Brazil Archives - Page 3 of 3

Mapping the Earth, Mapping the Air

The history of aviation is filled with heroes and their machines. Exhibits in the many air & space museums spread around the United States are filled with pictures of young pilots, proudly posing by the side of their aircraft before attempting some feat to enter into a long list of “firsts.” While we often focus on these brave characters and their daring flights, aviation became what it is today through more mundane activities than risking lives, performing stunts, or breaking records. The pilots who aided cartographers and engineers in the production of special aviation maps represented a much bigger contribution to the expansion, reliability, and increasing safety of air transportation.

Knowing one’s exact location was among the greatest challenges of the human push into the air, as it is in the exploration of any new frontier, before there were such things as aeronautical charts, that is, maps for aerial navigation. It is easy for a generation with pocket sized access to Google Maps to underestimate how different our world looks from above if you have only seen it from ground level. Pilots in the 1910s and 1920s scrambled to adapt any maps in existence to use in their cramped, loud and open cockpits.

Railroad, highway, land survey and other maps were often cut up into smaller strips depicting the exact routes pilots had to navigate. These “strip maps,” chopped and annotated from various sources are a common archival find among the possessions of pilots from the first half of the twentieth century.

This strip map shown here is a nautical chart that was cut to only show the area needed by the pilot, then folded and punch holed to be stored in a binder for easy manipulation.

Because strip maps were cut out from maps made for other forms of transportation, pilots were often forced to follow routes that already existed. American Air Mail pilots, for example, followed railroads, known then among pilots as the “iron compass.” Even with a track marking the path on the ground, pilots still required some help along the way. That could be farmers painting navigational aids on the roof of a barn, or making bonfires and installing beacons to help pilots through the night. Seaplanes flying along the coast, like the ones Pan Am operated on the New York – Buenos Aires route during the 1930s, could count on the same infrastructure sailors had used for hundreds of years. They used nautical charts, which not only showed them the coastline, but also any lighthouses along it. This early aeronautical chart was intended to be used by pilots navigating the coast around Rio de Janeiro. It was obviously made from a nautical chart, but inland features useful for aerial navigation were also added.

These adaptations made from railroad or nautical maps worked fine – so long as one only intended to fly up and down the coast or along railroads, a serious limitation on the promise of untethered transportation implied in aviation. It only took a sudden fog to throw a pilot off his railroad track with no means to find his way back. For seaplane pilots that same fog could cover coastal mountains, and since nautical charts showed the depth of the ocean but not the height of mountains, that meant serious trouble – especially as weather forecasts were often lacking in both frequency and precision. Even more mundane problems plagued pilots, especially in the days of open cockpits, when a map could fly right out of a pilot’s hand into the open air.

This aeronautical chart from the late 1930s tries to include useful meteorological information, by adding a little angel blowing the wind in the statistically prevailing direction.

Before real aeronautical charts became available, pilots often worked around these limitations by adding their own bit of navigational knowledge to maps for their own reference or to share with other pilots. Archival copies of adapted strip maps used by pilots before the 1930s often had a variety of small annotations, pointing out where one could find fuel, farms with fields large enough for landing, the height of dangerous peaks, and even descriptions of geographic features useful for navigation. This kind of information, first informally added to maps by pilots, was eventually formalized in aeronautical charts.

The notes on the two maps above were added by a pilot prospecting an area for an airline, noting the heights of the mountains and the conditions of landing fields – two pieces of information unavailable on the nautical chart which he used.

By World War II, many places with developed aviation industries already had maps that could be used for aerial navigation, charts that helped pilots interpret the ground below to understand what they were flying over. But as airplanes flew higher and higher, aeronautical charts would come to represent airspace three-dimensionally, showing different areas of airspace, restricted or reserved for different purposes at different altitudes. Finally, with the expansion of radio-navigation towers, even invisible radio highways were depicted on these maps, so that pilots could use special instruments to follow radio signals, decreasing the need for visual references on the ground altogether. Here you can see a modern aeronautical chart showing many invisible features, such as airways created by radio signals and divisions of airspace at different altitudes.

