Revoltas, Motins, Revoluções: Homens Livres Pobres E Libertos No Brasil Do Século XIX

Abstract

Focusing on the major uprisings that swept through several Brazilian cities and rural areas during the imperial period, this collection seeks to examine the ways in which free poor and freed populations of color engaged with, resisted, and negotiated the often tumultuous process of state formation at the national, provincial, and local levels. While the topic of lower-class involvement in these rebellions is not new, what distinguishes this volume is the variety of geographical areas covered, the inclusion of movements from the first and second halves of the nineteenth century, and the depth of analysis of the motives, means, and meanings of popular participation in social protest as the Brazilian state built and defined the boundaries of its legitimacy.The book rejects the traditional classification of imperial-era revolts as nativist, regional, liberal, conservative, regency, regresso, or late imperial rebellions. By centering the analytical lens on popular participation in social protest, this collection demonstrates how free poor people, and particularly lower-class men, asserted their rights as citizens and free men of color living the paradoxes of the imperial social and political order, which combined slaveholding and hierarchy with liberal institutions of state. Thus, for instance, Matthias Röhrig Assunção shows that while the lower-class leaders of the Balaiada, a rebellion that affected Maranhão, Piauí, and Ceará between 1838 and 1841, supported elements of the liberal elite cause, they also rose to protest arbitrary recruitment, poor treatment of prisoners, and other abusive measures that violated the citizenship rights of free poor men.The collection challenges simplistic notions that state formation was a one-way street and that the establishment of political hegemony involved only the elite groups that dominated local, provincial, and imperial political institutions. Even though not all the contributors apply the concept of hegemony, the details in the articles do reveal the extent to which popular groups recognized the legitimacy of the state while attempting to set limits to its power through violent protest. According to Maria Luiza Ferreira de Oliveira, the lower-class men from Campina Grande, Paraíba, who rebelled against the imperial civil registry law of 1851 tore up edicts and occupied public buildings in an attempt to delay the spread of information on the law. As Ferreira de Oliveira argues, they understood the law as a tool that would allow the government to gather information on free poor families and, ultimately, to enslave their children. But crucially, the rebels did not destroy all the documents found in the municipal offices and battalions they attacked, and they did not take money from municipal coffers, which demonstrated their acquiescence to at least some aspects of state power. Instead, they only destroyed records from the justices of the peace and palmatórias (wooden paddles used to punish slaves), which symbolized their opposition to the civil registry law and its links with slavery.Several of the authors use police records, official correspondence, criminal trial suits, and newspaper articles to examine the social profile of popular rebels and how their motivations to join or lead these movements intersected with their material circumstances, class locations, and social positions within the racial hierarchy of imperial Brazil. Although not always in dialogue with the new cultural history of Spanish-speaking Latin America, the discussions of how lower-class men's experiences as voters, National Guardsmen, army recruits, and mobilized troops for various political causes informed their political experience and articulation of popular forms of liberalism, conservatism, constitutionalism, anti-Portuguese sentiment, and republicanism parallel the approach of new cultural studies of Mexico and Peru.Given the outpouring of recent scholarly work on gender in Latin America and especially Brazil, the volume's title and its lack of gender analysis are problematic. It is true that the Portuguese-language terminology homens livres pobres e libertos refers to the free poor as a racial and class group. Yet unfortunately, this designation homogenizes the experiences of men and women from this group. The authors in the collection carefully identify their collective subjects as free, freed, slaves, mulattos, blacks, or whites. Yet they fail to point out whether these subjects were male or female, although the details presented in the chapters demonstrate that most of those who engaged in social protest were men. By not acknowledging sex, the essays inadvertently depict the mostly male political, economic, and social circumstances that they document as universal or normative for both men and women. Likewise, the discussion of the assertion and contestation of state power would gain nuance if the authors addressed the gendered ways in which the construction of political legitimacy in postcolonial Brazil reflected the attempts of male ruling elites to control free poor men's access to weapons, use of violence, labor, and political practice.These issues aside, this is an innovative contribution to the Brazilian scholarship on imperial politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Brazilian and Latin American history, postcoloniality, and state formation.