1. Foreigners

São Paulo, 1900–1925

As the twentieth century opened, a small group of men of color in the city and state of São Paulo had cause to be optimistic about their future. Slavery was no more, and the laws of the new Republic (1889–1930) formally declared all literate adult men full and equal citizens of the nation. As a relatively privileged group within São Paulo's small black and brown population, a select “class of color” in one of the nation's wealthiest and most rapidly modernizing states, these men far exceeded those basic requirements for citizenship. They were literate, cultured, and modestly well employed. In their social clubs and newsletters, they initially expressed hopes that displays of respectability, learning, and patriotism would help them overcome the lingering racial prejudice that still barred even middle-class men of color from certain jobs and public spaces.

Yet from their stations of relative privilege in cities like São Paulo and neighboring Campinas, the men of the class of color were also uniquely positioned to glimpse the ways in which contemporary ideologies of whitening, together with state-sponsored European immigration, exacerbated racial exclusions in practice and threatened to reinscribe them in the law. In the early twentieth century, São Paulo was the state where local elites most vigorously, and most successfully, implemented the national goal of replacing former slave laborers with whiter immigrants. By the early 1920s, newspapers by and for the class of color in the cities of São Paulo and nearby Campinas reported with alarm that while white immigrants were welcomed with open arms as desirable citizens, people of color, increasingly losing the competition for employment, housing, and equal treatment, were becoming foreigners in their native lands.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, then, the state and city of São Paulo were places where members of a small elite of color, privileged by national standards, witnessed and experienced a particularly sharp form of racial discrimination as their cities swelled with whiter immigrants. This specific experience of racial exclusion, which writers of color described as foreignness, shaped the strategies these Paulistano (from the city of São Paulo) and Paulista (from the state of São Paulo) writers pursued as they struggled to assert their belonging as Brazilians in the first quarter of the century.¹ It was the feeling of becoming outsiders to the national community that drove many dark-skinned writers to rely on ideas of racial fusion and harmony to repudiate the racism that supported their state's policies of mass immigration. In the hands of writers of color, ideas of racial fusion helped portray people of African descent as central contributors to a Brazilian race and nation, while ideas of racial harmony helped cast immigrants (and racist Brazilians) as the true outsiders in a country that, these writers contended, made interracial respect a basic condition for citizenship.

Fears of being labeled foreigners also led this early generation of Paulista thinkers of color toward nativism, and, in most cases, away from potential ties of solidarity with blacks in Africa or elsewhere in the diaspora. Above all, the experience of being a beleaguered racial minority at the margins of rapidly whitening cities changed these men's perceptions of themselves, defining the contours of what it meant to be a black thinker in that time and place. By the mid-1920s, indignant members of São Paulo's class of color would come to see and present themselves less as an isolated elite and more as leaders of a broader black (preto or negro) racial community, using their writing to publicly demand inclusion and combat old and new forms of racism.

“Still dreaming of our complete emancipation”

As early as 1903, Benedito Florencio and Francisco José de Oliveira, men of color and editors of a small newspaper from Campinas titled O Baluarte (The Bulwark), eloquently captured the project of what would come to be known as São Paulo's “black press.” They vowed that their newspaper would defend people of color from “pessimistic” attitudes that kept them “still dream[ing] of our complete emancipation.”² In what sense had Brazilians of color not been completely emancipated by 1903? And, in any case, what meaning did “emancipation” have for writers for newspapers like O Baluarte, many—perhaps most—of whom had never been slaves themselves?³

In 1888 the monarchy abolished slavery, and in 1891 the first constitution of the new Republic declared all Brazilians equal citizens regardless of color or race and removed property requirements for voting. Yet despite the constitution's race-neutral language, the founders of the First Republic encoded a series of class and racial exclusions in Brazil's legal and political institutions. The constitution restricted the vote to literate men, while the government provided public education only to a select few. As a result, all women and illiterate men of any color were excluded from active citizenship. People of color almost all fell into at least one of those two categories. Nor did the few Brazilians with the right to vote exercise a clear influence over political life in the Republic, which had a one-party system designed to share power among members of a regional elite—primarily planters and cattle ranchers from the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro. Limits on suffrage, extensive political corruption, violence, and coercion further constrained popular participation in national politics. The Republic, as George Reid Andrews has argued, embraced democracy and racial equality as ideals but denied them in practice.⁴

Emancipation was therefore incomplete in spirit, in the sense that most Brazilians of color continued to occupy low social and economic positions, and to be excluded from their nation's formal political life, as the new century began. More pointedly, emancipation was incomplete for many libertos, or former slaves, who after abolition sought to diminish their dependence on plantation labor. Some migrated to major cities, where they found precarious employment as domestic servants, shoe shiners, deliverymen, messengers, street vendors, dish washers, and the like. Many, however, ended up returning to work on or near the plantations on which they had toiled as slaves, joining the already substantial ranks of free but dependent rural workers. They struggled to mark their status as free people by negotiating new terms with their employers, and they won some concessions, primarily related to wages and to the conditions under which they would and would not work. Yet planters and other employers during the Republic did not endure such bargaining with their laborers for long. Searching for alternatives to the libertos, whom they saw as excessively demanding and intractable or lazy and untrustworthy, Brazilian planters increasingly turned to what they hoped would be responsible, competent, and malleable immigrant workers from Europe.⁵ In the last year before abolition, the number of immigrants to Brazil more than doubled, exceeding one hundred thousand for the first time. Newcomers from places like Italy, Portugal, and Spain continued to pour into Brazil by the tens and hundreds of thousands yearly well into the 1920s.⁶ Emancipation, then, was also incomplete in the sense that, in many parts of Brazil, planters and politicians devoted their energies to securing new sources of labor from abroad rather than negotiating the terms of free labor with former slaves.

The editors of O Baluarte may well have had these dynamics in mind when they pronounced emancipation to be still incomplete in 1903. Though they were better-off men of modest professional achievements—Florencio was a journalist, and Oliveira was a schoolteacher and ex-seminarian—both appear to have shared a concern for the fate of Brazilians of color who had not been able to escape a life of poorly remunerated manual labor. Alongside his efforts in O Baluarte, Florencio wrote social commentary for O Diário do Povo, a major Campinas daily with working-class sympathies, and Oliveira acted as head of the Irmandade de São Benedito, a lay brotherhood composed primarily of poor people of color. He was also the founder and director of a well-regarded Catholic school (linked to the brotherhood) that educated children of color alongside those of Campinas's wealthier white families.⁷ Yet beyond such sympathies, what kept these men “still dream[ing] of . . . complete emancipation” alongside poorer black and brown Brazilians was, as they put it, the salience of elite thinkers who “pontificated, with the authority of dogma, the intellectual degradation of the race and the moral annihilation of the class [of color].” Emancipation, in this sense, was incomplete for Florencio and Oliveira as long as the racist “dogmas” that had sustained slavery continued to cast doubt on the fitness for citizenship of all people of color, regardless of whether they met the necessary legal, civic, and cultural standards.

In the early twentieth century, several strands of racist thought combined to portray people of color as intellectually degraded and morally annihilated. Ideologies of vagrancy, carried over from the nineteenth century, portrayed people of color as irresponsible vadios or bums, incapable of working without extreme coercion. These ideologies caricatured men of color in particular as weak, sickly, effeminate, dishonorable, and unable to provide for their families.⁸ When combined with long-standing ideas about Brazil as a place supposedly free of racial discrimination, where anyone willing to work could improve his or her lot, the ideology of vadiagem heaped blame on black and brown Brazilians themselves for their low social status and unemployment.⁹ Several currents of “scientific” racism emerging from Europe, proclaiming the innate and incontestable superiority of whiter over darker races, also gained widespread following among members of Brazil's economic and political elite in the late nineteenth century, further fueling the turn to immigrant labor.¹⁰

Yet even as Brazilian intellectuals accepted many of the basic premises of scientific racism, they rejected those that ruled out Brazil's chances of becoming a modern, civilized nation. In 1896, for instance, French anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge predicted that Brazil, with its large African and indigenous population and its extensive racial mixture, was doomed to become an “immense black state, unless as is more probable, it reverts entirely to barbarism.”¹¹ In the face of such gloomy pronouncements, based on the notion that racial mixture necessarily led to degeneration, several turn-of-the-century Brazilian thinkers optimistically countered that the process of intermixture produced offspring of intermediate, rather than inferior, qualities. Since white “blood” and European culture were superior, these thinkers argued, those traits would prevail over time, “whitening” and improving the race. Racial mixture, aided by an influx of new white “blood” (in the form of state-sponsored European immigrants) and by the low reproduction and high mortality rates of people of color (caused by miserable living conditions), would gradually help Brazil overcome the “problem” of its mixed-race population.¹² By 1920, in a lengthy preface to the national census, Francisco José de Oliveira Vianna, a leading proponent of whitening, triumphantly announced the “negative growth” of African-descended populations and praised the fecundity of mulattoes and whites. Brazilians, he boasted, had defied the dire forecasts of Lapouge and his ilk and had earned, “without a doubt and without the least irreverence, the right to smile.”¹³

The idea that Brazil could “whiten” itself through mass immigration gained many converts among members of the Brazilian elite in the early twentieth century. It not only offered a solution to the problem of Brazilians’ being too dark, but it also promised a constant source of labor for a growing agricultural economy no longer based on slavery. Moreover, the “whitening ideal” resonated with long-standing myths about Brazil's harmonious race relations. Ostensibly friendly relations between members of different races, especially sexual encounters among them, could be celebrated both as a mark of the nation's racial tolerance, and as the great hope for whitened nationhood. Brazil's purported racial harmony (an image developed in explicit contrast with the United States since at least the late nineteenth century) became the cornerstone of nationalist discourses of Brazilian uniqueness during the Republic, especially in the years after World War I.¹⁴ With theories of whitening, then, architects of Brazil's national identity ingeniously transformed dismal predictions of national decay into celebrations of national greatness, even as they confirmed the basic tenets of scientific racism. These theories, which Florencio and Oliveira denounced as obstacles to the complete emancipation of black and brown Brazilians, transformed Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result of immigration, differential mortality rates, and changing measures of who could count as “white” (a relatively flexible category that traditionally encompassed some upwardly mobile people of color and came to include certain immigrants of non-European descent), Brazil's population (as reflected in national censuses) shifted from a nonwhite to a white majority over the course of the First Republic.¹⁵

