Former Brazilian president Washington Luís's famous dictum, “The social question is a matter for the police,” expressed the sentiment of elite politicians during the last years of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), when few citizens were eligible to vote and coffee barons and other oligarchs ruled the country with an iron fist. The dire conditions of former slaves, rural peasants, and the urban poor—both freed people of color and recent European immigrants—generated popular dissent of all kinds, which was quickly met with the police's baton and the soldier's bullet. The state's brutal response to all forms of protest largely reflected the defense of a rigidly hierarchical and unequal society and a political system that offered few channels for effective legal petitions to power holders by those seeking social justice.This volume captures the nature of that political violence through an examination of social conflicts from the beginning of the republic in 1889 to the 1964 military coup d'état, drawing on a rich array of beautifully reproduced images from the Moreira Salles Institute, the largest and most diverse private photography collection in Brazil. Carefully curated and thoughtfully framed through essays opening the book's three sections by leading scholars—Angela Alonso, Angela de Castro Gomes, and Heloisa Murgel Starling—the book documents regional revolts, naval mutinies, pacification campaigns, and diverse insurrections.Some of these social conflicts have produced iconic images of the Brazilian state's callousness. One becomes freshly unsettled in observing the empty stares of the 400 African-descended women huddled together, many with their heads shrouded with rough peasant cloth, who had just survived the Canudos massacre of the 1896–97 federal government campaigns against religious leader Antônio Conselheiro and his followers (pp. 80–81). The worn faces and the dark skin of resting soldiers in the municipal park of Itapira during the São Paulo revolt of 1932 against the central government, who seem exhausted from marching or perhaps a recent skirmish, reveal their humble social origins (pp. 248–49). Throughout this work one notes how the state time and again forcibly mobilized the poor to fight the poor.In Brazil, as elsewhere, photography in the early twentieth century became an instrument of the victors, documenting the demise of the vanquished and circulating those images in newspapers and other print vehicles, and later in newsreels, to show the power of the state and the consequences of rebellion. The image of the severed heads of rural bandit Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, popularly known as Lampião, and ten of his men, displayed artfully on four steps at the entrance to a rural home with leather half-moon-shaped cangaceiro hats, ammunition belts, and two Singer sewing machines meticulously placed nearby, sends a clear message to the viewer (p. 295). Yet rebels also employed the same medium to promote their strength, power, and persistence, as in the posed photo published in a popular newspaper of Lampião's partner, Maria Bonita, elegantly seated somewhere in the barren sertão affectionately petting a dog, or in the group picture of leaders of the Prestes Column, from the late 1920s, sitting comfortably with their legs crossed wearing high leather boots and conveying a calm determination to continue their trek through the backlands of Brazil in their challenge to the country's ruling elites (pp. 210–11, 303).Cameras also recorded physical destruction of both rebels and the state. In a surrealistic photograph, a boy and a girl sitting in what seems to be a living room whose ceiling has been shattered by federal troop bombardments during the São Paulo revolt gaze passively into the lens with rubble all around them (p. 185). Out-of-focus 16 millimeter frames by an amateur filmmaker register the burning of the National Student Union headquarters in Rio de Janeiro during the 1964 military takeover (pp. 394–95). Papers are scattered all over the ground. Two young men are hurling something (are they rocks or firebombs?) into the burning building.The authors of the essays show the varied political uses of these images as they appeared in magazines and newspapers. Their narratives leave no doubt that one of the purposes of this collection is to reveal the raw nature of political violence that challenged “the social question”—that is, the demands for economic, social, and regional inclusion for those cast to the margins by sectors of society and a state that favored other social classes.One regrets that the volume stopped in 1964. Perhaps the images of Brazil's most recent military dictatorship are too familiar to a generation of intellectuals who might purchase the book. Yet in a moment when elected politicians and a new president have become dictatorship deniers, those photos documenting police repression and brutality during the two decades of military rule regrettably will become germane again and more potent, perhaps, than they were in the immediate past.
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Nov 8, 2019
Open Access
