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Black Political Protest in São Paulo, 1888–1988*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Extract
Beginning with Brazil's origins as a nation, and continuing to the present, the relationship between race and politics in that country has been a close and integral one. Portuguese state policy made black slavery the very foundation of Brazil's social and economic order during three centuries of colonial rule. That foundation remained in place even after independence, with the paradoxical result that Brazil became ‘the last Christian country to abolish slavery, and the first to declare itself a racial democracy’. Indeed, perhaps nowhere is the connection between race and politics in Brazil more evident than in the concept of ‘racial democracy’, which characterises race relations in that country in explicitly political terminology.
This article explores some of the connections between race and politics in Brazil by examining four moments in the history of black political mobilisation in that country. Geographically, it focuses on the south-eastern state of São Paulo, which by the time of emancipation, in 1888, housed the third-largest slave population in Brazil (after neighbouring Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro), and which has formed a centre of black political action from the 1880s through to the present. Chronologically, it focuses on: the struggle for the final abolition of slavery in the 1880s; the rise and fall of the Frente Negra Brasileira in the 1930s; the black organisations of the Second Republic; and the most recent wave of black protest, from the mid-1970s to 1988.
The purpose of such an exercise is twofold. First, placing these moments of black mobilisation in a century-long time-frame makes it possible for us to see them not as isolated episodes, but as chapters in a long-term, ongoing history of black protest and struggle in Brazil.
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References
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74 De Barros Fontes, Alice Aguiar, ‘A práctica abolicionista em São Paulo: Os caifazes, 1882–1888’, unpubl. tese de mestrado, University of São Paulo, 1976.Google Scholar
75 On São Paulo's ‘black bourgeoisie’ during the earlys 1900s, see Andrews, , Blacks and Whites, pp. 129–143.Google Scholar
76 This generalisation applies to the southern United States and South Africa as well, where a combination of highly visible racial injustice, in the form of segregation, and exclusionary political regimes, eventually produced massive racial mobilisations in opposition to the status quo.
77 Though it is to borrow a characterisation from the (in some ways) analogous case of Brazilian feminism, ‘dispersion rather than disappearance would be a more accurate way to describe the state of the movement in the late 1980s’. Alvarez, Sonia E., Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women's Movements in Transition Politics (Princeton, 1990), p. 228.Google Scholar Numerous organisations continued to exist (see note 60), and some new ones were being created, such as SOS Racismo in Rio de Janeiro.
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