The state of São Paulo and its largest urban center, the city of São Paulo, became the sites par excellence of this national transformation. In the four decades after abolition, planters used the considerable revenues from the region's coffee exports to sponsor almost 2 million European immigrants, providing direct subsidies to nearly half of them. They arrived in an increasingly multiethnic city and state, taking their place alongside nonsponsored immigrants from Europe as well as from Asia and the Middle East.¹⁶ Even taking into account this ethnic diversity, São Paulo was noticeably “whitened” as a result of these immigration policies. Between 1880 and 1920, the population of the city of São Paulo grew from 35,000 to 579,033.¹⁷ Over the course of a slightly longer period (1872–1940), the city's population counted as preto (black) or pardo (of mixed African and European ancestry) together fell to 8 percent from 37 percent.¹⁸ And despite a nationalist rhetoric praising racial mixture, in the state of São Paulo as a whole in those years, it was the mixed or pardo census category that shrank most rapidly relative to others. Paulistas categorized as branco or white became an overwhelming majority, the category preto became a visible minority encompassing almost all people of African descent, and a new category of amarelos (yellows) emerged on the margins. White immigration, rather than creating a city with a significant mixed-race population (like the national capital, Rio de Janeiro, for which the 1940 census found 11 and 17 percent in the preto and pardo categories, respectively) shaped a city and state in which distinctions between people of European and African descent became increasingly dichotomous, defined primarily around the poles of a small preto minority and a branco majority.¹⁹ During the Republic, São Paulo's elites successfully presented their state's large population of European immigrants, its small population of African descent, its rapid urbanization and industrialization, and its cultural and artistic vanguardism as the model for a modern and white Brazil, unfettered by the racial legacies of slavery.²⁰

Even as the preto and pardo populations of the city of São Paulo shrank in relative terms, however, they grew absolutely. Many rural migrants from the state of São Paulo or neighboring states like Minas Gerais, newly freed or from families that had been free before abolition, arrived in São Paulo City around the turn of the century. Between 1890 and 1920, the population of color in the city more than quadrupled, growing from 10,842 to 52,112.²¹ Yet the very characteristics that made the state and major cities of São Paulo icons of a modernizing, whitened nation also made them particularly hostile places for people of color, places with some of the most developed color prejudice in Brazil. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, as revenues from coffee helped transform São Paulo into the nation's largest and most dynamic industrial economy, people of color seeking jobs in the state's expanding factories found themselves shut out of a largely white and immigrant workforce.²² As sociologist Carlos Hasenbalg has written of São Paulo, “Nowhere in Brazil were white immigrants so clearly the winners and blacks the losers of economic development and prosperity.” This situation “increased the visibility of racial discrimination as a cause of the unequal position of blacks” in the state.²³

Perhaps because of these particular circumstances, the state of São Paulo was home to an unusual degree of intellectual production by self-identified pretos in the years of the Republic. In the state capital and in prosperous nearby cities like Campinas, a small group of literate men of color who found gainful (if precarious) employment in the service sector or in local government began to set up literary clubs and neighborhood social associations. Some even began to publish small newspapers, like Florencio and Oliveira's Baluarte, which was the organ of Campinas's Centro Literário dos Homens de Cor (Literary Center of Men of Color). Newspapers by and for people of color had existed in other Brazilian cities and towns at least since the late nineteenth century, but nowhere else had there been so many papers with the circulation, variety, and frequency of the black press of the cities of São Paulo and Campinas in the early 1900s.²⁴ The emergence of a prolific black press in this time and place reflects the particular combination of opportunity and constraint experienced by Paulistas of color. On one hand, São Paulo's prosperous, modernizing cities held out the promise of self-improvement for educated men of color, expanding their ambitions and providing the material conditions with which some of them could sustain a small but active press. On the other hand, the more they accomplished, and the higher they rose into the lower ranks of their city's middle class, the more sharply these men experienced the specifically racial nature of their exclusion. As men who had achieved literacy despite the paucity of educational opportunities, they were not subject to the formal exclusions from citizenship that applied to most people of color. Yet they still faced racism and discrimination in a variety of forms. They were formally or informally barred from a range of jobs, were denied entrance to certain public establishments or leisure spaces, and faced discriminatory attitudes in a range of personal interactions with white Paulistas. These experiences of discrimination, exacerbated by their status as a small racial minority in their city and state, vividly reminded these upwardly mobile pretos of the broader ideologies of racial inferiority that marked people of color as unfit for citizenship.

These were the contours of the ways men like Florencio and Oliveira experienced racism in the São Paulo of the Old Republic. Against this backdrop, a generation of men of the class of color used their newspapers to challenge publicly the combination of old and new racial logics that excluded them from full membership in the national community. They celebrated nationalist sentiments that, they hoped, might guarantee them fuller membership in that community. Critical of the tendency of lighter-skinned people of color to attempt to confirm their individual higher status by avoiding race-based associations and publications, and in keeping with the shrinking importance of intermediate color categories in São Paulo, these writers shunned terms like pardo or mulato. Instead, they identified with the darker color category preto or, by the mid-1920s, the racial term negro. In the period between 1900 and 1925, this subset of São Paulo's educated and modestly well-off men of color used their newspapers to assert their leadership over, and to speak on behalf of, what they successively called a “class of color,” “the men of color,” “preto men,” and, by the middle of the 1920s, “the negro race.”

The Class of Color

Who made up the small middle class of color of São Paulo and Campinas during the Republic? One man of color later described to sociologist Florestan Fernandes the relatively humble jobs that only tenuously separated this group from the ranks of the working poor: “‘There were lawyers and doctors who had Negroes [sic] to take care of the office.’ To be a private chauffeur, a low-ranking civil servant (janitor, office boy, or clerk as well as to do pick-and-shovel work or be a garbage man), or a police investigator was really something.”²⁵ Whatever social or economic status such jobs bestowed on members of these middling sectors was fragile, constantly threatened by instability and poor pay (particularly in relation to whites in comparable jobs).²⁶ The people who joined race-based recreational and literary associations in São Paulo and Campinas appear to have come from a still smaller upper echelon of these middling sectors and might more accurately be called a middle class of color. They were teachers in public schools; clerks and low-level officials in the federal, state, or municipal government; or low- to middle-ranking officers in the army or police forces—in short, the sorts of positions Fernandes (paraphrasing his informant) described as “really something,” and which, he specified, could only be obtained through connections with a powerful white patron.²⁷It is difficult to judge how many men of color achieved this employment status. A 1923 survey of just over five thousand male military draftees in São Paulo State identified 18 percent of the sample as pretos and pardos, and about 10 percent of those men (a total of 101) as business employees, civil servants, professionals, and students (the majority were agricultural workers, followed by factory workers).²⁸ If these percentages were extrapolated to the contemporary urban population of São Paulo, it would suggest as many as several thousand men in this category. Yet it is in no way certain that this small sample was representative of the population of the state, or of São Paulo City.

Whatever their numbers, members of the upper sector of the middling classes of color based their distinctions from working-class or poor people of color not solely on their occupations but also on their desire and ability to conduct themselves according to the values of the Brazilian bourgeoisie. In particular, they were among the minority of pretos and pardos who had managed to earn educations in the Republic's restricted system of public schools. Through their cultural achievements, leisure activities, religious practices (they were Catholics), and self-presentation, these men and women sought to distinguish themselves from what they saw as the dissolute lower classes, whose members lived in overcrowded tenements (cortiços), frequented rowdy botequins or bars, and practiced African-derived religions like Macumba or Candomblé. Countless photographs of association members and of writers and readers in São Paulo's black press depict young men of color impeccably coiffed, smartly dressed in suits or military uniforms, bespeaking through their personal appearance the polish, prosperity, and social position they had attained.²⁹ Yet while literate manhood allowed men of the class of color to vote and hold privileged jobs, their performances of respectability did not earn them unfettered entrance into São Paulo's white middle class. Though not condoned by the law, de facto discrimination was common in many businesses and institutions in early-twentieth-century São Paulo, as in other parts of Brazil. Even two or three decades after abolition, many high-ranking civil or military jobs (like São Paulo's Civil Guard), restaurants, hotels, parks, sports teams, and recreational clubs remained closed to people of color.³⁰ In response, relatively high-status men of color in cities like Campinas and São Paulo formed their own spaces of leisure and sociability. Their literary clubs and recreational societies bore names that emphasized class and polish more than color: “Centro Smart” and “Elite da Liberdade.”³¹ When these men called themselves the “class of color” in their early publications, as we will see, they used the word class to reference a narrow category of social distinction, not a broad category of shared racial circumstance.

Railroad worker reading newspaper, surrounded by young baggage carriers, at the Estação da Luz in downtown São Paulo. Circa 1910. Vincenzo Pastore, Instituto Moreira Salles Collection.