The modern aeronautical chart, rather than being only a visual representation of the ground, has become a truly three-dimensional representation of space.

Figure sources:

Amelia Earhart: Wikimedia Commons

Figure 1 – Humphrey Toomey Collection, Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida

Figure 2 – T. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil

Figure 3 – Courtesy of Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress

Figures 4 & 5 – Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida

Figure 6 – Wikimedia Commons

For more on aeronautical history:

Akerman, James. Cartographies of Travel and Navigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Corn, Joseph. The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

The National Air and Space Museum has an online and physical exhibit on the history of early Air Mail pilots and navigation.

A Dangerous Idea

by Miriam Bodian

In 1645, a young Jew who had been captured in Portuguese Brazil was brought to Lisbon and tried by the Inquisition for heresy. He had been reluctantly baptized by his parents in France, where the practice of Judaism was forbidden. His trial, in many ways so much like other inquisitorial trials, is different from any other trial I know of in one respect: The “heretic,” Isaac de Castro Tartas, defended his right to practice Judaism on the basis of a universal natural right to freedom of conscience. This was a bold defense but it ultimately failed; he was burned at the stake in 1647, at the age of nineteen. But his long exchanges with his inquisitors on religious authority and individual conscience are preserved in a lengthy dossier housed today in the Portuguese National Archives, and tell us much about the hopes and fears around this issue.

Anonymous engraver, 17th century. The text reads “Method for burning those condemned by the Inquisition” and depicts the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon, Portugal.

Today, people who live in democratic societies take religious freedom for granted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most Europeans found the idea of “freedom of conscience” deeply threatening. How could the fabric of society withstand competing religious ideas? What would convince people to live moral lives in the absence of a single, state-supported church? The anxiety Europeans felt about religious freedom impeded the struggle to achieve that freedom. Isaac de Castro’s trial vividly reflects the great divide between the few who supported this idea and the powerful authorities who rejected it. The inquisitors’ views about religious authority is often disparaged; but even in 2011 it is just as important to understand the mentality of the inquisitors as it is to understand the arguments of Isaac de Castro.

Castro defended himself by arguing that even if the inquisitors chose to regard him as a baptized heretic, he was not guilty of heresy, “because an act that is done in accordance with one’s conscience cannot be judged culpable, and the act I have and will continue to do – the act of professing Judaism – is done according to the dictates of my conscience.” Castro supported his argument by describing his experience as a practicing Jew in Amsterdam and Dutch Brazil. These were exceptional environments in which freedom of conscience had been written into law. The inquisitors would have been well aware that Dutch society was thriving and had not been torn apart by the religious diversity of its inhabitants.

The Kahal Zur Israel synagogue in Recife, Brazil was the first Jewish congregation in the New World. It was founded in 1636 during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco.

But the inquisitors were imbued with a medieval perspective on conscience, according to which individual conscience was “in error” if it differed from the teachings of the Catholic Church. Castro was accused of ignoring the Church’s authority and presumptuously adhering to his own personal beliefs. Confronted with this accusation, he strategically abandoned his argument as an individual and adopted an authoritarian counter-view. He argued that as a Jew by ancestry, and having been circumcised, he was bound to observe the Law of Moses – an argument invoking (Jewish) religious authority that met the inquisitors on their own ground. This concession by Castro,however, proved fatal. The inquisitors argued that baptism, regardless of ancestry, obligated Castro to observe the teachings of the Catholic Church. Having invoked religious authority, Castro had opened himself to attack. If “conscience” meant obedience to doctrines that did not come from within, as he had been pressured to admit, was he not bound to the first obligation he had incurred in his life, that is, baptism?

A great deal of pain, suffering, and experimentation have accompanied the process by which we have come to regard religious beliefs as a matter of individual conscience. But to understand events in our own time, it is important to understand that such an idea is not at all obvious – that for many centuries this was an idea that few could even imagine. An examination of the intense struggle in early modern Europe between those who defended religious authority and those who resisted it brings into focus the great difficulty involved in establishing a principle of religious freedom. It may help us to understand the frequent failure of well-intentioned efforts to impose an idea cherished in the western world, but alien to people conditioned to accept religious authority and to condone the persecution of religious nonconformists.

