Politics and Parentela in Paraiba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil

by Linda Lewin

Overview

This richly documented work focuses on the parentela (extended family), including Epitacio's, to illustrate the role bonds of blood, marriage, and friendship played in formal politics at local, state, and national levels throughout the Old Republic (1889-1930).

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691609485
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #476
Pages:	526
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.80(h) x 1.10(d)

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Politics and Parentela in Paraíba

A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil

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By Linda Lewin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07719-2

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CHAPTER 1

Land and Population

This valuable plant has now become of more importance in Pernambuco than even the sugar cane, owing to the great demand for the cotton of that province, and of those adjoining it, in the British markets.

— Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil, 1817

Can we, in view of the threatened supply of long-staple cotton ... afford to neglect any possible source ...? Does it not behoove all, Lancastershire in particular, to look around in good time for new fields? From what I have seen in the north-eastern part of Brazil, I maintain that we have a stretch of country able to come to our help; all that is required is administration and the initiation of a few elementary reforms.

— Arno Pearse, Brazilian Cotton, 1923

Land and population in Paraíba reflected geographical patterns common to the Brazilian Northeast. However modest its territory, Paraíba occupied the geographical heartland of the region. Brazil's seventh smallest state, it shared with its neighbors the two major ecological zones of the Northeast: a coastal sugar belt that had originally opened the region and the colony to sixteenth-century European expansion, and an agro-pastoral hinterland that subsequently maintained coastal export production. Strategically placed in the very center of Brazil's northeastern "hump," Paraíba's political boundaries encompassed all of the topographical and climatic features considered typical of the region. (See Map 1.1.) In addition, its population had always participated in the major events of regional history. From the very first contact that both French and Portuguese dyewood gatherers had with the indigenous inhabitants in the early 1500s, historical developments in Paraíba paralleled those elsewhere in colonial Brazil. Later, land and population would also reveal Paraíba's regional uniqueness and hint at the rebellious historical role the Northeast would eventually play, first in the Portuguese colony and then in the independent nation.

Geography

The Regional Context

Although physical differences existed within the six states that originally defined the Northeast, they remained subordinated to overwhelming similarities of geographical accident. In Euclydes da Cunha's immortal enunciation, topography, climate, and settlement patterns had molded the population of the Northeast's interior into "the bedrock of the Brazilian race." Features of geography and settlement patterns did indeed forge a distinctive regional type, one that as a racial mixture still retains predominantly Portuguese and Amerindian features while conserving a decidedly more muted African ancestry. Historically, the interior's population turned not toward the commercial and administrative centers of the coast but toward the empty and vast heartland of the region. Natural barriers, coupled with the limitations that distance imposed on Crown authority, nurtured early tendencies toward independence and local rule. If that circumstance was by no means unique in Brazil's history, two other features of regional evolution would distinguish Paraíba and its neighbors from the rest of Brazil.

First, declining comparative advantage in producing sugar for a world market meant that eventually Brazil's growing Center-South would economically surpass the Northeast as the colony's most dynamic region. By independence, what had once been the world's richest sugar colony bowed to the ascendance of coffee. Second, the absence of significant foreign immigration to the Northeast — except for the continual traffic in African slaves throughout the three centuries preceding 1850 — caused the region to evolve more conservatively than the Center-South. The Northeast retained its homogenous population throughout the Old Republic, at a time when many familiar features of Brazilian life were being discarded or modified elsewhere under the influence of mass immigration and rapid industrialization. Long before the collapse of the Empire, the region had ceased to play a pivotal role in national development, for long-term, irreversible decline had taken hold by 1750. By 1889, the Northeast's role in the political economy of the nation had been subordinated to the industrializing core of Sao Paulo–Rio de Janeiro in two respects. First, although the Northeast still exported raw materials, chiefly cotton, to transatlantic markets, the Center-South had become the major customer for its sugar and an important buyer of its cotton. Second, the Northeast increasingly exported its own population as cheap labor — by the 1870s to exploit rubber riches in the Amazon and by the 1890s to work in factories or staff middle-class households in the Center-South. Among all social classes in the underdeveloped Northeast, outmigration remains the most reasonable individual solution to the region's endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity.

Geography, both physical and human, only partly explains why underdevelopment has persisted in the Brazilian Northeast. More comprehensive attempts to account for the region's human misery would place greater emphasis on historical patterns of political and economic organization, especially the changing position of the Northeast in the world economy. Even though geography has too often been made the scapegoat for the region's poverty, it is nevertheless true that topography and climate have imposed crucial limitations on the forms of social organization possible in the region.