Although there were dozens of associations for the “class of color,” only a few, perhaps the wealthiest among them, left behind a record of their activities and concerns in the form of club newsletters. One contemporary editor called these newsletters “small newspapers [pequenos jornais],” and the adjective small characterizes the publications in many respects.³² They averaged about four pages in length and appeared only biweekly or monthly. The papers were also “small” in circulation. Editors published relatively few copies of each issue (since the papers were aimed almost exclusively at members of the clubs and associations) and distributed them primarily through subscriptions or at club meetings and parties.³³ Like the middle class of color itself, the papers had a precarious financial existence. Editors often pleaded with readers to donate money and time to the struggling newspapers. Chronically understaffed as well as underfunded, many of these early papers managed to put out only a handful of issues before folding.³⁴ Moreover, only a fraction of them have been preserved.³⁵ Florencio and Oliveira's Baluarte, which began circulation in 1903 as the newsletter of Campinas's Centro Literário dos Homens de Cor, offers the best glimpse of the very early years of these societies. Most of the surviving association newsletters, however, circulated between 1916 and 1923, a period of apparent proliferation of clubs and newsletters. After 1923 newsletters published by recreational societies largely gave way to independent newspapers.³⁶

The small papers that emerged from the class of color's social clubs served as an “additional press.”³⁷ They sought to complement rather than replace mainstream newspapers, dedicating their few pages specifically to issues affecting the class of color. Editors primarily conveyed information about club and neighborhood activities (dances, meetings, beauty contests, or soccer matches), important events in the lives of individuals (birthdays, deaths, graduations, promotions, marriages), and gossip on members’ misbehavior and mischief. But increasingly throughout the second half of the 1910s, even the most lighthearted papers came to include editorials or opinion pieces through which writers addressed their readers on weightier matters affecting people of color. These editorials appear to reflect, in written form, an oral tradition of rhetoric and exhortation within the societies. Many of the men who became editorialists in the newspapers held official positions as oradores in their associations.³⁸ These “orators” commonly gave patriotic or motivational speeches to fellow members, and the papers transcribed the tenor of these speeches. As Frederico Baptista de Souza, himself an orator of the Centro Smart and a frequent contributor to the early black press in São Paulo, explained, society newsletters helped to immortalize the words of deceased great leaders whose advice had once “resonated in all of the clubs and in all of our homes.”³⁹ Editorialists also gave voice to their own concerns in the early press, ranging from discussions of club governance to lofty disquisitions on the values of civic spirit or education. But almost all addressed a central question: the role of the associations in promoting the uplift and performing the respectability of the class of color.

“Men of worth”

Frederico Baptista de Souza was a particularly active member of São Paulo's literary and recreational societies, and a zealous guardian of the respectability of the class of color. He acted as president of the esteemed Gremio Recreativo Kosmos (Kosmos Recreational Club), contributed essays to numerous black papers, and eventually directed the newspaper O Elite (The Elite), organ of the social club Elite da Liberdade (Elite of Freedom). In 1919, Souza addressed members of various recreational societies in an editorial for O Alfinete (The Pin), named for its proclivity to “prick” members with criticism. He urged members to devote less of their energy and money to parties and dances and more to the creation of institutions, like libraries and mutual aid funds, that would contribute to members’ cultural and financial progress. For Souza, as for the other writers who issued similar stern admonitions, the public behavior of people of color was not just a matter of personal or group improvement. It was a central weapon in the battle against the prejudice of their whiter conationals, whom Souza, and other leaders like him, understood to be watching and judging the class of color at every turn. “We must show that it is not just the One-Steps, Ragtime, and Picadinhos [a popular dance] that we know how to cultivate, but that we also feel love and goodwill toward instructive things, good books of literature, poetry, and morals.”⁴⁰

“Showing” white Brazilians the good education, financial stability, and morality of the class of color, one of his contemporaries later remembered, was Souza's fondest mission. Under Souza's leadership, the Kosmos Recreational Club “under no circumstances accepted people of dubious morals.” Souza also allegedly once sold his own house to ensure Kosmos's financial viability rather than opening the club's membership to a broader, less select segment of society.⁴¹ On another occasion he resigned in anger from Kosmos following accusations by the club's landlady that the club was behind in its rent on its headquarters. “I judged it my duty,” he wrote in A Liberdade, “to save the honor of that club which, composed of men of color, has always shined in the fulfillment of its moral and social duties, something that not even the landlady herself can deny.”⁴²

Arlindo J. Veiga dos Santos, contributor to O Clarim d'Alvorada and future founder of the Frente Negra Brasileira, and Frederico Baptista de Souza, active member and contributor to multiple black Paulistano associations and newspapers. From O Clarim d'Alvorada, 15 January 1927. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Brazil.

Souza's concern with how whites perceived members of the class of color probably reflected the importance, for men like him, of daily interactions with whites of higher status. Souza worked as a clerk at São Paulo's law school; other men of the class of color similarly found themselves in constant professional contact with white Brazilians. Deocleciano Nascimento, editor of O Menelik (1915), began his career as a foundry worker and eventually became an accountant. Augusto Oliveira, editor of O Alfinete (1919), was a brigadier in the Força Pública, São Paulo's armed guard, and later became a paralegal. Jayme de Aguiar, cofounder of O Clarim d'Alvorada (The Clarion of Dawn, 1924), worked in the police's fingerprinting lab with “poets and law students.” Other editors held day jobs as cooks in large institutions, as workers in electric and telephone companies, or as public employees.⁴³ In their jobs, these men continually negotiated assumptions about their own characters that reflected broader prejudices against people of color. It was common, for instance, for skilled people of color seeking employment in the early decades of the century to undergo a “trial period” in which they were expected to prove their abilities and moral character to potential employers.⁴⁴ Outside work, too, the men of the class of color had to perform for the powerful white patrons on whom many depended for favors, employment, or financial support. These interactions were conditioned by the patron's general opinions about the reliability of men of color. One man identified as “J” (almost certainly José Correia Leite, cofounder of O Clarim d'Alvorada) recounted to sociologist Florestan Fernandes his experience approaching his white father (who did not legally recognize him) to request money for the publication of his newspaper. “J” recalled his humiliation as his father, in the process of considering his request, tried to check his breath for alcohol.⁴⁵ These fraught day-to-day relationships with whiter conationals help explain why so many articles in the early black press evince a consciousness of being watched and judged. Whether in O Baluarte’s call for the men of the class of color to “give a lesson in civic virtue [civismo]” or O Menelik’s promise to “show the world our knowledge,” the early newsletters echoed Souza's sense of urgency in correcting misbehavior and “showing” a broader Brazilian audience the worth of the class of color.⁴⁶

In the first two and a half decades of the century, writers of color eager to disprove the negative racial attitudes of whites outlined a political strategy that largely avoided direct confrontation over racial issues. The editors of the newspaper O Menelik, for instance, aimed to “conquer the friendship” of a broader white audience by “piously expuls[ing] from the columns of O Menelik the word ‘combat.’ We will never seek to combat, even though there might be cause.”⁴⁷ Similarly, an article titled “Race Prejudice” in a 1918 issue of O Alfinete advised readers to “see[k] to capture the friendship and consideration of those who think differently than us” by “stay[ing] quiet, and, by means of our example—in the practice of all that might reveal a spirit of goodness, of affection, of sweetness, of perseverance and of abnegation—we will be able to speak louder and better than through words.”⁴⁸ By opting to fight racism through exemplary behavior rather than words of confrontation, and by choosing to appeal to whites’ “friendship” and better sentiments even in the face of stinging discrimination, writers of color were not capitulating to conformist or assimilationist pressures. They were combating racism as they experienced it in the Republic—not in legal form, but as a set of “dogmas” about racial and cultural inferiority that conditioned their interpersonal relationships with white colleagues, family members, or patrons.

Even as they shunned words of confrontation, therefore, these men placed the ability to wield “words” at the center of the project of setting an example. Literacy and culture were the proxies that excluded most men of color from full citizenship in Brazil. So the educated, relatively well-off men of the class of color placed literacy and culture—and particularly writing—at the forefront of their fight against racism and their claims to equality. Writing became a crucial political act, most obviously as a vehicle for communicating and organizing political strategies in a Republic in which access to a national public sphere was severely restricted. But writing was also political for its very capacity to enact men of color's fitness for citizenship, to challenge prevailing ideas of their intellectual degradation. Not infrequently, the cult of writing itself became writers’ topic, as in a paean to “The [Written] Word,” which declared this “the most beautiful, the most expressive, the most difficult of all the other arts.”⁴⁹ Even when they were not directly celebrating the written word, writers’ use of formal, exceedingly refined linguistic conventions communicated great pride in their hard-earned learning. Sharing the preoccupations of other men of letters of their era, members of one newspaper frequently insulted those of another for their incorrect or pedestrian grammar, revealing the importance they placed on formal literary merit, and not just content, as bases for their individual authority.⁵⁰ Alongside society news, these papers gave pride of place to literature—poems, short prose pieces known as crônicas, and excerpts from novellas or short stories, often with patriotic themes. Through literary production often unrelated to racial themes, writers and editors of these newspapers—men like Deocleciano Nascimento, the editor of O Menelik and a published poet—tried to show that they far exceeded the basic requirements for citizenship.⁵¹ They were not simply literate, but lettered.⁵²

To whom were such performances directed? These newspapers circulated primarily among the class of color and were aimed most pointedly at that audience. Yet the memoirs of writers and editors, as well as evidence in the newspapers themselves, suggest that white readers paid attention to the papers with enough frequency, if not regularity, to justify writers’ sense that they were on display for a broader segment of society. José Correia Leite, who in 1924 cofounded O Clarim d'Alvorada, recalled later in his life that a few “curious” or “learned” whites sent their servants to buy black papers.⁵³ Moreover, until 1923, all of the newspapers of the class of color were sent out to commercial printers for composition and production. Being overseen by typesetters and copy editors from outside their community almost certainly made writers and editors of color conscious of how they wrote and might have even limited their sense of what they could write. Finally, throughout the 1920s, editors of the newspapers of the class of color frequently sent select issues of their papers to editors of mainstream dailies.⁵⁴ Their attempts to gain the attention of mainstream newspapers is not surprising at a time when journalism rather than books provided the primary outlet for intellectual production on social questions.⁵⁵

Because the mainstream public sphere in Republican Brazil was restricted to men, as was the right to active citizenship, it is not surprising that the newspapers of the class of color sought to demonstrate fitness for citizenship in gendered terms. Most noticeably, these papers largely excluded women as writers. They were an overwhelmingly male space, with almost all male editors and contributors. In this sense, the newspapers appear to have intensified a gender imbalance visible in the clubs and associations, where despite a mixed membership, men occupied most, if not all, positions of leadership.⁵⁶ But they also seemingly imagined an audience that was predominantly male. Many papers directed themselves not to the “class of color” but, more narrowly, to the “men of the class of color” or the “class of the men of color.” The editors of O Baluarte, for their part, tethered the broader project of racial advancement specifically to the “class of the men of color,” hoping their paper would “teach them to be citizens in the strictest sense of the word!”⁵⁷ Women appeared in these papers as muses of poetry, as subjects of love letters, photos, or stories, or as contestants in beauty contests, but they almost never appeared as writers, readers, or direct beneficiaries of the project of expanded citizenship.⁵⁸

