São Paulo Since Independence: A Cultural Interpretation

Abstract

HE CITY OF Sao Paulo has today an estimated population of 2,700,000. This figure represents a hundred-fold increase during the past eighty years, and makes Sao Paulo the most spectacular example of metropolitan growth in Latin America. The purpose of this essay is to convey something of the city's history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a selective examination of its cultural expression. Of central interest are the implications of Sao Paulo's emergence from the parochialism of a rural, creole community into the cosmopolitanism of an industrial metropolis. These implications are of course relevant to the histories of many other Latin American cities, but Sao Paulo, because of its long colonial isolation and the abruptness of its transformation, reveals them in singularly dramatic fashion. Sao Paulo's artists, thinkers and men of action of the past century have, in their confrontation with the modern world, been tempted to neglect their elusive creole, hinterland heritage, which enshrines neither viceregal panoply nor dominant Indian or African culture patterns. They have been more inclined than most other Latin Americans to deny their history, to grasp at ready-made and, in the new context, precarious solutions and ideals from abroad. In this study, therefore, mid-nineteenth-century romanticism and the modernista movement inaugurated in 1922 are of particular concern; for these two movements fruitfully assimilated foreign cultural influences and at the same time gave expression to special characteristics of the paulista milieu. At the time of Brazilian independence in 1822 Sao Paulo was a town of some 20,000 souls.' To an approaching traveler it would have