Variations in Paraíba's physical geography explained the state's historical subordination to neighboring Pernambuco and its political role as Pernambuco's satellite during the Old Republic. Even more strikingly, variations in Paraíba's geography directly influenced the political distribution of power among the five geoeconomic zones that had emerged in Paraíba by the advent of the Republic. Until the close of the eighteenth century, geography had defined only two zones for Paraíba's inhabitants — the coast and the interior. But because zonal divisions ran according to vertical or north–south axes, they ignored the political boundaries established during the colonial period, which ran on east-west axes oblivious to the natural features imposed by geography. This simple fact allowed Pernambuco to control Paraíba for centuries, because topography remarkably integrated Paraíba within its boundaries. In addition, Pernambuco had the splendid harbor of Recife, which had caused the original colonists to establish the administrative capital of the region there. Its early suitability as a zone for sugar cultivation and unrivaled geographical position as the regional entrepôt for the transatlantic trade gave it political hegemony over the Northeast. Not only Paraíba but also Alagoas, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Piauí, and southern Maranhão fell within Recife's commercial and political orbit as so-called satellite states. (See Map 1.1.) Because Paraíba remained incorporated politically within Pernambuco for much of the colonial period, many of its founding families, both on the coast and in the backlands, were Pernambucano pioneers.

Geographical accident, on the other hand, defined one important difference, for it deprived Paraíba of a large sugar zone and bestowed on Pernambuco one of Brazil's two most productive cane-growing centers. North of the capital city of Parahyba, the verdant coastal belt narrows and then disappears upon reaching Rio Grande do Norte. At that point, the landscape of the backlands meets the sea. This geographical circumstance encouraged the interior to play a more important role in Paraíba's politics. By comparison, in Pernambuco the coastal belt has always been the preponderant political force, even during the Old Republic. In Paraíba, on the other hand, the political emergence of the intermediate zones known as the brejo and the caatinga-agreste had coincided with the introduction of provincial legislatures throughout Brazil in 1835. From the beginning, the intermediate zones, together with the two backlands zones, possessed a significant voice in Paraíba's unicameral legislature, the Provincial Assembly.

Physical Features

Paraíba's landscape, like that of its neighbors, revealed an astonishing diversity of topography and climate, which fostered the emergence of five geoeconomic zones within the state by the close of the Empire. A long, narrow, and very irregular slice of territory, Paraíba cuts inland due west from the Atlantic Ocean for slightly over 600 kilometers. (See Map 1.2.) When the Portuguese arrived, the approximately 150 kilometers of the coastal belt was densely forested with tropical hardwoods. Alluvial soils, rich in organic material and mineral salts, explained its conversion into a sugarcane zone in the second half of the sixteenth century. Two-thirds of the state's surface area, however, spans the backlands or sertões, a vast, semi-arid zone originally exploited for stockraising. This pastoral hinterland, though socially isolated, always had economic connections with the coastal zone because geography had provided routes that ran from the Paraíba backlands directly to the regional entrepôt of Recife. Where it aligned with Rio Grande do Norte and Pernambuco, Paraíba's irregular and pinched northsouth boundaries registered an ancient pattern of economic dependence on regional market routes. The jagged profile on the map reflected favorable openings that nature had created, for key river valleys permitted passage across most of the imposing barrier of the Serra do Borborema.

The rugged Planalto (Plateau) of the Serra do Borborema — a dry, elevated backlands that extended inland once its eastern escarpment had been scaled — was Paraíba's principal topographical feature beyond the coast. A forbidding divide, the Borborema united Paraíba, Pernambuco, and Rio Grande do Norte in a common geographical and commercial subregion. The trade routes that crisscrossed its rugged heights connected zones beyond the western ridges of the mountain range to points nearer the Atlantic. Cutting across Paraíba on a northeasterly axis, the plateau originally had confined population to the coastal belt, forming an extensive barrier to early settlement in the interior. Until the end of the eighteenth century, it was the reason why only two zones — the coast and the interior — existed. However, when cotton cultivation spread into the river valleys lying to the west of the Serra do Borborema after 1860, then the plateau exerted a new influence in the economy of the far backlands. Only when world prices rose substantially, would planters receive sufficient compensation for sending their cotton over the steep gradients of the Piancó Valley and through the Pernambuco backlands to distant Recife.

Two major river basins complemented the geographical division between coast and backlands. Together they etched out the earliest zones of economic wealth and the key riparian routes to Paraíba's unexplored interior. The coast's major river system, the Paraíba, originated 500 kilometers upstream, in the eroded metamorphic rock slopes of the Cariris Velhos, a southwesterly spur of the Borborema Plateau. As the lower Paraíba River flowed toward the sea, it created the broad floodplain of the coastal zone that surrounded the capital city and gave it its name. Further north, this coastal belt adjoined a second floodplain formed by the river Mamanguape, which similarly drained the Borborema Plateau on its northeastern slopes. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, these contiguous floodplains contained the political seat of power in the province. By the 1890s, however, the coast's opulence based on sugar and slaves survived among only a few families. They had shrewdly invested in modern usinas, steam-powered refineries, either buying out or foreclosing on their less fortunate neighbors. In the 1930s, José Lins do Rêgo, a scion of the ruined Lins de Albuquerque family, described the melancholy silence of the dead hearths of the old sugar mills lining the Paraíba's banks. The nostalgic cycle of novels he wrote testified as much to the decline of the planters' political hegemony in Paraíba as it did to the economic "decadence" of the coastal plantation society into which he had been born.

