of the Sabbath. Many ostensibly Christian events often assumed profane dimensions, especially when participants incorporated traditions of popular religiosity and festivity originating in Iberia, Africa, and Amerindian America.
Colonial Rio was a city of waters. Rainfall was generally abundant, and residents lived off the bounty of the saltwater bay, brackish swamps, and freshwater streams and rivers. Nevertheless, early colonial administrators confronted the challenges of regulating common access to potable water, especially in an urbanizing core surrounding the early hillside settlements. As demand outstripped the availability of resources suitable for domestic life, the landscape was altered by public works to channel the Carioca River and other waterways toward areas dedicated to residential, religious, military, and commercial land uses. By the end of the eighteenth century, a huge Roman-style aqueduct delivered waters from the Carioca to the base of Morro de Santo Antonio. Now known as the Arcos da Lapa, the aqueduct is an enduring feat of colonial civil engineering.
Most people got around the city on foot, but the privileged few traveled by sedan chairs, often borne on the backs of the enslaved Africans who built, fixed, and serviced the city. Rio's peculiar geography — many forested hills and mountains, limited navigable rivers — made long-range travel beyond the shores of Guanabara Bay difficult. Connections to the hinterland were precarious, along short and narrow dirt trails largely run by muleteers. Yet colonial Rio emerged as a global city, linked to Europe, Asia, and Africa though the circulation of people, goods, and ideas that traveled by ship. The city served as entrepôt for a range of commodities — wines and cane brandies, commercialized foodstuffs, precious metals and gemstones, valuable spices, and enslaved laborers — coveted in regional and global markets.
Labor scarcity was a perennial problem, leading Portuguese settlers and authorities in Rio to adopt a range of recruitment strategies rehearsed in southern Iberia, the Atlantic Islands, and the Brazilian northeast. Such arrangements ranged from convict labor to outright chattel bondage. The labors of enslaved Indians and Africans were essential to the guarantee of basic provisioning and the construction of the rudiments of Christian civilization. The success of the Portuguese colonial enterprise in Rio was always dependent on strategic alliances with multicultural male brokers, often born from sexual relations between European men and indigenous women in the Americas and African women across the Atlantic. Such figures gave rise to the large class of mixed-blood, multicultural colonial subjects called a wide variety of terms, including mestiço, mulato, cabra, and caboclo.
Despite Portugal's relative disinterest in its American colony and the greater importance of agrarian over urban life, New World cities like Rio were instruments of royal absolutism. The colonial cityscape contained many symbols of imperial authority, including the whipping post, the pillory, and the royal coat of arms. The supreme representative of the reigning monarch was the governor-general and, after 1763, the viceroy. Yet the city and its residents also enjoyed a certain level of local self-regulation. A municipal council (the Câmara Municipal) exercised powers of fiscal autonomy. The locally born served in militias and staffed Church offices. The built and visual environments were largely made by the hands of the Brazilian-born. When local prerogative might be threatened — by tax reform, predatory corsairs, or perceived violations of customary rights — the residents of Rio were known to raise their voices (and sometimes their weapons) in the defense of their self-interest.
The agro-commercial production that developed in Rio's immediate hinterlands was a source of everyday violence punctuated by episodes of upheaval. Order was largely maintained by private means; there was no effective royal police force or constabulary until the nineteenth century. Bush captains plied the forests in search of fugitive slaves. The labor regime and colonial legal distinctions in this highly stratified society were maintained through a mixture of private discipline, religious devotion, and racial and gendered bars on participation in various aspects of public life. The prevalence of everyday violence in all registers of urban life, including production, cannot be underestimated. Public punishment, from executions in the street to whippings at the pillory, were common. The wanton cruelties of the slave market established at Valongo in 1779 exemplified the brutality of a wider slave society entering a phase of expansion in the late eighteenth century. Yet recent archeological evidence of human remains excavated at Valongo reveal that enslaved West and West Central Africans brought with them sacred objects and other manifestations of culture that survived the Middle Passage. Thus we must consider the rising profile of slave imports through the lens of a city's evolution into a polyglot, multiethnic extension of Africa and African cultures in the Americas.