Although their maleness and literacy allowed writers of color to escape the principal formal exclusions of the Republican legal system, their pigment linked them, through the workings of prejudice, to the much larger population of color. Since the early 1900s, writers of color like Benedito Florencio and Francisco Oliveira had decried that racial prejudice made it impossible even for worthy men of color to feel fully free. The writers and editors in the early black press thus came to see their project as a performance not simply of their own superior culture but also of their leadership in uplifting a broader community of color. “It is our duty,” wrote the editors of O Baluarte, “to defend the black race [raça negra], taking charge of its civic education, its moral equilibrium, and its social independence.”⁵⁹ The self-appointed leaders of the class of color therefore often sharply criticized their community, blaming members of the class of color (and often, a wider population of less fortunate pretos and pardos) for not taking better advantage of the opportunities that the Republic afforded them. In this vein, Augusto Oliveira, editor of O Alfinete, wrote in 1918 of the “lamentable state of men of color in Brazil, oppressed from one side by the slaveholding mentality that has not yet fully disappeared from our social milieu and, on the other, by the nefarious ignorance in which this element of the Brazilian race wallows.” Though Oliveira bemoaned the situation of people of color in Brazil, he nonetheless expressed hope that the “slaveholding mentality” would eventually disappear and that people of color might eventually overcome their limitations by taking full advantage of their rights. Sounding what was perhaps the most common note in the early black press, Oliveira urged men of color to pursue an education, which would make them “a much more important factor in the greatness and prosperity of our dear motherland.”⁶⁰ Elsewhere, writers exhorted readers to improve their work ethic, civic consciousness, or hygiene so as to “present themselves in society in a dignified and decent way, giving an example of good manners, the finest and most delicate characteristic of civilized men.”⁶¹ Though they sometimes addressed these pleas to a wide swath of the population of color, most frequently writers limited themselves to the task of preparing only the class of color, the members of their own organizations, for exemplary behavior. As one writer put it, associations were “miniature versions of the nation,” and members’ actions and self-presentation, the building blocks of citizenship for the class of color.⁶²

If membership in recreational societies constituted one level of a geographically layered sense of national belonging for men of the class of color, membership as Paulistas, or natives of the state of São Paulo, constituted another. The newspaper O Bandeirante (organ of the Bandeirantes Recreational Society) reflected the aspiration, among many writers in São Paulo's black press, to claim an identity as full and unmarked Paulistas. The paper took its name from what was becoming, in the 1910s and 1920s, the foremost icon of São Paulo's regionalism. In the colonial period, when São Paulo was a rough outpost of Portuguese settlement, European-descended bandeirantes (literally, flag bearers) helped build the local economy by leading prospecting and Indian slave-raiding expeditions into the hinterlands. Though considered key protagonists of brutal Portuguese colonialism by writers in the “Black Legend” tradition, in the early decades of the twentieth century, bandeirantes came to be celebrated as precursors to São Paulo's European, entrepreneurial, modern civilization.⁶³ That a black social club and newspaper in São Paulo would take on this name, with all of its whitening pretensions and evocations of violence against natives and Africans, reveals members’ desire to be seen as protagonists in São Paulo's emergent regional leadership of the nation. This gesture, echoed in several articles, suggests that the men of the class of color of São Paulo, like Paulistas more generally, saw themselves as marching ahead of the nation in the role of standard-bearers of modernity, their urbane clubs and newspapers standing as examples for all Brazilians of color.⁶⁴

In their exhortative editorials, male writers made it clear that gender norms were central to performances of fitness for citizenship, as both Paulistas and Brazilians. As in other areas of their behavior, leaders of the class of color based their ideals of proper masculinity and womanhood on those of contemporary Brazilian bourgeois society.⁶⁵ But as with values like education and patriotism, ideas about gender, and about male and female honor in particular, had special meaning for people of color seeking to dispel ideas of their “moral annihilation.” In a newspaper editorial from 1918, J. d'Alencastro, literary director of O Bandeirante, declared that people of color would only be able to live as equals with whites if they “sought, by every means, to elevate the character of our men, obligate our children, brothers, and friends to frequent schools, [and] inculcate in the spirit of our daughters, sisters, or wives the exact understanding of honor and appreciation for themselves.” He emphasized that “constituting a legal and legitimate family, and creating men of worth” was the basis for “the uplift of our class as we understand it!”⁶⁶ In this vein, the gossip columns of newspapers like A Liberdade and O Alfinete were full of denunciations of young women engaging in behavior (public kissing, “licentious” dances like the maxixe) considered improper and unbecoming to ladies of their standing.⁶⁷ Protecting women's honor, however, was about policing not just their sexual propriety but also their appearance in public. In his editorial, d'Alencastro expressed additional concern about the undue exposure of women and children of color to the world of work and of the street, both because he saw the presence of worn-down, ragged women and children of color on the streets of São Paulo as a stain on the image of the class of color as a whole and because, in his view, the inability of black and brown men to provide for, and protect, stable patriarchal families recalled the days of slavery.⁶⁸ Providing for their families through what d'Alencastro called “honorable work” and protecting the honor of their women were thus particular points of pride and essential attributes of respectability for men of color aspiring to become men of worth and hoping to dispel the images of weakness, effeminacy, and laziness associated with long-standing ideologies of vagrancy.

Fraternity

Just as the metaphor of the legitimate, honorable family provided writers in the black press with the moral guidelines for their behavior as individuals, as members of clubs and as a class of color, so too did ideas of family frame their understandings of citizenship. Writers repeatedly seized on the notion of fraternity to assert their belonging in the national community. Specifically, like friendship, they used fraternity to describe ideal relations between people of color and whites. In one kind of usage, fraternity, along with liberty and equality, reflected the extensive influence of French revolutionary ideas in the rhetoric of Brazilian republicanism. For several writers, the triad of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” spoke eloquently of the condition of people of color since the rise of the Republic. An article by Conde in A Liberdade, for instance, praised the 14 July (the day of the storming of the Bastille in France) as a date that, with its connotations of liberty, should “run parallel and shoulder to shoulder with 13 May [1888], the date that emancipated a race [i.e., when slavery was abolished in Brazil].”⁶⁹ In this vein, some writers used fraternidade specifically to stand for the end of slavery and the advent of a society in which men of color would be treated as brothers by whites.⁷⁰ More frequently black writers, like many of their whiter conationals, linked French revolutionary ideas to the founding of the Brazilian Republic in 1889. The “advent of the Republic,” Benedito Florencio wrote in 1903, was “the golden key that closed an extraordinary cycle of our political evolution,” a date “ennobled by the highest conceptions of the spirit of liberty and human fraternity!”⁷¹

But if writers’ enthusiasm for fraternity stemmed from an attempt to appropriate a range of useful ideologies from French Republicanism, many also used it to celebrate a specifically Brazilian situation: their nation's purported racial harmony. The clearest example of this usage appears in J. d'Alencastro's “A Grave Error!” (1918), the same long editorial piece that exhorted men of color to become “men of worth.” In one of the first explicit discussions of race relations in the black press, d'Alencastro rebuked people of color who believed that the project of “uplifting the class” required a contentious “separation of the races” in the style of the United States. The situation in that country, marked by “lynchings and prejudice,” “rancor, persecution, and war to the death” against people of color, was fundamentally different from Brazilian realities, d'Alencastro insisted. Throughout his piece, d'Alencastro characterized as brotherhood the racial harmony he saw as Brazil's unique national patrimony. Brazil was a place where “pretos and whites [were] made brothers [irmanados] by their same love for this land.” “Let us,” he continued, “solidify the fraternity that makes us indistinguishable from whites born under the gold and green flag,” for “to promote the separation of races is to provoke hatred and possible fratricidal struggles!”⁷²

It is significant that the article that most forcefully made the case for honorable, exemplary masculine behavior in the early black press was also the one that most ardently advocated a gentlemanly, brotherly code of conduct (in contrast to “fratricidal struggles”) as the class of color's path to racial inclusion. Though few men of color wrote as openly about race relations as d'Alencastro in this period, his celebration of the ideal of racial fraternity—and his refusal to talk about the ways Brazilians failed to live up to it—echoed the black press's broader strategy of fighting racism through example rather than confrontation in the first two decades of the century. Few were the statements, like that of O Alfinete editor Augusto Oliveira, that “the equality and fraternization of peoples, guaranteed by the Revolution of ’89 in France and which the Republic implanted as a symbol of our democracy is, in relation to negros, a fiction and a lie.”⁷³ Even then, Oliveira appears to have made the principle and practice of fraternity the test of a nation's true commitment to equality. In a subsequent article, he wrote that while the U.S. Constitution “theoretically” guaranteed blacks in the United States “all the same rights and freedoms as whites,” its failure to substantiate those ideals in everyday relations made that nation “the land of equality and liberty, though not of fraternity.”⁷⁴ Oliveira's ability to criticize the shortcomings of racial fraternity in Brazil makes his embrace of the ideal all the more poignant.

