Suchergebnisse

AbstractDuring much of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital, was under a selective curfew that made it a crime to be in the city's public spaces after dark. The curfew bent normal rules and attenuated supposedly universal rights, overtly discriminating between people on the basis of class and race. Rules that legally defined the nighttime did not come from any national statute, or from newly independent Brazil's liberal Constitution (1824) or its Criminal Code (1830). Instead, Rio's nocturnal sociolegal world was the product of police edicts, on-the-ground policing practice, and city ordinances. It also emerged from the actions of people who used the darker hours for work, play, and resistance against oppression, especially members of the city's immense enslaved population and the growing number of free persons of African descent. In other words, this is a phenomenon of urban governance that allows, and indeed forces us to look beyond the nineteenth-century nation-state to understand the exercise of power at a local level. This article explores how the curfew established patterns and means of limiting the basic freedom to move about the city. It was at night when both the necessity and fragility of what jurists in Brazil called the "freedom to come and go" came into view. The daily transition between day and night enacted juridical changes that, although invisible at the national level, fundamentally shaped the social categories that determined people's places in society in ways that historical research has yet to explore.

AbstractAt the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), the clandestine lottery called the jogo do bicho or 'animal game', which still exists today, gained enormous popularity in Rio de Janeiro, the city of its origin, and soon in the whole of Brazil. Reconstructing the spread and persecution of the jogo do bicho during its first decades reveals the social process of urbanisation evident in the daily, often informal and quasi-legal, interactions between the state and popular commerce in Latin America. The ambivalent official stance and public sentiment that developed toward this lottery suggest that 'law and order' concerns in themselves do not explain the criminalisation of vernacular practices.

This book portrays the labor movement in the Brazilian port city of Santos in the period between the two World Wars. Author Fernando Teixeira da Silva reconstructs a period of rapid urbanization, economic instability, and worker ferment in a city known for the combative nature of organized labor. The author focuses on the two types of work that predominated in interwar Santos: civil construction and, above all, dock work. Through his finely grained local history approach, Silva describes both the clashes of interests between labor and management and the reformulation of each class from within.

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.