You may also like:

Historian Richard Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition: an Historical Revision (1999) offers a nuanced reassessment of the Spanish Inquisition’s role in history.

Yale Professor of Brazilian history Stuart Schwartz examines religious toleration in All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2009).

Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (1999).

Images via Wikimedia Commons

Hollywood’s Brazil: Rio (2011)

It’s no coincidence that Hollywood has a thing for Rio de Janeiro. The city’s breathtaking landscape enlivens the most uninspired camerawork. Its pulsating musical rhythms spice up any soundtrack. Rio’s favelas (slums), with their arresting squalor, stoke movie-goers’ fears and fantasies. And its purported libertinage titillate viewers’ libidos. Masters such as Orson Wells (It’s All True, 1942) and Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious, 1946) chose Rio de Janeiro for their backdrop, while James Bond duked it out with Jaws on the Sugar Loaf cable car in Moonraker (1979). Yet whether the objective was Flying Down to Rio (1933) or to Blame it on Rio (1987), for decades the city has also served as a cinematic protagonist: a place that unbinds social strictures and forgives moral lapses. Much of Hollywood’s romance with Latin America and Latin Americans has played on these stereotypes, and Rio’s sensorial comparative advantage long secured its niche in the tourist and film market.

The 3-D computer-animated film Rio (2011) tells the story of Blu, a Spix’s macaw, smuggled out of tropical Rio de Janeiro as a chick and raised in frigid Minnesota.

A Brazilian ornithologist, seeking to save the endangered species, convinces Blu’s owner that she must allow the bird to be returned to Rio to mate with a female. It is not love at first sight. Blu is awkward, cerebral, and flightless (symptomatic of freedoms stunted and sentiments dulled by years of Americanization).

Jewel, the (Latin) female, is free-spirited, impulsive, fiery, and at-home with nature. As Blu and Jewel struggle, however, to elude the evil Afro-Brazilian favela bird-smugglers who pursue them, their love blossoms. Escaping from captivity, Blu learns to fly, the birds mate, and they live happily ever after with their brood in the lush Brazilian forest.

In some ways Rio reflects changes that have overtaken Hollywood in the last decades. The city’s landscape, favelas, and Carnaval continue to command top billing, yet they are now dazzlingly recast via jaw-dropping computer animation. The movie also demonstrates advances that Latin Americans and Latinos have made in U.S. cinema: Carlos Saldanha, the film’s director and story writer, is Brazilian. Yet the movie’s depictions also illustrate how stereotypes about Brazil continue to thrive in, and because of, the cinema.

No one really seems to work in Rio: they are too busy partying in Carnaval, going to the beach, hang-gliding, or thieving. Afro-Brazilians are cast exclusively as thugs, pranksters, or dancers. Moreover, the film’s fetish for natural landscapes, colonial architecture, and favelas gives a skewed view of a multifaceted, modern metropolis. In the end, nature is so overpowering in the story (and, by extension, Brazilian culture) that the one Brazilian who has a legitimate job—the ornithologist—intermittently is compelled to incarnate birds.

Given Americans’ longstanding penchant for seeing Brazilians (and Latin Americans) as anti-modern and closer to nature, it is unsurprising that Rio has been a commercial and even a critical success in the United States. Perhaps more intriguing is the mixed reception the film has received in Brazil. Although some critics slammed the film’s unfavorable depiction of their compatriots, many Brazilian bloggers hailed the movie. For some, the city’s headlining a major Hollywood film was enough of a nationalistic triumph. Yet those viewers seduced or unfazed by the film’s stereotypes—whether Brazilians’ purportedly carefree, lackadaisical, or sensuous demeanor; the exuberance of tropical nature; or the malevolence of Afro-Brazilian favela dwellers—also underscore how such myths about national character are deeply entrenched in Brazil as well.

Read more about Brazil on Not Even Past, here, here, and here.

Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil by Bryan McCann (2004)

National identity has been both a dream and a nightmare for historians. When they attempt to historicize the concept, it becomes a thick web of actors, motives, and unintended consequences. Exploring the “invention of tradition” underlying modern national identities proves an appealing but extremely difficult task. In Hello, Hello Brazil, Bryan McCann offers a suggestive method to master this process. By tracing the emergence of Brazilian popular music, he successfully shows how the “traditional” samba was composed in an unequal exchange between regional musicians and composers, state officers, recording managers, radio producers, and radio broadcasters. The history of modern Brazilian music must be understood, then, within the broader debate on “Brazilianness.”

Between the late 1920s and 1950s, three processes converged to foster the emergence of the new popular music: industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratic centralization. At the same time, the cultural context saw an intensification of exchanges between high culture and popular innovators, a rapid growth of the broadcasting industry, and an activist government under the Vargas regime that aimed to manage cultural production. McCann inserts the history of the samba into the broader struggles around the definition of tradition, authenticity, and national music. He shows that samba was at the center of a broad political and cultural transformation, that allowed converting a “small collection of popular musical forms into both a thriving industry and a consistently vital mediation on the nature and contradictions of Brazilianness.” For example, the quest for authenticity connected with the rise of the samba included purist understandings of tradition that saw the American presence as a threat to Brazilian folklore. While the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was an active defender of “authentic” Brazilian music and an enemy of international influences, another of Brazil’s famous musical nationalists, Ari Barroso, pointed out that “international influence was inescapable.”

Although the opinions were divided, McCann insists that Brazilians were not immune to American influence, having instead an ambivalent relationship with its seductive and repellent qualities. McCann argues that far from erasing Brazilian traditional music, as Villa-Lobos feared, the international presence fostered the quest for authenticity. An appealing desire for the “exotic” led U.S. record labels like Columbia to make recordings of the “most legitimate Brazilian music.” Furthermore, for MacCann, American record executives did not attempt to “Americanize” Brazilian music. Instead, they sought to make the Brazilian popular cultural market similar to that of the United States.

In brief, McCann offers a textured history of the actors, arenas, and trends that played a role in the making of a national music. Hello, Hello shows how these actors intersected to create the discourse that produced new Brazilian popular music. The Vargas era has been widely explored, the process of Americanization of Brazil during his regime also has received scholarly attention, and more recent scholarship has explored the “unevenness” of these exchanges. Nonetheless, MacCann’s book offers a subtle exploration of the entangled processes that led to the emergence of Brazil’s popular music, drawing in the significance of folkloric realms, quests for authenticity, an ambiguous appropriations in its development. It is the “texture” of this process that McCann offers to the reader.

A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janiero by Brodwyn Fischer (2010)

by Salvador Salinas

Brodwyn Fischer’s A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janiero explores the heterogeneous class of the urban poor in Brazil’s national capital from 1920 to 1950. At the center of the book are the favelas, Rio’s infamous shantytowns, where the majority of the urban poor resided. Although the favelados engaged the legal and political system to win property rights for their makeshift neighborhoods, they failed to achieve full civil rights, which compounded the problems they faced as impoverished city dwellers. Using a wide array of sources such as criminal court cases, oral histories, samba lyrics, newspapers, legal codes, and the correspondence of presidents, prefects, bureaucrats, and governors, the book presents several paradoxes and contradictions. Most twentieth-century Brazilian laws were written in a universal language, yet the urban (and rural) poor were excluded from full citizenship. Marginalized, Rio’s poor still played a crucial role in city politics. City ordinances outlawed favela settlements, but the residents of the shantytowns, in many cases, gained recognition of their neighborhoods and remained anchored to Rio’s hillsides. Informality, however, became critical to the poor’s pursuit of rights. Civil rights in twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro became privileges of social and economic class, not universal entitlements.

From the beginning, the capital’s poor residences were left out of the city’s planned development. Sanitation campaigns in the early 1900s pushed the destitute to the city’s fringes – the hillside and suburbs.

The Rocinha favela, one of the largest and oldest in Rio.

These neighborhoods were outlawed because of sanitary conditions and building codes, and then received little or no public sanitation, running water, paved roads, electricity, or public transportation. Yet in-migration to Rio in the 1930s and 1940s caused a housing crunch to turn into a housing crisis as the population of the illegal city reached some one million inhabitants. The favelados demanded public services, and politicians at least paid lip service to the causes of Rio’s poorest residents. Illegality, in other words, became a cheap form of political currency.