Paraíba's other major river system, the Piranhas Basin, originated in the far backlands near Ceará. The ecological conditions it supplied were uniquely favorable for growing tree cotton. Flowing northeasterly as the Espinhara or the Espinharas, the Piranhas then forked in a parallel course southwest of the city of Pombal and carved out the Piancd Valley. (See Map 1.2.) Depositing a rich strip of black bottomland for 240 kilometers south to Pernambuco, this tributary eventually connected with the San Francisco Basin. Except for a few, very fertile pockets, it became completely dry during the long summers, offering perfect growing conditions for the backlands' long-staple arboreal cottons. The chain of rich agricultural oases that the Piranhas implanted in the otherwise dessicated far backlands attracted seventeenth-century pioneers to settle along its tributaries. The concatenated pattern these early clusters of cattle ranches outlined along the riverbanks revealed the propensity for the interior's population to gravitate to sources of water. By 1900, the Piranhas Basin emerged as Paraíba's major zone of tree cotton cultivation. Not surprisingly, its planters began to challenge the political monopoly which zones nearer the coast had exercised until the late 1890s.

Zonal Divisions

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the original division between coast and backlands had given way to five geographical zones, each with an economic specialization. Except for the coast, each bore the mark of cotton's advance into the interior. The coastal zone extended only 20 to 68 kilometers inland from the sea. The landscape beyond its white beaches of coconut palms originally had contained the densely forested zona da mata, whose primeval stands of trees had been exploited for their brazil-wood. After centuries of deforestation, most of the zona da mata had been rendered an extensive floodplain of green canefields. Further inland, the coastal zone changed to sandy tableland before yielding to a second, intermediate zone known as the caatinga-agreste (agreste acaatingada). The caatinga-agreste consisted of a very fertile strip of agricultural land 26 kilometers wide known as the agreste, which was surrounded by a drier belt of caatinga. Partly named for the zerophytic vegetation, or caatinga, that blanketed its outer ring of landscape, this zone straddled the territory between coast and backlands. The ubiquitous caatingueira, a low-lying creeper particularly prominent in this zone, announced that one had entered the bleak interior, where all plant life was dedicated to conserving water. Thorn trees, hardy fibrous plants, scrub, and gigantic cacti created the caatinga's dry and twisted summer landscape. As one moved upward to the higher elevation of the Borborema Plateau, this vegetation continued indefinitely, its water-storing bulbous roots offering travelers an emergency source of liquid when drought caused rivers and streams to disappear.

The agreste, a small subhumid pocket in the caatinga's northeastern corner at the beginning of the nineteenth century, possessed ideal conditions for agriculture. Historically, the drier caatinga surrounding the agreste had been developed as an adjunct pastoral zone for the coastal sugar belt. Isolated ranches, which were mere camps in the bush, began to appear there during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They supplied charky (came do sol) and the oxen and horses that served as motor power for the coastal sugar mills during the cane-grinding season. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the relationship of economic complementarity between the caatinga and the coastal zone changed. Agriculture — cereals and cotton — began to steal the forage resources of the pastoral economy. The uniqueness of the caatinga-agreste, consequently, lay in its emergence as a zone of polyculture. By the 1820s, the agricultural agreste had become a man-made landscape, thanks to creeping enclosure, and by the era of the Old Republic it was challenging successfully the adjoining brejo zone as the major market center in Paraíba. Cereals, tobacco, and a remarkable variety of both herbaceous and arboreal cottons accounted for the agreste's burgeoning productivity. Not surprisingly, by 1900, the caatinga-agreste usurped the position the brejo had enjoyed as Paraíba's wealthiest zone of agriculture. In the same year, the ginning center of Campina Grande, which dominated the economy of the caatinga-agreste, became the largest market in the state. Cotton had made Campina "the gateway to the sertao." Thanks also to cotton, the politicians of the caatinga-agreste, who formerly had aligned themselves with the brejo's merchant and landowning elite, found new allies in the local bosses of the backlands zones, where the cotton boom redirected their commercial endeavors.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Politics and Parentela in Paraíba by Linda Lewin. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
• LIST OF MAPS AND FIGURES, pg. xi
• LIST OF TABLES, pg. xiii
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xv
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR PHOTOGRAPHS, pg. xix
• NOTE ON PORTUGUESE USAGE AND STYLE, pg. xxi
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xxv
• Introduction, pg. 1
• Chapter I. Land and Population, pg. 39
• Chapter II. The Agrarian Oligarchy and Its Export Economy in an Era of Change, 1889-1922, pg. 81
• Chapter III. The Parentela in Empire and Republic, pg. 127
• Chapter IV. The Politics of Parentela in the Era of the Oligarchies, pg. 174
• Chapter V. The Formative Decade: The Republican Nineties, pg. 229
• Chapter VI. From "Anarchy" to "Order," 1900-1912, pg. 271
• Chapter VII. The Pessoas in Power: The Years of "Order," 1912-1924, pg. 308
• Chapter VIII. The Oligarchy Moves toward Crisis, 1924-1930, pg. 349
• Conclusion: The Demise of Family-Based Politics, pg. 408
• APPENDIXES, pg. 425
• GLOSSARY OF PORTUGUESE TERMS, pg. 447
• GLOSSARY OF BRAZILIAN KINSHIP TERMS, pg. 453
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 457
• INDEX, pg. 475