History of Brazil

Stemming from an accelerated and tumultuous process unleashed by European wars in the first decade of the 19th century, Brazil and Portugal split politically in 1822. In a sense, Brazil’s independence reflects a number of peculiar characteristics within the context of the time due, in part, to three centuries of Portuguese colonization and to changes within the colonial system beginning in the second half of the 1700s. In other ways, however, Brazilian independence is linked to external events like the French Revolution, the independence of Haiti, and, above all, the wars of independence in Spanish America. The most profound and lasting consequences of the break with Portugal were the emergence of a Brazilian state and nation that until that point did not exist and that was consolidated over the course of the nineteenth century, as well as the nationalization of certain colonial institutions that were partially maintained. Historiography and national memory would later imbue independence with supreme importance as the foundational moment of the nation such that it has become a recurring theme in historical studies of Brazil.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.

Since the implementation of the Brazilian Republic in 1889, its history has been shaped by the political role of the armed forces, particularly the army. From 1964 to 1985, the Brazilian military was in direct command of the state, appointing generals as presidents through indirect elections. After overthrowing the center-left reformist government of João Goulart, on March 31, 1964, the military imposed an authoritarian regime of tutelage of the political party system and of civil society, which served as a political model for similar regimes in Latin America during the Cold War.

The military imposed arbitrary laws and cracked down on leftist political groups and social movements. They sought to boost capitalist development and “national integration” within the vast area of Brazilian territory, modernizing industry and updating the nation’s infrastructure. However, the military encountered strong opposition from civil society, which was led by political groups and the press, as well as intellectuals and artists from different ideological backgrounds (Marxists, liberals, socialists, and progressive Catholics). These groups were divided over whether to refuse to negotiate with the military or to take a critical stance in relation to the policies of the military governments, resulting in complex social relationships.

Social actors and contemporary politicians continue to vie for ownership of society’s memories of the period, making it necessary to combine historical research with historiographical criticism for understanding the role of the military regime in the nation’s history.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.

Since its creation in 1982, the Laboratory of Oral History and Image (LABHOI), a division of the History Department of Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil, has been developing projects on the history of memory of different Brazilian communities, based on both oral and visual sources and the relationship between them.

The main purpose of LABHOI’s projects, despite its academic origin, is to engage communities in the production of their own history through visual and oral records. One of the results of this work is the organization of a digital database, accessible for a large public, that covers three fields of interest: Memory, Africa, and Slavery; Memory, Art, and Media; and Memory, City, and Communities.

LABHOI has become an important source for theoretical and methodological debates about the uses of visual representations of the past, and its members have published books and articles in this field. Recently LABHOI turned to the production of experimental videos based on the idea of the “videographic writing” of history, a modality of historical text that can perfectly mix sounds and images of recollections.

The video productions of LABHOI include the DVD box set Passados Presentes (Present Pasts) with four documentaries built upon our audiovisual archive Memórias da Escravidão (Memories of Slavery), launched in 2012. This audiovisual collection has been developed since 1994 and is composed of more than 300 hours of interviews with the descendants of slaves of the old plantation coffee areas of Rio de Janeiro.

Other projects developed during the last ten years include: Sons e Imagens da Rememoração: Narrativas e Registros das Identidades e Alteridades Afro-Brasileiras dos séculos XIX ao XXI (Sounds and Images of Recollections: Narratives and Records of Afro-Brazilian Identity and Otherness from the 19th to the 21st Centuries) (2010–2013), sponsored by the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq), in which an international network of researchers worked on issues concerning the memory of slavery. História e Memória da Prática Fotográfica no Brasil Contemporâneo (History and Memory of Photographic Practice in Contemporary Brazil), started in 2003, which is organizing a database of interviews with different professionals who have worked before, during, and after the Brazilian dictatorship in order to understand the political role played by photography in producing historical meaning about the present time and the organization of photojournalism as a field for public photography.

