A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio De Janeiro - Rilegato

Fischer, Brodwyn

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0804752907 ISBN 13: 9780804752909

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2008

Riassunto

A Poverty of Rights is an investigation of the knotty ties between citizenship and inequality during the years when the legal and institutional bases for modern Brazilian citizenship originated. Between 1930 and 1964, Brazilian law dramatically extended its range and power, and citizenship began to signify real political, economic, and civil rights for common people. And yet, even in Rio de Janeiro—Brazil's national capital until 1960—this process did not include everyone. Rio's poorest residents sought with hope, imagination, and will to claim myriad forms of citizenship as their own. Yet, blocked by bureaucratic obstacles or ignored by unrealistic laws, they found that their poverty remained one of rights as well as resources. At the end of a period most notable for citizenship's expansion, Rio's poor still found themselves akin to illegal immigrants in their own land, negotiating important components of their lives outside of the boundaries and protections of laws and rights, their vulnerability increasingly critical to important networks of profit and political power. In exploring this process, Brodwyn Fischer offers a critical re-interpretation not only of Brazil's Vargas regime, but also of Rio's twentieth-century urban history and of the broader significance of law, rights, and informality in the lives of the very poor.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Brodwyn Fischer is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University.

Brodwyn Fischer is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University.

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A Poverty of Rights

Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

By BRODWYN FISCHER

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-5290-9

Contents

Political Parties Represented in Rio de Janeiro's City Council, 1947–64, xvii, 
A Note on Historical Context, xix, 
Introduction, 1, 
Part I: Rights to the Marvelous City, 
Preface to Part I: "A favela vai abaixo", 15, 
Chapter 1: The City of Hills and Swamps, 19, 
Chapter 2: Rio and Brazil's Postwar Republic, 50, 
Postscript to Part I: The Morro of Santo Antônio, 83, 
Part II: Work, Law, and Justiça Social in Vargas's Rio, 
Preface to Part II: On the Borders of Social Class, 89, 
Chapter 3: Vargas and the Voz do Povo, 91, 
Chapter 4: Word into Law: Work and Family in Vargas-Era Legislation, 116, 
Postscript to Part II: Work, Welfare, and Citizenship, 1945–64, 143, 
Part III: Rights Poverty in the Criminal Courts, 
Preface to Part III: Judicial Honor in the Morro, 151, 
Chapter 5: The Poor in Classical Criminal Law, 153, 
Chapter 6: Positivist Criminology and Paper Poverty, 186, 
Part IV: Owning the Illegal City, 
Preface to Part IV: Urban Ground, 213, 
Chapter 7: Informality in Law and Custom, 219, 
Chapter 8: The Land Wars of Rio de Janeiro, 253, 
Postscript to Part IV: "É uma cidade, no duro", 301, 
Epilogue: Poverty and Citizenship, 305, 
Statistical Appendixes, 319, 
I. Cross-Tabulations for Chapters 5 and 6, 322, 
II. Regressions on Pre-1945 Sample for Chapter 5, 326, 
III. Regressions on Post-1945 Sample for Chapter 6, 328, 
Notes, 331, 
Bibliography, 415, 
Index, 447, 

CHAPTER 1

The City of Hills and Swamps

* * *

Space, Nature, and the Colonial City

From its founding in 1565, Rio was a city forged by a stunning and challenging geography. Nestled on the jagged edges of the Bahia de Guanabara, one of South America's largest ports, the city's breathtaking setting lent itself more easily to rapturous odes than to large-scale settlement. Three distinct mountain massifs, with peaks as high as 1,024 meters, surrounded and interrupted the city, forming narrow valleys where their tentacular ridges cascaded down toward the bay. Lower hills and rocky outcroppings rose from these same valleys and jutted abruptly from the water, creating countless discrete enclaves of gently sloping land and protected sea. At the time of the city's founding, rivers riddled its territory, and the lower reaches of its valleys were covered with lakes and marshes. Exuberant tropical vegetation draped the hills and mountains. Such dramatic overlappings of mountain, river, marsh, and sea proved formidable barriers to continuous settlement; steep slopes impeded communication from one narrow valley to the next; rivers claimed their banks as flood plains in the rainy season; marshes harbored mosquitoes and rendered vast expanses of lowlands uninhabitable; and the sea could turn wild and eat away at the very city it sustained.

