hello great folk of the internet. a
friend asked me to do a little sum up of brazilian history for a
cultural awareness class he will be teaching in china, and (out of a
dangerous mix between angst and boredom) i went slightly overboard
with it. i got carried away trying to
systematize the country, and ended up with a long overview of
brazilian history (as seen through the amateurish bias of a left-wing
educated non-historian). it's not very precise, but i don't think it
is too wrong in most respects. plus, 'a nation is an imagined community', but
different narratives can provide this collective imagination. though
it isn't much, i think this one would suit brazilians better than the
spontaneous, contradictory and unreflected one you usually get out of
brazilians (but only if you pressure them.)
brazil's political/economic cycles:
1500 (discovery) to 1822
(independence): under portuguese rule
1500s - early settling on northeastern
brazil, stirrings of economic activity, very limited exploration of
the geographically intractable northwest. all portuguese activity was
centered around pau-brasil, the red wood used as a dye by europeans
that gives the country its name. the rest of brazilian history can be
seen as a slow march towards the south from Salvador, our first
colonial capital on the northeast.
1600s-1700s - progressive expansion
towards the middle-southern coastal ares, sprinkled with portuguese
territorial disputes against the spanish and the dutch on the
northeastern coast. interestingly, the dutch took control of a major
northeastern city for about 20 years. culture flourished and brasil's
first theaters, libraries and public schools were built. they were
all subsequently razed by the portuguese when they won the city back.
contrast this relative barbarism of portuguese settlers with the
tendency towards interbreeding mentioned below.
economic horizons of sugarcane and
mining are discovered, and brazil takes off as one of the great
european colonies. until the 1800s we were the world's only producer
of sugar (no wonder our cuisine is unsashamedly sweet. actually
things are always either very sweet or very salty, with no middle
ground and no other real seasonings other than black pepper - there's
some sort of psychoanthropological prohibition on mixing the two;
sweets are always for dessert - or breakfast; grandmothers
incredulously dismiss tales of lands where the two flavour combine in
ecstatic verbotten pleasure).
for the next 200 years brazilian
economic cycles were to be intimately connected with the
international price of sugar. equatorial (northeastern) brazil proved
to have the perfect geography and climate for sugarcane plantations.
as the portuguese slowly drifted southward in search of more lands
for cultivation, they stumbled on the great middle-south-american
gold and silver reserves.
outlandish amounts of slaves were
brought in from Africa (mostly what is now angola, not coincidentally
another big portuguese-speaking country) to work on sugar processing
and gold/silver mining. the usual death and opression rates for
slaves apply. i've read once that more slaves were brought to brazil
than to the rest of all the european colonies combined, but that
should be double-checked.
this happened parallel to systematic
extermination of the indigenous population, who the portuguese
considered very hard to christianize and enslave. brazilian folk
stories still present indians as lazy and perfectly contented living
hand-to-mouth. this might be related to the fact that most
south-american indians were hunter-gatherers - there were no great
empire like the ones faces by the spanish on central america, only
very small tribes entrenched deep within the jungle. disease played a
greater role than warfare in killing the indians.
it's also worth noting that the
portuguese were reportedly much more willing to mix with natives and
african slaves (if you catch my drift) than other european
colonizers. this is when the defining feature of brazilian ethnicity,
miscegenation, begins to take shape. together with it go near-total
absorption of native or immigrant cultures into portuguese culture.
a comparison i saw recently (but should
be double-checked) states that, while in the u.s. african-americans
represent around 5% of total population, in brazil 48% declared
themselves black or mestizo in the 2010 census. given such intense
miscegenation, our ethnic black doesn't correspond perfectly to the
north-american. this has some extraordinary effects on the dynamics
of racism and prejudice in the country - it runs silently and
slightly more along economic than ethnic lines. brazil is
demographically somewhere in between the north-american case (with a
black minority) and the south-african case (with a white minority),
but oddly this hasn't proven the right ground for the overt,
institutionalized discrimination that one sees on the extremes of
this spectrum. our top sociologists say that underneath the
appearance of cordiality and friendliness hide the two-sided fears
characteristic of slave-master relationships: the slaves' fear of the
masters' power, and the masters' fear of the slaves rebellion. to
even approach the subject as such, to expose the relations of
domination and oppression, would threaten the social order, so this
is all neatly tucked into a cover-up of giddy friendliness and
hospitality. something like that might perhaps also be said of our
foreign fetish. in any case, we'll gladly settle for appearing
non-racist, whatever is going on underneath.
this period is sprinkled with disputes
against the spanish for territorial rule of an until then not fully
explored south america. the pope ruled in 1650something that
everything west of the arbitrarily drawn line of Tordesilhas will
belong to the spanish, everything east of it to the portuguese. the
catholic god was no on spain's side: further exploration west of
tordesillas reveals that the pacific ocean was just around the
corner, and that's how south america ends up with one huge tract of
portuguese-speaking unified land on the west (brazil) and a thin
strip of assorted spanish-speaking countries on the east (all the
pacific-facing other south american countries, chile, argentina,
bolivia, venezuela, colombia...)