Since 2013 LABHOI officially included public history as one of its fields of debate and research with the approval of two new projects: História Pública, Memória a Escravidão Atlântica no Rio de Janeiro (Public History, Memory, and Atlantic Slavery in Rio de Janeiro), sponsored by the Carlos Chagas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), which is developing a new approach to the study of the Atlantic diaspora in Rio de Janeiro, a city that has one of the major populations of Afro-descendants in Brazil; and Expanding the Global Feminisms Archive: Brazil and the “BRICS” Five, which is being compiled together with a team of scholars from the University of Michigan.

Although the slave trade to Brazil did not end until 1850, and slavery itself lasted until 1888, the practice of freeing slaves had been common from the time of first colonization by the Portuguese in the 16th century, and the children of freed women were born free. The result was that, by the time of a national census in 1872, there were 4.25 million free blacks and mulattos in the country, accounting for over three quarters of all those of African descent and two fifths of Brazil’s total population.

To understand the willingness of Brazilian slave owners to free so many one must first consider the general nature of Brazil’s social structure and the paradigms that ordered it. For most, society was not thought of as being made up of individuals equally protected in their rights and mobile in relationship to one another, but by castes, ranks, corporations, guilds, and brotherhoods, layered one atop another or arranged side by side. Almost everyone could feel superior to someone else, even if inferior to others. The nuanced distinctions of ranks somewhat restrained the threat to social order that free and freed blacks might otherwise have been thought to pose. “Free-and-equal” was not a phrase heard in Brazil.

There is overwhelming evidence that race was an important variable affecting one’s position, and discrimination against blacks was widespread and constant. The government reinforced the prejudices of white Brazilians, acquiesced in maintaining a hierarchy based on color, and presented obstacles to the ambitions of free African Brazilians. Civil service positions were usually denied to them, regardless of their qualifications. Recruitment for the army was focused on the poor, that is, on African Brazilians.

Yet, it is also true that many individuals found their way around those obstacles and rose to positions of some importance, for skin color was just one of the many characteristics to be considered. There are multiple examples of freeborn mulattos (and some freed and freeborn blacks) who succeeded in 19th-century Brazil. Some became doctors, pharmacists, journalists, and teachers. Others entered politics and rose to positions of real power. A few worked energetically to bring about the end of slavery.

Over the past forty years, increasing attention to gender and sexuality in Brazilian historiography has given us a nuanced understanding of diverse ways in which women and men in Brazil’s past experienced patriarchy, racism, and other forms of oppression. As gender historians have shed light on how racialized and patriarchal gender and sexual roles have been reconstituted in different historical contexts, empirical studies in the field of social history have focused primarily on the historical agency of women, particularly non-elite women, who lived within or pushed against the confines of prescribed gender roles. Pioneering histories of sexual minorities have accompanied this trajectory since the 1980s, although this subfield has grown more slowly.

A few nodal themes help to explain transformations in gender relations during each of the major periods of Brazil’s social and political history. Under the empire (1822–1889), honor is the entryway for analysis of gender and sexuality. Gendered standards of honor were critical tools used to mark class and racial boundaries, and to traverse them. Historians of the imperial period also stress the centrality of gender to the social, cultural, and economic networks built by members of various occupational, familial, and kinship groups. During the First Republic (1889–1930), the focus shifts to state vigilance and social control, together with debates over modernization of sexual and gender norms, particularly regarding urban space and prostitution. In the Vargas era (1930–1945), patriarchy and racialized sexuality formed the core of intellectual constructions of the nation’s history and identity, at the same time that homosexuality and women’s and worker’s rights generated intense debate. A new emphasis on domesticity emerged in the context of developmentalism in the 1950s, helping to spur a reaction in the form of the counterculture and sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The dictatorship (1964–1985) went to great lengths to suppress challenges to gender and sexual norms as part of its broader strategy to demobilize society and repress oppositional political movements. These challenges reemerged in the 1970s, when feminists and sexual minorities gained much greater visibility within a new wave of social movements.