Settlers could hardly claim seamless possession of such unruly landscape. Early on, defensive exigencies exacerbated natural ones, and settlers clung together, briefly in a tiny beach enclave near the Pão de Açucar and then, from 1567, to the slopes of the now-flattened Morro do Castelo in central Rio. Over the following two centuries, as Rio grew from a small and relatively insignificant village to a great port city and the seat of the viceroyal government, urban residents ventured only tentatively from the small-lake-dotted plain bounded by the hills of Castelo, Santo Antônio, São Bento, and Conceição. As the city grew, its center gradually descended from the flanks of the Morro do Castelo toward the port's small docks and warehouses.

The uneven archipelago of dry land jutting up from the valley's lakes and marshes quickly proved inadequate for an increased population and intensified commercial traffic. Settlers responded by creating land from water, filling wetlands with earth. At first such efforts were haphazard and individual; but by the mid-seventeenth century, public authorities had begun to take an active role, authorizing the full drainage of lakes and the leveling of small hills. By the late eighteenth century, some of Rio's best-known landmarks had arisen from such machinations, among them the Passeio Público and the Largo da Carioca, which housed the fountain that dispensed much of the city's potable water through the mid-nineteenth century. Outside such public spaces, however, the creation of so much territory clouded an already ambiguous system of property rights, rendering its administration difficult. A system of ownership and land use that was founded on sixteenth-century sesmaria grants and on presumed municipal jurisdiction was incapable of neatly defining the rights and obligations of occupants living on land that they themselves had created.

The economic surge brought to the city by Brazil's early-eighteenth-century gold and diamond boom—Rio, among the chief exits for mineral exports, was also the main port of entry for African slaves and European consumer goods—propelled its promotion to capital of the viceroyalty in 1763. With commercial and bureaucratic expansion came influxes of fortune seekers, businessmen, slaves, and bureaucrats. By 1799, Rio was home to more than 43,000 inhabitants, more than a third of whom were enslaved. After 1808, the arrival of some 15,000 members and followers of the Portuguese royal court, fleeing the Napoleonic Wars, accelerated this growth; and the early coffee boom in Rio's hinterlands cemented it. By 1849, the city probably held around 206,000 souls, and by 1872 its population stood at 274,972 (see table 1).

In the short term, responses to this population boom varied widely. Settlers rendered land from marshes; houses and shacks pressed ever closer together; the poor improvised spaces in backyards, swamps, and hills; royal governors summarily expelled all classes of residents to make room for the royal court. In the long term, though, growth implied exodus from the colonial cradle. First snatching up rural land along colonial highways, and later filling the space between those spidery pathways through the familiar techniques of drainage, landfill, and leveling, settlers gradually expanded the city to the west, northwest, and south, creating in the process such neighborhoods as the Cidade Nova, São Cristóvão, Glória, Catete, and Botafogo. While some of this settlement was made possible by large-scale public works—examples include the channeling of the Saco de São Diogo into the Mangue Canal, which helped create the Cidade Nova, or the draining of Carioca Lake to create the Largo do Machado—most expansion was more haphazard, an incremental filling in of lots and open spaces by individuals hoping to lay claim to lands rendered from sweat, dirt, and garbage. The resulting patchy geography, as in the old city core, created a knot of confusion about everything from the definition of inhabitable land to ownership boundaries, occupancy rights, and jurisdictional responsibilities. In the colonial centuries, ownership and use rights were among the few public goods that municipal governors were authorized to distribute. Yet the peculiarities of Rio's geographical expansion rendered the precise administration of territory impossible, setting an early precedent for the approximate relationship between legal and use rights that would characterize the twentieth-century city.