That writers like d'Alencastro or Oliveira would endorse the ideal of racial fraternity might strike us as perplexing, given what we know about the ways Brazilian elites in the Empire and Republic used ideas of racial harmony to support racist projects, like whitening, that aimed to erase Brazil's black population. Yet the rhetoric of racial fraternity was not always or uniformly a smokescreen for racist schemes; at times, it could provide a line of defense against overt forms of discrimination. Consider the congressional debates of 1921 regarding plans by the Brazilian American Colonization Syndicate to promote the mass migration of black North Americans to Brazil, a land many of the would-be migrants considered free of racial prejudice. Debates over whether and how to discourage these “undesirables” quickly reached the Foreign Ministry and the Congress, for the idea of large groups of black American immigrants settling in Brazil did not sit well with those who hoped for a gradual whitening of the population through European immigration and intermixture.⁷⁵ In July 1921, two congressional deputies, Andrade Bezerra (of the northeastern state of Pernambuco) and Cincinnato Braga (of São Paulo), put before the lower house of Congress a bill that would prohibit the entrance “of human individuals of the black races.” Although the Constitution of 1891 already banned “Africans” from entering Brazil, a 1907 federal decree had done away with geographic origin restrictions in order to allow the immigration of Japanese workers.⁷⁶ The new bill proposed to institute a specifically racial ban in order to keep out U.S. citizens of African descent, who despite being acceptable in geographic terms as North Americans were racially undesirable for their “African” racial origins. Proponents of the bill did not specify whether they feared U.S. black immigrants for their presumed racial identities and politics (which, many Brazilians believed, threatened their nation's racial harmony and mixture) or whether they saw them as posing a setback to the eugenic processes of whitening. They simply cited the migrants’ “undesirability” and their own “desire to defend the real interests of our fatherland [pátria].”

Opponents of the proposed immigration ban immediately took over the debate, arguing that it was beneath Congress's dignity even to consider the matter. Joaquim Osório, the representative from Rio Grande do Sul, led this opposition, opening with the argument that the bill was incompatible with the Golden Law, which abolished slavery and “celebrated the fraternity of men.” Another delegate argued that the bill was an attack on the principles of brotherhood central to the Catholic faith, which saw the sons of Ham “also as God's sons.” Above all, opponents argued, the bill was incompatible with the ideals of fraternity inherent in the Brazilian Republic. “The Republic makes brothers of all men, makes them equal before the law; the Republic has no racial prejudice, or exclusivist sentiments; and does not distinguish among whites, negros, or pardos.” Along with legal equality and freedom from slavery, the Republican ideal of fraternity made legal racial discrimination of the sort the bill proposed anathema in Brazil.

As these debates took place in Congress, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry quietly rendered them moot by instructing its consulates in the United States to deny visas to African Americans seeking to travel to Brazil. It is certainly possible, as some scholars have argued, that it was the bill's redundancy in light of extralegal prohibitions of black immigration, together with many representatives’ preference for less overt forms of racism, that led to the bill's eventual failure.⁷⁷ Yet the bill elicited real debate. Indeed, though it eventually failed to pass, frustrated supporters helped resuscitate a similar version two years later (which would also fail to pass). This suggests that opposition based on avowed antiracism and at least rhetorical commitment to racial fraternity had the power to constrain those who would implement overtly discriminatory policies. And while definitions of racial fraternity among the bill's opponents almost certainly diverged from those of contemporary writers of color, the terms through which representatives like Osório registered their distaste for the bill—their emphasis on racial fraternity as the essence of Brazilians’ moral character—left an example for the antiracist uses of fraternity that would dominate the black press for the rest of the decade.

In particular, for opponents of the bill, fraternity expressed the sentimental particularities of Brazilians in their relations with people of different races. Osório framed the bill as repellent to “Brazilian sentiments, which do not distinguish or condemn men by the color of their skin.” Congressman álvaro Baptista explained that “even if we did not have . . . the law” to expressly disavow the bill, “we would have the protest of our sentiments.” Sentiment could, of course, be discriminatory, yet these men implied that in the Brazilian nation it was necessarily antiracist. Citing the “dignity” of the “raça negra,” Osório and his colleagues João Cabral and álvaro Baptista entreated their fellow congressmen to remember the role Africans and their descendants played and continued to play in the formation of the Brazilian nation and race. Baptista, in prescient reference to what would become one of the most popular icons of racial fraternity among groups of black and white thinkers toward the end of the decade, reminded his audience that “the women of that race served as nursemaids even, perhaps, to the majority of these congressmen!” Congressman Gilberto Amado, a noted antiracist intellectual, similarly called Brazil “the son of negros.” Throughout the discussion, opponents of the bill defined fraternity as a feeling of familial intimacy and a sentiment of human dignity that made up a particular kind of Brazilian sensibility, especially in contrast to the open racism of the United States. Even those who favored racial restrictions on immigration perceived the power of sentiment to turn the debates. In his attempts to defend his bill, Bezerra condemned “this purely sentimental tendency with which we face the vital problems of this nation.” Yet sentiment won the day, and sealed the bill's failure, at least in the short term.⁷⁸

The open use of fraternity and sentiment to discredit openly racist policies helps explain the appeal of these concepts for writers seeking to defend the class of color. In a political system where equality had little meaning, but where arguments invoking sentiment might hold the line against racist legislation, the metaphor of fraternity, with its implied mutual obligations of familial love and respect, provided the men of the class of color with a strategic weapon in their battle against racial exclusion. The use of fraternity in the 1921 debates about immigration can also help us to understand some writers of color when they went so far as to embrace the ideologies of racial fusion associated with ideals of racial fraternity. The congressmen who opposed the 1921 bill presented racial fusion and intimacy as cultural and sentimental, rather than strictly biological, formulations. It seems likely that this was the interpretation a writer like J. d'Alencastro favored when he called (somewhat unusually) for people of color “not to perpetuate our race but to infiltrate ourselves into the bosom of the privileged, white race,” or when he described the “intimate communion” that existed among preto and white children in Brazil's classrooms.⁷⁹ There is no literal sexual or biological meaning for bosom and intimacy here; rather, d'Alencastro appears to be using those sentimental metaphors to talk about the social commingling and cultural integration he and his colleagues at O Bandeirante repeatedly championed.⁸⁰ Dominant discourses of interracial intimacy and fusion, in this sense, could serve as metaphors for the erasure of race as a category of social distinction (not just for the erasure of blacks themselves) and as a way of demanding that people of color be treated as full, unmarked Brazilians.

In the early years of São Paulo's black press (until 1922), while the papers still consisted mostly of society news and literary production, d'Alencastro's writings were remarkably (if unusually) clear expressions of an emerging approach to racial politics. Given the tension between confronting the limits of their freedoms outright or celebrating the possibilities for inclusion, most writers placed their bets on the latter. As a whole, their writings suggest the view that a pact with representatives of relatively progressive visions of racial fraternity would benefit people of color more than racial separation or confrontation. This strategy fit well with the other project these newspapers espoused, namely, that of disproving the lingering remnants of racist “dogmas” through example and uplift. In the black press of the 1910s and early 1920s, several writers thus contributed to the ideas about racial fusion and harmony then taking hold in certain elite circles. They saw these principles, like many other aspects of the Republican order, as alternatives to older, blatantly racist social and political arrangements, and as opportunities—recently earned and still imperfectly implemented, but potentially powerful—to enact their belonging as rightful Brazilians.

“What wounds our souls”

Racial fraternity would become an even more important ideological resource for writers in São Paulo's black press over the course of the 1920s. Yet after 1923 writers increasingly paired celebrations of Brazil's ideals of racial fraternity with denunciations of its shortcomings in practice. A key context for this shift was the emergence of new kinds of newspapers by and for people of color. In July 1923 a group of men of color in Campinas, including Benedito Florencio (formerly of O Baluarte) and two poets, Lino Guedes and Gervásio de Moraes, founded a new newspaper: O Getulino. Even in its first few issues, O Getulino (a nickname for preto abolitionist lawyer Luiz Gama) captures the transformations that would affect the form and content of the black press, as well as the attitudes of the men who wrote in it, in subsequent years.⁸¹ In contrast to previous papers, O Getulino was independent of associations and clubs, and, as its first issue proudly proclaimed, the paper had “oficinas próprias”—its own typesetting equipment.⁸² Coeditors Guedes and Moraes composed and printed about fifteen hundred copies of O Getulino weekly for three years with few interruptions, a significant advance in frequency and consistency over earlier journals. Veterans of the Diário do Povo, a major Campinas daily with working-class sympathies, Florencio and Guedes carried over their experiences with issue-oriented social critique to their new paper. Whereas editorials had appeared only sporadically in the club newspapers, O Getulino devoted the better portion of its pages to editorials and readers’ letters on issues affecting people of color in Campinas. They relegated poems, crônicas, and society gossip to a secondary position. Benedito Florencio, who had sharpened his editorial pen in a popular satire column for the Diário do Povo, and who as early as 1903 had diagnosed the incomplete emancipation of men of color in O Baluarte, brought to O Getulino a particularly clear sense of his role as an opinion leader for his race, contributing lengthy pieces on a range of subjects in almost every issue.⁸³

O Getulino reconfigured and expanded the scope of the black press in other ways as well. Its topics and audience were no longer circumscribed by a small group of neighborhood associations. It had correspondents and subscribers in São Paulo as well as contributors from Rio de Janeiro. Its editors and writers increasingly commented on articles in mainstream newspapers covering issues affecting people of color in those cities and elsewhere in Brazil. Without links to any specific social club, moreover, writers in O Getulino exercised their leadership almost exclusively through the practices of writing, publishing, and reading. Their independence from social clubs also presupposed a new audience of readers marked primarily by their self-identification as people invested in the paper's mission: the “defense of the interests of preto men.” O Getulino’s shift in terminology—its writers used preto in the masthead and increasingly turned to negro in the text of the articles themselves—reflects writers’ increased attention to the ways racial prejudice defined them and their readership not just as men accidentally marked by “color” but as members of a broader racial group with common interests and a common destiny. Its contributors thus no longer wrote to members of a club or an elite class of color. Instead, they imagined themselves, their audience, and their constituency, as members of a global “black race.” In Florencio's words, writers “read copiously and studied day and night the problems of the black [negra] race in the world.”⁸⁴ Drawing from mainstream Brazilian and international publications, O Getulino commented frequently on issues like the treatment of black troops in Europe following World War I, growing racial radicalism in the United States (particularly the rise of Garveyism), and, occasionally, on events in Africa itself.⁸⁵

Despite early signs of their shifting view of racial community, however, in the first few issues of O Getulino editors continued to express optimism

Lino Guedes and Gervásio de Moraes, poets and editors of Campinas's O Getulino. From an homage to that paper on the occasion of its first anniversary, in O Clarim d'Alvorada, 25 January 1925. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Brazil.