The 1988 constitution articulated these movements’ aspirations for social justice and equality through its foundational principal of human dignity. Significant legal changes followed over subsequent decades, including recognition of equal labor rights for domestic and sex workers, affirmative-action policies, and the legalization of same-sex marriage, in 2011. Despite notable setbacks, the momentum toward gender and sexual equality at the start of the 21st century was remarkable. This momentum was halted by the political coup that ousted the first woman president in 2016. The anti-feminist mood that accompanied the impeachment process underscored an overarching theme that runs through the historiography of gender and sexuality in Brazil: the centrality of gender to the major legal and political shifts that mark the nation’s history.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.

Since the early 20th century, Brazilian public health has focused on rural areas and populations, and the so-called rural endemic diseases that plague them. These diseases—particularly malaria, hookworm, and Chagas disease—were blamed for negatively affecting Brazilian identity (“an immense hospital”) and for preventing territorial integration and national progress. For reformist medical and intellectual elites, health and educational public policies could “save” the diseased, starving, and illiterate rural populations and also promote Brazil’s entry into the “civilized world.” In the mid-20th century, public health has secured a renewed place in the Brazilian political agenda, one associated with the intense debates about development in Brazil in conjunction with democratization following World War II (1945-1964). In particular, debate centered on the paths to be pursued (state or market; nationalization or internationalization) and on the obstacles to overcome underdevelopment. A basic consensus emerged that development was urgent to be pursued by modernization and industrialization.

In 1945, Brazil remained an agrarian country, with 70 percent of the population living in rural areas and a significant part of the economy still dependent on agricultural production. However, associated with urbanization, beginning in the 1930s the Brazilian government promoted policies of industrialization and social protection of organized urban workers, the latter entailing a stratified system of social security and health and social assistance. Public health policies and professionals continue to address the rural population, which has been excluded from social protection policies. The political and social exclusion of this population did not change significantly under the Oligarchic Republic (1889–1930) or during the first government of President Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945). The overall challenge remained similar to the one confronting the government at the beginning of the century—but it now fell under the umbrella of “developmentalism” both as an ideology and as a modernizing program. Economic development would be perceived, on the one hand, as a driver of improvements in living conditions and income in the rural areas. It entailed efforts to stop migration to large urban centers was considered one of the great national problems in the 1950s. On the other hand, disease control and even eradication of “rural endemic diseases” campaigns aimed to facilitate the incorporation of sanitized areas into projects of agricultural modernization and to underpin building the infrastructure for development. Development also aimed to promote the transformation of the inhabitants of rural Brazil into agricultural workers or small farmers. During the Cold War and the anti-communism campaign, the government sought to mitigate the revolutionary potential of the Brazilian countryside by promotion of public health policies. This more general developmental program was supported by important sectors and organizations, including the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) and, in particular, the bishops of the Northeast.

Health constituted an integral part of the development project and was integrated into Brazil’s international health and international relations policies. In the Juscelino Kubitschek Administration (1956–1961) a national program to control endemic rural diseases was created as part of a broader project development, including national integration efforts and the construction of a new federal capital in central Brazil (Brasilia). The country waged its malaria control campaign in conjunction with the Global Malaria Eradication Program of the World Health Organization (WHO) and, to receive financial resources, it signed an agreement with the International Cooperation Agency (ICA). From 1957 malaria eradication had become part of U.S. foreign policy that sought the containment of communism.

The Malaria Eradication Campaign (CEM, 1958-1970) marked the largest endeavor undertaken by Brazilian public health in this period and can be considered as constituting synthesis of this linkage between development and health. Given its centralized, vertical, and technobureaucratic model, this project failed to take into account the structural obstacles to development, a fact denounced by progressive doctors and intellectuals, particularly those affiliated with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). They affirmed that disease, illiteracy, and hunger stemmed from inequality in land ownership and of the “latifúndio” system. These were the real obstacles to development in the countryside and needed to be removed by an agrarian reform or by a socialist revolution. This debate became radicalized in the early 1960s and constituted one of the factors that led civilian and military elements to launch the coup d’état in March 1964.