Imperial Inequities

After Independence in 1822, changes in size, demography, technology, and administrative ambition further complicated Rio's inconstant social and legal geography. In the wake of Brazil's mid-nineteenth-century coffee boom and the gradual abolition of slavery, new groups began to fuel Rio's quick population growth. Slaves, freedmen, and other landless rural people came to the city in search of work and fuller freedom. Migrants from Portugal and, later, from Italy, Spain, and the Middle East swelled their ranks. At the same time, the steady emancipation of Rio's remaining slaves—and the practice of allowing some of those who were still enslaved to pay their masters for the right to live and work independently—transformed, cut, or loosened many of the ties that had ordered Rio's social world. By 1890, Rio's total population was 522,651, nearly 500,000 more than it had been in 1808. Among this population, nearly 30 percent were foreign-born, and 26 percent were migrants from other Brazilian states; 37.2 percent were of African descent. Many of these Afro-Brazilians would have been freed from slavery in 1888, in Rio or in the provinces. Many more would have been born free or lived in Rio as freed men and women for years or decades before official abolition. In 1872, the last census before abolition, only 17.8 percent of Rio's population was enslaved, down from 41.5 percent in 1849. Of the total 1890 population with declared professions, 20.9 percent worked in manufacturing, 20.7 percent in commerce, 6.3 percent in transportation, and 32 percent in domestic service (all broadly defined). The remaining workers ran the gamut from agriculture to civil service to the professions.

The ways in which Rio's social geography expressed its marked social differences became more complex as the city expanded and its demography became more intricate. Above all, physical growth, technological progress, and widening elite ambitions for social engineering transformed the degree to which public authority and large-scale private enterprise influenced patterns of urban social inequality. While some settlers could push the city's boundaries informally as before—first claiming land abutting on highways and other transportation routes, then using drainage, leveling, and landfill to create continuous territory between them—the effective integration of many new districts required more purposeful intervention. Tunnels had to be drilled, massive swamps drained, and streetcar and train tracks laid; none of this could be done without public orchestration and financing. New technologies, too, mandated increased public coordination; by the late nineteenth century, electricity, sewers, piped water, improved pavement, and new public transportation systems had become part and parcel of "urban" life, yet such services could not be acquired haphazardly or individually. And, finally, the influence of European racial and social ideologies, along with the very fact of socioeconomic diversification, helped to convince many elite Cariocas that new forms of social regulation—of criminality, of public health, of entertainment, even of architecture and urban design—were necessary to make Rio a fully "civilized" city. The power to apportion or concession public works, public services, and public social regulation made Rio's governors and bureaucrats referees in the rough, competitive jockeying that would determine which Cariocas enjoyed newly complex and valuable rights to the city. Their decisions laid the foundations for a strikingly bifurcated form of urban growth, both deepening and broadening colonial inequities.

Services and Citizenship in Republican Rio

The technical trappings of modernity spread across Rio's central districts in the second half of the nineteenth century, impulsed by both private and public initiatives. In 1854, gas lanterns began to replace the fish-oil lamps that had traditionally illuminated Carioca streets; in 1905, they in turn began to give way to electric light. In 1863, sewage pipes began to eliminate the need for so-called "tigers," generally slaves or prisoners who had hauled human and household waste for disposal in the bay. In 1876, pipes began to bring running water to private homes, replacing the colonial system of public fountains and spouts. During these same decades, more sophisticated paving techniques gradually smoothed Rio's rough stone roads and sidewalks, tramlines facilitated travel over short distances, and new parks, theaters, and shopping districts drew Cariocas of all classes and both sexes to newly alluring public spaces. The Rio of the early nineteenth century—a city of cramped, often putrid streets, where quotidian public life was the domain of vendors, washerwomen, servants, and slaves, and where public celebration was a mark of low social class and racial degradation—had begun to give way to a sophisticated, modern capital where some streets, at least, aspired to the bustle and glamour of London or Paris's elite districts.