about the Republic's legal order, urging readers to integrate into Brazilian society by following dominant cultural codes and avoiding confrontation. In O Getulino’s second issue, for instance, editor Gervásio de Moraes called on the youth of his race to take advantage of their good fortune as citizens of Republican Brazil, where they enjoyed “liberty” and a range of “rights granted them by their fatherland.” Foremost among these for Moraes, as for other writers before him, was “the right to educate ourselves so that we may glory in the conquests of Civilization!”⁸⁶ Several articles expressed disapproval of pretos who undertook separatist racial organizing in a small all-preto neighborhood in Campinas, which the editors decried as an example of “terrible and condemnable self-segregation.”⁸⁷ When A Protectora, the organ of Campinas's Association for the Protection of Preto Brazilians, published an essay about job discrimination, asking “where, among our youth, do we see a contractor, a doctor, a lawyer, or a priest who carries in his veins the purest negro blood and hails from Campinas?,” O Getulino’s editors responded that the paper's implication of systematic discrimination was “absurd” and “venomous.” They supported this opinion through a lengthy and somewhat arbitrary calculation, stating that the earliest date that a descendant of slaves could possibly have attained the rank of doctor through the Brazilian educational system was 1924. As the year was still 1923, they roundly dismissed their rival's argument that racism was responsible for the absence of preto doctors.⁸⁸ It should be noted, however, that neither side considered citing light-skinned pardo doctors or lawyers as evidence for their positions. Rather, true to their commitment to identifying as pretos, writers on both sides implicitly agreed that the absence of professionals of the “purest negro blood” was the issue—if one O Getulino wished overall to minimize.

Then, in 1923, Robert Abbott, owner and publisher of the U.S. black newspaper The Chicago Defender, visited Brazil to revive the possibility of mass settlement by African Americans. Not surprisingly, Abbott's colonization plan, similar to the ones that had led to a proposed immigration ban in 1921, caused an upheaval in Brazil's political circles and newspapers. As in 1921, most editorialists and politicians had little enthusiasm for the prospect of large-scale black immigration from the United States. But by 1923 some opponents of black immigration made their case using the very terms that had helped defeat their cause in 1921: ideas of Brazilian racial fraternity and harmony. An editorial in Rio's O Paiz, for instance, explained that “no Brazilian has a prejudice based on color and we are, without a doubt, the promised land for those who do not have light skin.” It was precisely the nation's status as a racial “promised land” that made the mass migration of “black North Americans” so unpalatable. Black Americans were not undesirable because they were black, the editorial implied—they were undesirable because of the way they were black, because segregation had turned them into a distinct social group with oppositional politics. If they were to arrive in Brazil, they would “establish here exactly the conflicts that we do not have.”⁸⁹

The editors of O Getulino closely followed Abbott's visit and the debates it sparked in Brazilian public life. Initially, their responses to the Abbott controversy stayed close to the political formulations of the earlier black press, seeking to avoid direct conflict, encourage sentimental ties with white conationals, and express hope in the power of nationalist views of racial mixture to keep public discourse (at least technically) antiracist. With an eye on the growing context of U.S. racial radicalism in the 1920s, particularly Marcus Garvey's International Negro Conference of 1920, Getulino’s Benedito Florencio, unlike most white commentators, did not hesitate to specify the nature of the threat posed by “black North American immigration”: it “harms the solution of the black problem in Brazil and threatens the racial harmony and peace of the nation.” By the “solution of the black problem in Brazil,” Florencio meant the “peaceful” race relations resulting from activism that was integrationist rather than separatist and the “harmony” resulting from “the mathematical process of the gradual disappearance of the black race in Brazil.”⁹⁰ Like d'Alencastro before him, Florencio here trod a fine but perceptible line between championing the disappearance of actual black people and advocating, as he did simultaneously in other writings, for the erasure of race as a fixed category of difference.⁹¹

Yet the immigration debates that reemerged in the Brazilian Congress in October 1923 as a result of Abbott's visit would soon dramatically shift the tenor of Florencio's largely optimistic articles, and of O Getulino more generally. They would crystallize writers’ transformation from leaders of middle-class associations of color to ardent “defenders” of a broader group of “preto men.” The catalyst in this process was a new bill introduced by Fidelis Reis, a federal deputy from Minas Gerais, aimed at meeting Brazil's labor needs by encouraging the immigration of whites while banning immigrants of the “black race” and limiting those of the “yellow race.” Fidelis Reis, who had supported the failed attempts to pass similar legislation two years earlier, sought to avoid the “vehement opposition” faced by his colleagues Andrade Bezerra and Cincinnato Braga in previous years. Where those men had been timid in explaining their rationale for a racial bar, Reis and his supporters drew explicitly on the Brazilian variant of scientific racism to outline the threat such immigration would pose to the whitening project. At times, these arguments masqueraded as a defense of Brazilian racial harmony in exactly the ways critics of the “myth” of racial democracy would later denounce as cynical. Expressing a wish to balance Brazil's continued need for immigrant laborers against the overriding concern to protect “the racial fusion that is taking place under our skies,” Reis (and his supporters) phrased their concerns about the impact of African and Asian immigrants in unbridled eugenicist terms. Not only would migrants of color be culturally “unassimilable,” creating “cysts” in the “national organism,” but, Reis avowed, Brazilians’ “Hellenic conception of beauty would never harmonize with the features resulting from this sort of racial fusion.”⁹²

In a subsequent congressional session, Reis read aloud letters from leading intellectuals and politicians stating their opinions on the proposal. In their missives of support, Oliveira Vianna, the lawyer-historian and leading theoretician of “whitening” ideologies, and Afrânio Peixoto, a prominent medical professor, echoed Reis as they proclaimed the degeneracy and undesirability of the mestiço or mixed-race person. Vianna predicted that immigrants of color would bring down the quality of Brazil's experiment with racial mixture, “augment[ing] the shapeless mass of inferior mestiçagem that so greatly retards our progress.” Peixoto, for his part, argued that “as a rule, racial mixture is an unhappy [condition]. . . . Many of our national woes stem from it.” Yet he hoped that, in time, this process would yield a lighter population: “We might take three hundred years to change our souls and lighten our skin, and, if not as whites, at least thus disguised, we will lose our mestiço character.” Faced with the urgency of defending this delicate project against any further setbacks, Peixoto begged leave to speak frankly: “It is precisely at this moment that [North] America intends to rid herself of her body of 15 million negros and send them to Brazil. How many centuries will it take to purify this human residue? Will we have enough albumin to refine all this dross? How much more time until we redeem [the sons of] Ham? Was Liberia not enough for them; have they now discovered Brazil?”⁹³ The editors of Rio's O Jornal similarly refused to hold their tongues in the face of such a threat, condemning the role of sentiment in thwarting previous attempts. “Enough of inept sentimentalism; let us not be afraid of words, and say things as they are.” It was bad enough that black Brazilians were “indolent,” “ignorant,” and “hard and slow to absorb, impeding our ethnic unity and depreciating our racial mixture with their inferior contributions.” But “of all the disadvantages of African immigration, only one has not manifested itself here: racial struggle.” This would be the contribution of U.S. blacks, if allowed to enter Brazil.⁹⁴

Even as it revealed the unapologetic popularity of eugenic schemes for whitening among some politicians and intellectuals in Brazil, Reis's bill earned the opposition of others. Jurist Clóvis Bevilacqua, a leading architect of the Civil Code of 1916, opposed the bill on the grounds that it contravened “human sentiments of fraternity and benevolence.”⁹⁵ As in 1921, the bill failed to pass, yet the support it commanded among leading thinkers, politicians, and journalists, and the terms in which it was justified, sent shock waves through the black press.

News of the Reis bill and of debates surrounding it first appeared in O Getulino through the contributions of the jurist, lawyer, and public intellectual Evaristo de Moraes. Moraes, a (light-skinned) man of color, was an outspoken critic of racism, a self-proclaimed negro, and a defender of Brazilian ideals of racial fraternity.⁹⁶ During Congress's consideration of the Reis bill, Moraes, who resided in the national capital, Rio de Janeiro, closely followed the lower house's daily proceedings. In his reportage on these events, published directly in O Getulino, Moraes made it clear that what was so disquieting about the bill was that, despite targeting Asians as well, “one perceive[d] that the attack [was] primarily against negros.” Moreover, Moraes worried, it was “immediately evident” that these attacks relied on the doctrinaire scientific racism of “heralds of the superiority of a particular branch of the white race,” like the notorious Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and Georges Vacher de Lapouge (both of whom Fidelis Reis cited on the floor of Congress). Moraes's essays in response to the bill and its supporting arguments provided the first and clearest exposition of scientific racism and whitening ideologies—and their legal, intellectual, and moral illegitimacy—in the black press of the early twentieth century and likely acted as a primer on those subjects for the writers of color who subsequently tackled them.⁹⁷

Evaristo de Moraes adopted several strategies in refuting the racial theories behind Reis's bill. First, he cautioned that applying Gobineau's ideas of Aryan superiority to Brazil was “inconvenient,” since it was well known that the French author of Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1855) did not consider Southern Europeans (like the Portuguese) to be Aryans at all but rather an inferior race resulting from mixture with Africans and Moors. Second, Moraes admonished that “there does not currently exist any civilized people exempt from race mixture.” Civilization and modernity depended on racial mixture. A lawyer of mixed ancestry, Evaristo de Moraes would have been particularly pleased to assert this as refutation of the theories of the “lunatic Gobineau” that mestiços were “inadaptable” to learning and the law. Finally, like d'Alencastro and Florencio, Moraes strategically posited an inclusive, optimistic version of racial and cultural fusion as the dominant (and rightful) consensus among Brazilians. “It seems incredible that in the year 1923, and in Brazil, someone would still remember to draw on Gobineau and Lapouge, who have been revealed to be completely foreign to the conditions of the ethnic fusion that has occurred among us and who, suffused with prejudices, were unable to foresee our civilization's progress.” Fidelis Reis's negative view of racial fusion was thus an outdated aberration, “a veritable affront to the Brazilian nation.” In the face of the stark reappearance of older eugenic projects, Moraes defended nationalist celebrations of racial fusion all the more passionately.⁹⁸