Animated by a zeal for reform, spectacle, and prosperity, the Portuguese Crown and colonial governors oversaw many changes to the economic and social order of the city over the course of the eighteenth century. Rio's rise as one of the principal whaling stations of the South Atlantic reflected wider shifts afoot in economic relations that accompanied the intensification of transatlantic trade in precious metals and enslaved bodies. In recognition of the shifting political and economic geography of Brazil, the viceregal capital was transferred from Salvador to Rio in 1763. The changing intellectual and cultural milieu that came to Rio along with the viceroy, high judges, and clerics could be disquieting, especially as royal agents grew suspicious of the influences of radical ideas circulating throughout the Atlantic, including the aspirations of republicanism, personal liberties, and antislavery that flowed from British North America, Saint-Domingue, and France. The residents of late colonial Rio witnessed the censorship, interrogation, and punishment of lettered men and even artisans who were drawn to such "dangerous" ideas imported from overseas.
By the late eighteenth century, Brazil had experienced a dramatic ascent within the Portuguese imperial system, becoming wealthier than the metropole. European powers excluded from direct trade with Portuguese America clamored for access to Brazilian commodities and strategic ports like Rio. When Napoleon's armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula in late 1807, the Portuguese royal family took flight to Brazilian shores. The event opened up Brazilian ports to foreign trade and ended colonial-era restrictions on local manufacturing, printing, and mapmaking. The news that Prince Regent João and his entourage were headed to Rio precipitated enormous excitement among colonials who had never seen the monarch. In March 1808, the principals of the House of Bragança began their prolonged residence in Rio, making the city the main stage for Portuguese America's peculiar path toward independence. A former colonial backwater assumed its place of privilege as the once and future capital of the independent Brazilian nation-state.
A Navigator's Diary
Pero Lopes de Sousa
On December 3, 1530, the Portuguese nobleman Martim Afonso de Sousa (c. 1500–1571) set out from Lisbon to extend his sovereign's dominion into southern Brazil. Eventually traveling as far south as the River Plate, the expedition stopped at various points along the Atlantic coast, including Guanabara Bay, where Sousa founded the first permanent European settlement in the region. Pero Lopes de Sousa (1497–1539), the commander's brother, registered the expedition's three-month stay on lands that would become part of the city of Rio.
The precise location of the Sousa settlement remains a matter of some controversy. Gaspar de Lemos, an earlier Portuguese navigator who entered Guanabara Bay at the start of 1502, originated the confusion of the "River of January," but his stay was brief, and the expedition had left no permanent way-finder. Lopes de Sousa, who also used the term "river," may have been familiar with a disputed account of the Brazilian coastline by Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512). In any case, Lopes de Sousa's diary of the 1531 expedition, excerpted here, registered the construction of a fortified structure on the bay shore. He noted the abundance of provisions and the easy access to shipbuilding materials. The traveler's account also contained observations about the geography of the islands and mountains that surround the bay as well as the Portuguese mariners' contacts with local Indians, described as a "gentle people" ( gentil gente ) who engaged in a friendly exchange of products and gifts. Although the diary takes note of an unnamed Indian noble who informed the Portuguese about gold and silver near the far-off Paraguay River, the account seems questionable, as precious metals were rare in Rio until late in the seventeenth century, when gold was discovered in an inland region that came to be known as the captaincy of Minas Gerais (General Mines). Nevertheless, Lopes de Sousa associated Guanabara Bay with the potential for economic profit in one of the earliest written records of a European presence in Rio and its environs.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
A Note on Translations, Spelling, and Monetary Units xiPlace-Names and Way-Finding xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: The Marvelous City 1
I. Colonial Rio 9
The Early Colonial Period, 1502–1720s
The Viceregal Period, 1763–1808
The Transfer of the Portuguese Court (1808–1820s)
II. Imperial Rio 73
The Independence Era, 1820s–1830s
A Neutral Municipality, 1834–1889
III. Republican Rio 139
The Federal District, 1889–1930
The Federal District, 1930–1960
IV. Recent Rio 235
The City and State of Guanabara, 1960–1975
After the Fusion, 1975–1980s
Contemporary Rio, 1990s–2015
Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing 367
Acknowledgments of Copyrights and Sources 375
Index 383
What People are Saying About This
"A great city deserves a great reader, and this one rises to the occasion. From the colonial outpost to the modern megalopolis, from emperors to the humblest of residents, this reader offers snapshots of Rio from every angle. Chico Buarque described Cariocas as 'completely crazy citizens, with truckloads of reason.' This book captures the craziness and the reason."
"Prepared by three leading Rio de Janeiro scholars, The Rio de Janeiro Reader offers a sweeping and in-depth exploration of the city. Lively and interesting, it provides a gateway into understanding the social, economic, political, and cultural diversity of the city over the last 500 years."