1800s onwards - "independence"
and coffe time!
1822 - the portuguese royal family
escapes napoleonic occupation of portugal and flees to Rio. in line
with the economic march towards the south, the capital is changed
from northeastern Salvador to southeastern Rio. for a few years Rio
is not only the capital of portugal's greatest colony, but the
capital of the crumbling portuguese empire itself! oh would it that
the portuguese had stayed - i could be an european citizen now! alas,
no such luck: napoleon was defeated and the royal family went back.
but wait, what is that? plot twist! dom pedro 1st, the portuguese
prince, decides to stay back? and proclaims independence from either
portugal or from his father, it is difficult to say? with an early
oedipal thrust, independent brazil is born as the world's only colony
whose independence retained the royal line - the only colony which
didn't go from monarchic rule to autonomous republic. these notional
power shifts with no real citizen involvement will be a recurring
theme in the future history of the country, and eerily enough some of
it can even be seen on the citizen protests going on in the streets
today.
together with the tordesillas debacle,
this might have something to do with the fact that, compared to other
south-american countries, brazil is huge and oddly unified. the trend
towards total incorporation of immigrant cultures into
portuguese-brazilian culture continued, and though now a minority of
the population is strictly portuguese-descendant, virtually
everybody, no matter where their ancestors came from, lost their
original languages and speaks plain silly brazilian portuguese.
there's a word in portuguese that's
hard to translate into english: migue. migue is compromise solution,
a sort of half-assed attempt to do something that turns out to have
reasonably acceptable results. a versatile word, it is a favourite
among university students who leave all the work for the last minute
and finally succeed - they migue their way around exams. a related
expression is 'pra ingles ver', which means something like 'for
English eyes' or 'to show the English' - something done with just the
minimal amount of effort, just enough effort to come up results that
fool the viewer in a superficial first analysis. these could be
considered a guiding principle of the way brazilian politics work,
and of the way we deal with others and with each other: an appearance
of democracy, an appearance of cordiality, an appearance of cheerful
dedication to football and dancing on the streets, and more recently
an appearance of emerging as a big player in the international
economy. we'll settle for the appearance - isn't that what identity
really is in last analysis? brazilian thought shies away from
breaking these images down, from trying to look at the underlying
processes. i'm not sure if even this can be said - it's tricky to
discuss culture from inside it. on the other hand, it would be
something by its very fictional nature hard to explore from some sort
of cultural outside.
anyway. 1800s. coffee makes tentative
dabs at the south, and slowly succeeds in establishing itself as what
would be the centerpiece of the brazilian economy until the early
twentieth century. the northeast is too hot for it, so farming
migrates to the southeast and sao paulo state proves to be the most
suitable for production. once it reaches sao paulo, towards the end
of the century, it booms. brazil's first (and sadly last, now
half-abandoned) true railroad is built to transport the coffee to the
Santos port on the southern atlantic, near Sao Paulo city.
immigration, mostly from italy and japan, starts to present itself as
an alternative to slave labour. coffee and free labour were to become
intimately connected, and the first features of a possible market
society emerge on the south.
1890 - slavery and monarchy are
abolished in a so-called revolution that lasted for a couple of days
and shed no blood. the change to republic is considered just a
rearrangement of power structures to follow the shift of economic
activity from the northeast - which is now facing exhaustion of mines
and competition in sugar production from the dutch - to the
southeast, where coffee for export rules absolute, a stern but
gracious, oversweetened dark lord. minas gerais, the state north of
sao paulo where all the mines were, slowly shifts towards cattle
farming. thus begins what is mockingly (but also a bit
affectionately) called the coffee-with-milk republic: a joint rule
under democratic guise between the two most economically meaningful
states, coffee-farming Sao Paulo and beefy, milky Minas.
with slavery abolished, immigration
from troubled europe booms. what now accounts for about 30% of the
population comes to brazil to work in the coffee sector and around
it. italians and japanese, then later syrian and lebanese, come to
sao paulo, germans to the southernmost states. the north and
northeast, the shining stars of colonial times, are left to its own
devices, and have to deal with the thorny issues of slavery abolished
without a plan for reintegration of former slaves into the economy -
an inflexible agrarian economy that is slowly but steadily
collapsing. leave it to the invisible hand of the market! 150 years
later, today, the situation is more or less the same.
in this sense, brazilian history
resembles (or better yet, mirrors; or better yet, fails to imitate
successfully) north-american history - a slave-driving north versus a
tentatively industrial south. no civil war though, and consequently
no centralized, directed development plan.