These immigration debates, and Moraes's coverage of them, were apparently a turning point for men of color like Theophilo Camargo, who in late 1923 took over as editor of O Elite (journal of the Dramatic, Recreational, and Literary Society Elite da Liberdade). Details of Camargo's life are scarce, but they show that while still a young man, he rose to become an army sergeant from his humble beginnings as a tailor. Along the way, Camargo obtained the necessary education to publish in several of the newspapers that made up São Paulo's black press.⁹⁹ Before the 1923 immigration debates, Camargo appears to have been unusually enthusiastic, even among writers in the black press, about the Republic and the opportunities for upward mobility it had provided him as a lettered man of color. Indeed, only a year earlier, Camargo had engaged in a virulent polemic in the Kosmos Recreational Club (of which he was a member) and in the newspaper O Kosmos, during which he accused his adversaries of being insufficiently committed to the Republic and rather viciously corrected their grammar—the currency of civilization and citizenship for the class of color in the Republic. He was eventually expelled from the Kosmos club for his outbursts.¹⁰⁰ Yet in the wake of Moraes's response to the Reis bill in O Getulino, Camargo and others who had celebrated the Republic for its principles of fraternity and its opportunities for mobility, or who had advised men of color to follow a course of quiet obedience and sacrifice, began to transform their association newspapers into spaces for open debate about racism and race science. Camargo helped turn O Elite, which might otherwise have emerged as a fairly cautious organ of a middle-class club, into a new platform from which to deal with national politics and their effects on people of color.¹⁰¹ Like Moraes's articles in O Getulino, Camargo's writings in O Elite explicitly addressed theories of eugenics, ethnology, and “blood,” introducing a racial vocabulary previously uncommon in São Paulo's black press.

In his first two issues at the helm of O Elite, Camargo published irate articles on the subject of the Reis bill, both of which were republished shortly thereafter by O Getulino. Camargo argued that it was shameful that Brazil would refuse hospitality to North American negros persecuted by racism. But, zeroing in on the same passages as Evaristo de Moraes, he worried more that the racism in the congressional debates spoke ominously of negro Brazilians themselves. Granted, Fidelis Reis had based his proposed ban on the idea that Brazilian blacks were superior to black North Americans: “our preto Africans . . . fought alongside us in the harshest struggles of the formation of our nation, worked, suffered, and with all their dedication helped us to create the Brazil we see before us today.” Tied to narratives about their position in Brazil that black writers held dear, such arguments had not, until then, roused a negative response from the black press. But despite “our Africans” being better than North Americans’, Reis added that “it would have been preferable had we not had them at all.”¹⁰² This was the heart of the matter, as far as Camargo was concerned. “What wounds our soul like a red-hot iron is, without doubt, the manner in which a certain Congressman [Fidelis Reis] justified this bill, which will appear in the annals of Congress for all eternity. Yes, for all eternity it will be made manifest that negro blood is a disorder in the formation of our nation's ethnological character.”¹⁰³ For Camargo, this turn of events represented a betrayal of the antiracist understanding that journalists of color had been attempting to build with progressive white allies—embracing fraternity, avoiding conflict, extolling uplift and exemplary behavior, displaying their “dedication and sacrifice,” and even chiming in to condemn U.S. blacks for their radical separatism. What “wounded his soul” about the proposed immigration restriction was his realization that, far from disappearing with the memory of slavery or being slowly overcome by an ideology of racial harmony, racial prejudice was making its way back into the nation's legal record, where it would remain forever inscribed. Though the Reis bill did not become law, for Camargo, as for Moraes, the terms in which it had been discussed and recorded crossed a line, severed a fraternal pact. Moreover, Camargo worried, if the imputation of inferior racial quality was an argument for barring foreign blacks from Brazilian soil, might it not someday also become an argument for eliminating black Brazilians? “What terrifies us most, what makes us walk in uncertain steps toward the future is the thought that, sooner or later, they will expel us as well!”¹⁰⁴

In the space of little more than a year between late 1922 and early 1924, Camargo's interventions in São Paulo's black press shifted from passionately defending the Republic and its guarantees to voicing fears of forced exile because of an unfortunate historical tie to Africa. The creation of O Getulino, the publication of Moraes's reports on the Reis bill, and Camargo's dismayed interventions in O Elite all point to a profound intellectual and political transformation that began around the immigration debates of 1923 and became clearly visible across an increasingly issue-oriented press in the following years. From this moment onward, writers in the black press clung ever tighter to racial fraternity as an ideal of national belonging, but they no longer held their tongues about the racism that kept it from becoming reality. In late 1924 Archimimo de Camargo, also of O Getulino, wrote an article calling the usual contrast between U.S. racial violence and a Brazilian racial paradise “pure deception.” At least in the United States, he argued, the animosity was “frank, loyal, and sincere”—negros there knew who their enemies were. In Brazil, however, they were treated with hypocritical politeness by people who actually despised them. Echoing the scientific language of Evaristo de Moraes, Camargo called for “a decisive death to prejudice” on the grounds that all “human organisms . . . even of different kinds” were equal.¹⁰⁵ Gervásio de Moraes, who in his first enthusiastic articles for O Getulino had congratulated Brazilian youth on their good fortune and opportunities as citizens of the Republic, by December 1924 excoriated the “iron-clad prejudice” that “strangled” people of color at every turn.¹⁰⁶

“Foreigners in the land of their birth”

Among the most eloquent of these new critics of Brazilian racism was Getulino’s Benedito Florencio. Although only a year earlier Florencio had condemned black immigration as a threat to Brazil's traditions of racial harmony and fusion, in late 1924 he began a series of articles alerting readers to the expansion and intensification of racial prejudice in São Paulo. Florencio was spurred into action, he explained, by a letter to the editor in the São Paulo daily A Gazeta. The letter was by one Bernardo Vianna, who, in Florencio's words, “just for being preto cannot find a job anywhere!” “He goes to the factories but is refused service; many times they do not even let him speak with the managers. He looks for job advertisements in the newspapers, runs quickly to wherever workers might be needed, but even if he arrives before any other candidate, he is shunted aside and rejected for being of color.” Over the course of several long and angry editorials, written “from the trenches of my faith in the race,” Florencio denounced this “mute and odious war” against the “preto men” of the city and state of São Paulo.¹⁰⁷ In 1924 Florencio, who since 1903 had placed his hopes in Republican principles of fraternity to complete the emancipation of men of color, posed the question, “Are we equal before the law?” and answered, “Theory says yes, but practice says no!”¹⁰⁸ Although no new discriminatory legal measures had been passed in the two intervening decades, increasing discrimination against pretos by private citizens (on the job market or as customers in private businesses) had come to “constitut[e] a grave threat to our tranquility and to the stability of our rights.” Florencio expressed the gap between the legal theory of equality and everyday practices of racism as a violation of those other Brazilian values of familial sentiment and fraternity. Across the state of São Paulo, Florencio claimed, pretos were “being rudely and effectively expelled from the familial conviviality of our society.”¹⁰⁹

In the struggle to achieve true equality, Florencio and others therefore defined the realm of sentiment, and particularly familial metaphors, as their major battleground. Legal liberty and equality were important, but they only became meaningful realities when combined with sentiments of respect, dignity, and full acceptance of the citizenship rights of people of color. Yet these sentiments, attitudes, and relationships among private citizens could not be legislated into reality. The seeming naturalness of family metaphors, especially fraternity, thus helped Florencio and others to argue for people of color's rightful belonging in the nation. “We are Brazilians, legitimate sons of this colossal country . . ., cradle of a heroic people whose greatness was cemented with the blood of our grandfathers, with the sweat of our elders.” Theophilo Camargo of O Elite similarly celebrated the negros who had “built this agricultural Brazil with their arms, made this intellectual Brazil with the blood of their wives, who breastfed, with so much tenderness, the great figures who today take pleasure in becoming our most bitter enemies.” O Getulino editor Gervásio de Moraes upheld the ideal of fraternity in the face of racial oppression, urging negros to continue in their struggles, “smiling toward a fraternal future where one day, there should flicker a flame symbolizing the undistinguishable confraternization of the races.”¹¹⁰

It is significant that Florencio attributed his new perspective on racism in São Paulo to an article in the mainstream newspaper A Gazeta. If Moraes's erudite rebuttal of the European racist theories behind the Reis bill appears to have provided the language with which black writers in São Paulo began to discuss Brazilian racial theories in the mid-1920s, reporting in A Gazeta markedly influenced their writing about immigration and labor discrimination in São Paulo in that same period. In September 1924, another Gazeta article, titled “Ill Fate for Pretos! Cannot Find Employment Anywhere,” caught the attention of several writers in the black press, who continued on the lookout for allies in their antiracist project. It is telling of their changing mood that, rather than focusing on white intellectuals who lauded Brazilian ideals of racial fraternity, these writers of color seized on work by a journalist who explicitly attacked the failures of Brazilian antiracism, confirming and granting legitimacy to their own emerging complaints. The article, partially reprinted in O Getulino, told the story of Joaquim Brandão Costa, a man who “writes and reads fluently and is trained for many tasks, but who, only because he is preto, cannot find an occupation, search as he might.” Sympathizing with the predicament of men like Joaquim Costa, the Gazeta writer broke step with the usual laudatory contrasts between Brazil and the United States. He cautioned his readers that Brazil was steering dangerously close to the discriminatory practices of Jim Crow, “where pretos live separately, so great is the hatred that whites have for them.” It was Brazilians, he argued, who were now “systematically . . . expelling [pretos] from their midst,” especially in areas of commerce, industry, or civil service. Even on the city's streets, the journalist noted, people of color were seldom seen. Little by little, the Gazeta author ominously concluded, “our countrymen [of color] are meeting an ill fate—becoming foreigners in the land of their birth!”¹¹¹

The cautionary tale of Joaquim Costa, a man who was well qualified for a range of jobs but was rejected simply because of his color, made a deep impression on writers in the increasingly assertive black press. As men who were not just skilled or literate but lettered, men who had done everything in their power to meet the standards of Brazilian propriety and fulfill the cultural conditions for citizenship only to find themselves still treated like outsiders and impugned by theories of scientific racism, Costa's story indeed appeared to foreshadow the “ill fate” of second-class citizenship that could soon befall pretos as a race.¹¹² Even deeper was the impression left by the Gazeta author's use of the word foreigners to describe this feared condition of second-class citizenship. The idea that pretos were “foreigners” connected the abstract racial theories and attitudes evidenced in immigration debates with writers’ everyday experiences of racial discrimination in a city marked by European immigration. It suggested a direct link between African origin and exclusion from citizenship, one that Gervásio de Moraes eloquently captured in 1927: “To be negro . . . is almost to be an undesirable foreigner, exiled from far-off lands for having committed a national crime!”¹¹³ In the São Paulo of the 1920s, however, most foreigners, especially those of European origin, were not “undesirable”—at least not nearly as undesirable as black nationals. The concern that Brazilian blacks were treated as foreigners while European foreigners were being welcomed as citizens would become one of the most resonant themes in the black press, now increasingly political in its frame, for the remainder of the decade. After 1924 black writers would seek to define the categories “native” and “foreign” to their own advantage by addressing two major concerns: their relationships with European immigrants and their relationship with Africa.