The culture of the poor and their ideas of work and family differed from those of President Vargas, the so-called “father of the poor,” which further marginalized them. The Vargas regime in the 1940s-50s, extolled workers as vanguards of economic progress and national identity, but rarely dignified occupations such as washerwomen, janitors, and servants. While the regime idealized women as housewives, poor women often worked all day to sustain their families and lived in informal unions with their partners.

Rio’s Vidigal favela viewed at dusk.

Furthermore, the majority of poor workers were excluded from Vargas’s labor legislation because they could not meet the requirements or obtain the numerous official documents necessary to gain labor benefits. The documents were expensive, the bureaucratic red tape was complex and the process slow, and many poor people did not even have birth certificates to begin the whole process.

Documents, in other words, became passports to citizenship. But the kinds of work the poor performed were not even reflected in the worker legislation, which favored industrial labor.

In the courts as well, Brazilians received differential treatment based on social and economic standing. Middle class defendants were more likely to have their cases dismissed, while the poor were more likely to receive guilty verdicts and harsher punishments. Again, the fact that the poor lacked documents to prove their citizenship undermined their judicial identity status.

By honing in on the diverse group of the urban poor and their relation to the state through civil rights, Fischer explains why and how the destitute of Rio de Janeiro remained only partial citizens. The book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the connections between politics and economics and anyone concerned with democracy in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Brazil.

Further reading:

The Favela Painting Project

Life in the Rocinha Favela

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil by João José Reis (2007)

by Felipe Cruz

Death and the dead were omnipresent in nineteenth century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Exuberant funeral processions marched festively in the streets and graves filled the church floors where parishioners stood. Since so many died, death was incorporated into many aspects of life in the city – and the living spent considerable effort in preparing for their own deaths and the deaths of others. In explaining why a crowd of over a thousand people revolted against and destroyed a cemetery in 1836, João Reis’ Death is a Festival brings to life the act of dying in Salvador.

Unlike the numerous revolts that broke out in the preceding two decades, the Cemiterada rebellion in 1836 was not carried out specifically by slaves, federalists, or soldiers. Although people of varying classes and colors took part, it was spearheaded by religious brotherhoods. They revolted against a law forbidding burial in churches and within city limits, a law that granted a burial monopoly to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. Distancing the dead from the living did not sit well with brotherhood members who wanted to be buried in their own churchyards and provoked all other parties involved in the business of dying.

The government had an arguably legitimate reason for passing such an explosive law: miasma. Miasma, or the gas emanating from putrefying organic matter, was considered dangerous and the subject was all the rage in the medical literature of the time. Doctors in Bahia’s Medical School, trained in France, were appalled by the burial of corpses emanating miasma in church floors. In their medical journals, they often described the dangerous odors of corpses in poorly ventilated churches, and much worse, the mass graves where slaves were buried, as the cause of the high mortality rate in the city. According to the medical profession, the dead in the church’s floor brought death to the city – while to many of its residents, being buried in sacred dirt (even if miasmatic) was crucial to a good afterlife.

João Reis sketches the colorful world of Bahian death and makes a good case for understanding the motives of the rebels on other than financial grounds. Analyzing estate, brotherhood and parish records as well as travelers’ accounts, wills and testaments Reis shows where people preferred to be buried, how they paid for numerous masses to avoid purgatory, and then redeemed their consciences by freeing slaves and paying debts. Wakes brought together great numbers of people, known and unknown to the deceased, including professional prayers and wailing women. Funeral marches were as extensive as one could afford, some including dozens of priests, orchestras and beggars paid to add to the procession. In unearthing the details of funerals, the book also shows how death reaffirmed social distinctions: whether one was carried to the afterlife in a hammock or sumptuous coffin, buried in the hospital’s graveyard or the main cathedral, such differences spoke volumes about class and race. Death is a Festival is a truly seminal work, elegantly written and skillfully translated, and a great read for those interested in the history of medicine and the practices associated with death in Brazil.

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