Even in the most central neighborhoods, though, the veneer of urban modernization spread only unevenly. In the midst of Rio's downtown, two morros (hills) that had marked the boundaries of colonial settlement now signaled the limits of its so-called progress. In the words of chronicler Luiz Edmundo, writing about turn-of-the-century Rio, the morros of Santo Antônio and Castelo were "two hamlets of affliction and destitution" in the city's heart. According to Edmundo, Castelo's colonial mansions had degenerated into tenements in the wake of elite exodus to the beachfront suburbs, and the spaces between the erstwhile luxurious homes had filled with miserable wooden shacks. Santo Antônio, despite its privileged location steps from the lyric theater, was inhabited by the destitute, many of them rural migrants, most probably of African descent. The morro's houses were "improvised, made from leftovers and rags, tattered and sad as their residents"; its children were "dirty" and "ragged" or "skeletal"; its mothers were "destitute, abandoned, and exhausted by bone-grinding work"; its food, music, and spiritual life were infused with African influence. On the Morro do Castelo, photographs show lights and electric lines in the years before the hill's demolition, which occurred in 1920–21, and residents claimed that there was at least some water piped to public repositories there. But the same pictures show muddy, unpaved streets, navigated by women balancing water cans on their heads, and lined with dilapidated colonial mansions whose dark cubicles were surely not lighted, drained, or piped. On Santo Antônio, too, there may have been some services at the hill's foot, but in the shantytown above, the modern city ended; the streets were not paved or lighted, water did not run, and waste was not piped away; no streetcars eased the winding journey up the hill, and no public spaces were beautified for local promenades. In both places, the streets delineated on early-twentieth-century city maps ended at the hills' bases.

Santo Antônio and Castelo were exceptional. Few of the central districts' tenements and shacks were so concentrated as they were on those hills, and few of the city's many embryonic shantytowns were so central. But tenements, rooming houses, and backyard shacks without access to established public services riddled Rio's central districts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and there was hardly a hill in urbanized Rio that did not hold a smattering of shacks that would evolve into a modern favela. The net of service provision cast by the municipal government and the companies it granted concessions to was always woven unevenly, leaving points and patches of lack even in the urbanized center.

Outside the city's central districts, tramlines—and, to a lesser extent, passenger rail routes—exercised a seemingly magnetic pull on the expansion of public services. Tramlines, or bondes, appeared as early as the 1860s, powered first by animal traction and later by electricity. The first routes, built and controlled by private companies—many of which were also contracted by the city to provide other basic services—ran from the center to already well-heeled and well-populated regions: Glória and Catete to the south, Santa Teresa to the southwest, and São Cristóvão to the northwest. The city granted many later concessions for tram service to nearly uninhabited regions in the near north and south, without any requirement that lines be extended also to less profitable but more populated suburban regions. Land developers and speculators, many of whom also had a financial interest in the tram companies, gained title to many of the old agricultural lands in these new areas, subdividing them and gradually selling them off. By the second decade of the twentieth century, fully serviced southern residential districts such as Jardim Botânico, Laranjeiras, Gávea, Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon had already begun to fill with wealthy foreigners and Cariocas. To the north, speculation combined with industrialization to create the middle- and working-class neighborhoods of Andaraí, Tijuca, Vila Isabel, Grajaú, and Maracanã.

Trams not only allowed residence and work in distant enclaves but also spearheaded other types of urban modernization. In the southern beachfront neighborhoods, and along the lines traced by the bondes that led toward them, speculators, in conjunction with city officials, began to create models of tropical urbanism. They filled in swamplands, blasted tunnels, laid out roads, and brought in piped water, drainage, electricity, and pavement. The sumptuous houses and beachfront palacetes built on these lands quickly became the beacons of a new ideal of tropical elegance, centered on the natural beauty of the mountains and the sea and the belle époque exaggeration of the residential architecture. As in the urban core, however, this rush of urbanization was never continuous or complete. It tended to concentrate around the tramlines and the increasingly valuable lands immediately surrounding them, ignoring vast tracts of swampy or mountainous terrain—stretches of which gradually began to fill with rough streets lined with humble houses or even wooden shacks, whose presence marked the boundaries of the sunny modernity sold by developers of the southern tramway bairros.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Poverty of Rights by BRODWYN FISCHER. Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804752907
• ISBN 13: 9780804752909
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 464
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile