The Crônica, the City, and the Invention of the Underworld: Rio de Janeiro, 1889-1922

Abstract

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Brazil produced a generation of literary and journalistic writers known as cronistaswho were animated by both a curious desire to know their city and a healthy humility in the face of its impenetrable mystery. In a lighthearted and somewhat sardonic style, Orestes Barbosa's above passage reveals the thoughts of someone whose vocation is to know the city, and yet who pronounces it unknowable. Lame human attempts to place markers on the inscrutable urban terrain are only absorbed again into the chaos, leaving readers to ponder the irony and contradictions that emanate from the eternal enigma of the city. Barbosa's quotation is typical of its time and genre, the crônica, a hybrid form of expression halfway between y and journalism. In their approach to writing about the city, the authors of these crônicas belong equally to the cults of mystery, fact-finding, and reporting. For the historian of urban Brazil, these texts present both a gold mine of insights into the daily life of the past and a minefield of authorial biases, distortions, and idiosyncrasies.