1900s - republican times and the
emergence of modern brazilian culture
30s - during the great depression,
early signs of change from primary exports to autonomous industry by
government-controlled market manipulation of coffee prices and
reinvestment of profits in manufacture. an incipient consumer base of
free labour provides market enough to begin trying out
industrialization on import-substitution lines. this is helped out by
the sad state of the international economy at the time and goes on
until the 50s.
1932 - sao paulo attempts independence
from the rest of brazil and is swiftly crushed. my grandfather is
born on an italian-descendant peasant family in inner sao paulo
state. horray!
getulio vargas, perhaps the most
notorious brazilian statesma, the brazilian Churchill so to speak,
rises to power and suckerpunches the coffee-with-milk republic into
the past. he would rule as president twice,
military-non-parliamentary head of state once, lead brazil through
the second world war, align with the Alliance despite
state-centralistic tendencies, coax massive investment in base
industry and infrastructure out of the US in exchange for helping out
with the european collective suicide, establish the brazilian welfare
system and labour protection laws, finally making a dent in the
heritage of slavery and opression, control international coffee
prices through production monopoly and stocking/marketing strategies,
reinvest the accumulated coffee profits in manufacture, giving brazil
the first shot at becoming an autonomous industrial nation, and
finally commit suicide days before a coup meant to finally depose
him. his suicide letter reads "I exit life to enter history".
fliegende kinderscheisse!
in the 50s, more concerted efforts at
proper industrialization are attempted. some of it goes well, and
construction of what is to become the new capital is begun in some
remote, desertic, not-easily-accessible-by-the population corner of
the Sertao. with a renewed wave of immigration and under the pen of
architect and (very)arguable national hero Oscar Niyemeyer, Brasilia
emerges from the unmanifested into the main city of central Brasil.
the capital is moved one last time from Rio, and there it stays until
today.
for some wildly unimaginable reason
that must be related to lobbying from the construction sector, it is
decided that the fifth largest country on earth can do without
railroads. "brazil has an automotive vocation", say the
government ideologues of the time. all the investment in
infra-structure goes towards massive road projects, some of which
proved unreasonable and now lie in crumbles being devoured by the
bits of the amazonian forests that still haven't been targeted for
deforestation.
*today, with an average per capita
income less than a quarter of germany's, the average brazilian owns
more cars than the average german. a large number of these cars are
ironically assembled by volkswagen. no one knows how to push for a
shift towards mass-scale public transportation. the economy is
dangerously reliant on the automotive industry, the one industrial
sector that consistently fails to de-industrialize. perhaps even more
so than in north-america, owning a car becomes the central
identity-building feature of young brazilians. one could carelessly
argue that brazilians care more about their cars than about anything
else in their lives - the car is the cornerstone of the brazilian
subject. it all unfailingly gives me the creeps and makes me run away
to china!*
the 50's were the golden age of
independent brazilian culture (despite our having lost the world cup
to Uruguay in Rio!!). this is when the quintessential, untranslatable
brazilian novel is written - grande sertao, veredas. it deals with
the Sertao, the vast temperate-desertic land expanses of middle and
northeastern brazil where the portuguese, the indians and the
africans mixed for 200 years to give rise to an unique culture of
oppression, plantation and miscegenation. samba and its variations,
all mixes between portuguese fado and african rhytms, consolidate as
a musical styles in the northeast. the more urban bossa nova is born
in rio and sao paulo, and the two faces of brazilian musical culture
are settled: the cheerful, carnal, rural samba versus the gloomy,
sadness-obsessed, urban bossa. one major offshot of bossa nova is
chorinho, which means literally 'the little cry'. our best music is
full of yearning, nostalgia, existentialist dread and a constant
ambiguous interplay between love and the death drive. same goes for
our best poetry. this might all tie back in to Fado (semi-literally
Fate), a portuguese musical style with much the same feature of
resigningation against the dark spectre of destiny.
look for 'aguas de marco' on youku for
the unanimously voted best brazilian song ever, and i challenge you
not to cry when listening to it. i can also send you a translation of
a paradigmatic brazilian poem about love (and love's necessary
failure etc etc) by carlos drummond de andrade.
