The Realities of Images: Imperial Brazil and the Great Drought

Abstract

In this monograph, Gerald Greenfield goes beyond his previous examination of imperial elite discourse on the Great Drought—the devastating drought that ravaged the backlands of much of the Brazilian Northeast between 1877 and 1879—and elite constructions on the usefulness of relief assistance to retirantes, or drought victims. He seeks to unveil the relationship between the imperial elites’ class interests, their political discourse on the drought, and the practical effects of that discourse on the reality of suffering and death of retirantes. This is a welcome addition to the scant scholarly literature on the history of the Great Drought and, more broadly, that of the backlands of Northeast Brazil.The book’s greatest contribution is its demonstration of the connections between imperial, provincial, and even municipal politics and the timing and nature of the allocation of relief help. Through the use of parliamentary records and official correspondence, Greenfield shows that self-interest and the possibility of patronage opportunities motivated local elites as well as legislative representatives from the Northeast to lobby for relief funds as early as June of 1877. But by the early months of 1880, and despite the fact that conditions in the backlands had not improved sufficiently for the surviving retirantes to return, virtually all relief help was suspended. Partisan rivalry determined the increasing opposition in the legislature to continuous expenditure on drought relief. In this context, the book furthers our knowledge of the effects of imperial politics in the periphery, and not only at the center of state power.Greenfield also seeks to demonstrate how elite discourse in Rio and the provincial capitals concerning the drought and the retirantes actually shaped the experience of retirantes in the scorched backlands. By analyzing provincial executive and municipal council sources, the author aptly shows that the elites based an exploitative relief policy—one that offered assistance in exchange for labor—on their imagined construction of backlanders as lazy and in need of moral regeneration. Therefore, in addition to contending with dislocation, epidemics, and family separation, retirantes became providers of cheap labor in agricultural colonies, railroad projects, and other public work projects that ultimately benefited those members of the elite with enough connections to channel relief assistance to their own benefit.The book is unified through the theme of the divergence between the elite representation and the reality of the Great Drought. But Greenfield also attempts to contrast the broader world of the sertao (the semiarid interior of the Northeast) and of the sertanejos (poor backlanders), as imagined by political elites, with the material reality of life in this difficult environment. However, the book is not as successful in tracing the living conditions and the social structure of the sertao. Greenfield bases most of this discussion on secondary sources that emphasize sertanejos’ dependence on large landowners and the continuity of traditional exploitative relations of production in the backlands. Furthermore, perhaps due to his reliance on correspondence from local and imperial elites, the author tends to portray sertanejos not only as the victims of a corrupt relief policy but also as lost individuals who failed to find ways to recommence their lives at drought’s end due to their loss of patron-client relations with influential potentates. These findings are at odds with the conclusions of the recent literature on the free poor in other areas of Brazil, which has uncovered various avenues to socioeconomic autonomy pursued by this group in different regions. In fact, despite the dearth of historical studies on the backlands, a handful of scholars (including Roger Cunniff and Roderick Barman) have shown that the dependence of poor free populations on large landowners gradually broke as a result of rapid social change starting in the mid-nineteenth century; this led to autonomous, if more vulnerable, livelihoods for many sertanejos. By contrast, Greenfield’s work implicitly perpetuates the image (also reproduced by local elites) of the back-landers as continuously subjugated to large landowners and of dependence as the main value orienting their lives.Greenfield’s examination of the images and realities of the sertao at large would have benefited by combining analysis of elite discourse with the methodologies and documental sources used by other researchers to uncover the lives of the free poor elsewhere in Brazil. This would have allowed a thorough examination of the material conditions of sertanejos before and after the drought and the possible ways in which they exercised agency at various levels. Nevertheless, this is a noteworthy book for historians and the general public interested in understanding some of the complex reasons why, despite relief help, the Great Drought resulted in almost half a million deaths over the course of three years.