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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

A Poverty of Rights, Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Brodwyn Fischer (2008)

By Marcus Oliver Golding

Getúlio Vargas, President of Brazil from 1930-1945, is often credited as the champion of the Brazilian working class during the twentieth century. His policies led to the progressive industrialization of Brazil and to a barrage of labor regulations that protected workers’ rights. However, not everyone benefited equally from these laws. Thousands of poor Cariocas (Rio de Janeiro’s residents) who labored outside the formal economy were not legally considered workers and faced great challenges to attain the rights that Vargas originally intended for the organized working class.

Brodwyn Fischer presents a compelling study integrating urbanization, patronage networks, and conceptions of citizenship in modern Brazil. The book addresses the formation of poor people’s rights in Rio de Janeiro between 1920 and 1960. The basic thesis is that the poor’s claims to economic, social, and political rights were constantly constrained by legal ambiguity and informality, fostering a state of partial but perpetual disenfranchisement. Despite the unprecedented expansion of labor benefits for the workers during the Vargas era, socioeconomic assumptions and bureaucratic hurdles revealed the discrepancy between legislation and social realities. New regulations prevented outright exclusion from rights, but legal ambiguity prevented their full attainment, placing a significant portion of urban poor’s lives outside the sphere of citizenship. Fischer shows how this contest over citizenship rights played out in urban spaces, courtrooms, and in the government bureaucracy.

The implementation of legislation on urban growth in Rio in the early twentieth century shows one such disparity in the ways the poor were both included and excluded from citizenship rights. The sanitary code of 1901 and especially the Building Code of 1903 had lasting impacts on the conceptualization of urban spaces and poor’s place in cities. Both sets of legislation targeted the favelas (informal settlements) for removal, associating them with disease and moral danger. However, the incapacity of the state to enforce those laws enabled tolerance for them and created a venue for the poor to achieve a tenuous hold on land in the city.

Getúlio Vargas’ ascension to the presidency put the poor at the center of his populist project. A network of patronage among politicians, middlemen, and poor residents in the favelas soon arose to defend vulnerable constituents against the laws’ enforcement and to guarantee political support. Vested interests in the slums would prolong their existence in an atmosphere of legal uncertainty. While becoming the only solution to Rio’s housing crisis, favelas remained illegal according to the law. This fact deprived residents of any meaningful claim to urban rights, making vulnerability and dependence a key feature of Rio de Janeiro’s poverty.

Vargas also extended considerable material benefits to the Brazilian working classes mainly through the Consolidation of the Labor Laws of 1943. In the process, a poverty of rights emerged that made workers supplicants rather than fully enfranchised citizens. These reforms were exalted more as public displays of generosity from the president than as the attainment of full rights belonging to the citizens. Vargas’ administration articulated a conception of citizenship underpinned by notions of work, family, and patriotism according to which rights were distributed. In order to access these rights, the poor had to negotiate not only discourses of citizenship in their written petitions to the government, they also needed documentation to claim their benefits. The possession of birth certificates, work ID’s and other bureaucratic hurdles created a multi-tier system in which the procurement of a specific document unlocked the next level of social protections. The precondition of documentation for citizenship turned rights into privileges that benefited only those among the poor who were documented. Political loyalty, bureaucratic agility, and corruption often meant the difference between exclusion or access to benefits.

If Brazilian bureaucracy created serious obstacles for the attainment of rights, courtrooms presented a legal mine field awaiting favela residents. The inconsistent and heterogeneous Brazilian legal system added more ambiguity to the situation of the undocumented poor. Legal decisions often rested on perceptions of individual circumstances and character and as such, poor Brazilians and judicial officials engaged in negotiations of judicial responsibility and sentencing based on open-ended ideas of civic worthiness. Documentation might provide a solid signifier of citizenship permitting Rio’s residents to escape the more nebulous dimensions of social character, class, and circumstance. A positive vida pregressa (brief life history) and the possession of other documents such as a work card, constituted less ambiguous signs of civic honor. Thus, poor people who could not present themselves as such saw their civic rights undermined and a higher risk of conviction in the courts.

Fischer concludes by chronicling a series of conflicts in the favelas that were due to the growth of the city and the rising value of land in the 1950s and early 1960s. The proliferation of local social movements to defend claims to abandoned lands, coupled with networks of support from leftist politicians and favela middlemen, succeeded in preventing most of the public and private evictions in this period. However, this success rested on political loyalty and not in the enfranchisement of their residents per se. Untitled permanence and illegality would continue to constitute the ultimate legacy of the community’s legal battles.

Fischer offers a well-researched and nuanced analysis of ambiguities of citizenship in modern Rio de Janeiro based on the eclectic use of civil and criminal court cases, legal codes, statistics, oral histories and even samba lyrics.

You May Also Like:

Confederados: Texans of Brazil by Nakia Parker
Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973

Also by Marcus Oliver Golding:

Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War
Paper Cadavers: The Archive of Guatemalan Dictatorship

Hollywood’s Brazil: Rio (2011)

imageby Seth Garfield

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.

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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).

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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.

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 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.

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