the 60s-80s follow the traditional
south-american lines of u.s.-backed dictatorship. it is often argued
that the cold war worked to the advantage of developing nations by
making america slightly less averse to economic development in the
third world. it is also often half-jokingly said that the great
brazilian tragedy consists in argentina never having turned communist
- as we all know, losing a world war or having a communist neighbour
are the two sure-fire recipes for economic development in the second
half of the 20th century.
it's interesting that we never really
made a serious attempt at communism throughout the century: following
what was at the time an already well-established tradition of lack of
political commitment or even consciousness, communism in brazil was
attempted half-heartedly and consisted, before the war, mostly of a
few people aimlessly riding horses around southern brazil. after the
war all left-wing thought was suppressed by the dictatorship. so
there.
under militarized central rule, brazil
did manage to make another big leap into industrial development. thus
brazil has two so-called `economic miracles`: one on the 50s (under a
democratic regime) and another on the 70s (under the dictatorship,
when we almost finished the leap towards industrialization but
finally dropped the technologically-autonomous ball)
history from the 80's on is the usual
third-world spiel: hyperinflation, clumsily opening up of protected
markets to global competition, presidential impeachment,
privatization, de-industrialization, reversion to agrarian primary
exports, total submission to national and international financial
interests. our strategy to combat this seems to consist mostly of
migueing our way around the most immediately pressing issues.
brazil today
brazil is now the world's fifth largest
country in both area and population (8 million square km and 200
million people, respectively 90% and 45% of u.s. figures, give or
take). the population is disproportionately concentrated on the
industrial south/southeast, and the north and northeast still
struggle with rampant poverty, lack of industrial activity, and an
obscure political system that resembles medieval europe. no wizards
or elves though, just plain peasant oppression and the occasional
chupacabra.
we are the 9th largest economy (6th in
some measures, but gdp is fictional anyway), but about 80th in per
capita income. we are also, in hobsbawm's words, the world champions
in economic inequality. our gini index is only surpassed by our
interest rates (if you will pardon the index-imprecise comparison).
average economic growth barely keeps up with population growth,
though some redistributive measures have successfully been undertaken
by the labour government of Lula.
besides portuguese as a language,
catholicism is the other big cultural heirloom from portugal. brazil
has long been the largest catholic country. the pope being, as we all
know, the last remaining leader of the roman empire, this means that
brazil is the last true roman colony! we are all romans down there,
though our current brazilian army would probably be no match for
ancient roman legionnaires. catholicism, however, is now fast losing
ground to spiritism, african-inspired umbanda and the fundamentalist
evangelical christianity that seems to be a universal trait of
low-income populations in most modern third-world countries.
***postscript
protests broke out all over brazil in
2013, following the now well-established practice of apprently
spontaneous, viral, meme-like social network mobilization. these are
the first nationwide protests in 500 years of recorded history.
I left Brazil soon after the
countrywide manifestations started, and the little I witnessed gave
me a clear feeling of a lack of focus, of protest for protest's sake.
The signs held by the protesters in my home town of about 200
thousand people were as likely to say "Brazilians - join in
Jesus" as "Mayor - Pikachu doesn't evolve, but you can"
(sic). This is a town that for 400 years was untouched by overt
politics, and it all felt like a pretty strange awakening. Brazil is
the world's largest catholic country and also the holder of the
world's (reportedly) largest gay parade, but it still feels to me
that between these apparently inconsistent extremes there's no room
left for actual politics - a politics of reflection, commitment and
systemic thought. From what I hear of the protests, or more properly
fail to hear, this dislocation seems to have stuck - they are also
watered down, even though repression isn't, and politics remain the
business of the elite.
Interestingly enough, discontinuities
can also be felt between government measures and whatever the average
Brazilian would regard, if pressed, as his political beliefs. When an
evangelical pastor was appointed as minister of human rights, before
the protests, there was some measure of directed insatisfaction: it
briefly appeared that we were moving towards identity politics
without the usual first stop at public awareness about the challenges
of development. Wasn't identity politics supposed to be a prerogative
of rich countries? It seems not - incontrovertible steps towards
legal status for homoaffective unions were taken without resistance
last year, even though most of the non-university educated people I
know would be against it, if asked. There doesn't seem to be a lot of
connection between public opinion and political measures, for better
or worse - and it doesn't seem like the protests have managed to
bridge that gap.
***postpostscript
as of late 2015, the fight is on, the country is politically fractured, the wheels are turning on the conservative machine