“The foreign facet of the problem”

Before the mid-1920s, to the extent that black writers talked about immigrants at all, they had generally looked on them sympathetically, at times even defending them from the xenophobia of many Brazilians. In a few instances, writers in the black press portrayed people of color and immigrants as equally disoriented but deserving newcomers to São Paulo's cities. Others argued that immigrants should serve as models of political and social organization for people of color, as they struggled to improve themselves and create institutions of mutual support. A few writers even reasoned that while it would be easy to blame immigrants for unemployment among people of color, the true culprits were the poor work ethic and lack of education of black and brown Brazilians themselves.¹¹⁴ Yet by 1924, as men like Benedito Florencio and Theophilo Camargo began to write about racial discrimination in São Paulo in the wake of controversy over the Reis bill, they also shifted the ways that they wrote about immigrants. A big part of the problem, they argued, was the excessively hospitable way Brazilian employers and officials treated white immigrants—a hospitality that threw into relief the ill treatment of preto Brazilians. O Getulino and its peer publications were, by the mid-1920s, peppered with accounts of the experiences of people of color like Joaquim Costa and Bernardo Vianna, who were unable to find jobs because of their race. The papers also ran frequent denunciations of the too easy taking, by prized white foreigners, of the few service jobs still available to educated pretos in the urban economies of São Paulo or Campinas.¹¹⁵ Working out the ways that pretos were becoming “foreigners,” Getulino’s Euclydes Oliveira noted with bitter irony that employers commonly used the word nationals not as a mark of belonging in the nation, but as a derisive synonym for black, undesirable workers.¹¹⁶ It was a short step from criticizing racist white employers to identifying immigrants themselves as the problem. By September 1924 Florencio published an exposé on immigrant racism that announced a “sensational revelation”: “Even foreigners want to turn us into undesirable guests!”¹¹⁷

The early life of black writer and activist José Correia Leite provides a window onto some of the local social dynamics that fueled the increasing sense of outrage toward immigrants in São Paulo's black press by the mid-1920s. Leite was born in the city of São Paulo in 1900. His white professional father did not officially recognize him, and his mother, a black domestic worker, had trouble supporting him and his sister. Leite spent much of his youth in the custody of strangers, working odd jobs. He earned only a patchy primary education by performing small services, like sweeping out the schoolyard, in exchange for lessons. As a young adolescent, following a pattern not uncommon for preto and pardo children at the time, Leite took a job as a live-in worker and caretaker for a family of Italians in his heavily immigrant neighborhood. Leite later recounted that his weak ties with his own family limited his contact with people of color, and, along with his light complexion, facilitated his assimilation into an immigrant subculture of Italian language, food, opera, dances, and other social relations. He claimed that he became so thoroughly involved in this subculture that his non-Italian friends perceived him to speak with a marked Italian accent. This might have been exaggeration—after all, Leite told this story as part of a self-portrait that emphasized his status as an outsider to the group of relatively well-off, formally educated pretos who made up much of São Paulo's elite of color. Perhaps, as Leite himself admitted, some of what passed for an “Italianized” form of speaking could actually have been his uneducated Portuguese.¹¹⁸

For Leite, this very closeness with white Italians eventually led to his self-definition as a negro (a term he used both in his later interviews and in his early writings). Leite was witness to the racial insults Italians frequently hurled at Brazilians of color, whom they called “tizune” or “tiçule,” Italianized renditions of the Portuguese tição, or charcoal.¹¹⁹ Italians also associated negros with a global history of subordination. In order to “be above us,” Leite explained, many Italians told people of color that slavery had ended thanks to the king of Italy.¹²⁰ Italians, according to Leite, also often called people of color “meneliques,” a reference to Menelik II, a legendary Ethiopian king against whom Italian troops had fought (and lost) fierce battles in the late nineteenth century.¹²¹ Leite never made it clear what this insult meant to Italians in São Paulo. It seems likely that it was a way of calling Brazilians of color Ethiopians, of linking them with an African heritage that they saw as hostile, primitive, and barbaric.¹²² But Menelik had famously beaten back Italian colonial ambitions in the Battle of Adwa in 1896, so perhaps the epithet also carried a grudging respect.

Leite had been spared some of these epithets as a child, being considered “negro but not too much” by his Italian host family and friends. But as he grew into adolescence, members of the Italian community began to object to his presence at dances and social gatherings, or to his dating Italian women. This, he recalled, led him to conclude that he was “wasting time . . . with these Italians.”¹²³ By his early twenties, Leite reconnected with some of the black friends of his boyhood. One friend in particular, Jayme de Aguiar, steered Leite away from the Italians and introduced him to the social organizations of the class of color, with its own dances and leisure activities. He also taught Leite correct Portuguese grammar and encouraged his growing interest in activism and journalism. This was in the early to mid-1920s, just as the associations and newspapers of the class of color were beginning to articulate a new critique of Brazilian racism. In 1924 Aguiar and Leite founded a newspaper of their own, O Clarim d'Alvorada, which like its predecessor O Getulino was an independent newspaper for negros in the city, not a club newsletter for the class of color. While Leite was critical of immigrant racism, he took the Italian-language immigrant press (familiar from his boyhood) as a model for his own paper. “The black man,” he reasoned, “was, in a certain way, also a minority like the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish.”¹²⁴ Though pretos and pardos were not immigrants, they were all relative newcomers to Brazilian citizenry, and many were recent arrivals to São Paulo. What they shared with immigrants was a sense of being outside the mainstream of Brazilian society, of needing to claim fuller rights as a group. In this sense, immigrant meeting halls, ethnic associations, and newsletters provided a point of comparison, even a set of models, for the black community. In O Clarim, Leite and others repeatedly called for people of color to imitate immigrants in constructing a common identity out of their shared condition, and a politics out of their common identity.¹²⁵

Jayme de Aguiar and José Correia Leite, coeditors of O Clarim d'Alvorada, on the cover of the issue of 15 January 1927. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Brazil.

Although Leite was unusual among black writers for having lived with a family of Italian immigrants, his admiration for the successful organization of immigrant communities together with his experience of racism and rejection by some Italians reflected the broader patterns of day-to-day contact and rivalry with immigrants that shaped representations of that group in the 1920s black press. Several of the city's oldest black settlements, like Leite's neighborhood of Bexiga, were also places where less wealthy Italian immigrants owned homes, often renting out their basement apartments to families of color.¹²⁶ In these neighborhoods, people of color frequently interacted (and clashed) with immigrants as neighbors, tenants, or customers. It seems likely, for instance, that the landlady who accused Frederico Baptista de Souza's Kosmos Club of reneging on its rent was Italian.¹²⁷ Black newspapers in this period also newly began to report on the sorts of immigrant taunts and insults Leite later described. O Getulino, for instance, ran an indignant article by B. H. Ferreira denouncing a piece in Il Pasquino, an Italo-Brazilian newspaper, that had allegedly “ridiculed” a beauty contest recently sponsored by O Getulino. According to Ferreira, the writer for Il Pasquino had complained of a “certain smell” lingering in the dance hall in which O Getulino had held its beauty pageant and dance (and in which, it appears, a group of Italians had subsequently staged their own festivities). Seeking to return the insult “to the filthy source whence it came,” Ferreira wrote that the odd smell the Italian writer had perceived among blacks must have been the smell of perfume, “which is why it seemed so peculiar to him, as he is always accompanied by the smell of formaggio.”¹²⁸

By the end of 1924 writers who had only begun to describe the problem of Brazilian racism a few months earlier increasingly reserved their harshest prose not for immigration policies or racist Brazilians, but for immigrants themselves. Benedito Florencio, for instance, argued that though many white Brazilians of a former slave-owning class were the source of “the most ferocious prejudice,” this constituted “the least worrisome part of the problem, since it poses hardly any threat to the stability of our sacred rights as free men.” The old fazendeiros (landowning slaveholders) would soon die off, and their children and grandchildren “will see in the black man not a lost or ‘illegally usurped’ piece of property but instead a Brazilian citizen.” The imminent threat to blacks’ rights and freedom lay elsewhere, in the “foreign facet of the problem.” “There exists a kind of prejudice that is absolutely intolerable and barbaric in its origin, and that is the [prejudice] that certain foreigners are practicing against the poor Brazilian black man.” “For foreigners,” Florencio continued, “mere guests here in our land, to have the criminal petulance to persecute us—that is truly barbaric, it surpasses the limits of stupidity, and deserves to be fought, if necessary even by iron and fire!” Florencio warned that if things continued as they were, people of color would soon face the same restrictions on the use of public spaces as their counterparts in the United States. Unless black people stood up to the “affronters,” “our fate tomorrow will be that of true social outcasts.”¹²⁹ This attitude was broadly reflective of writing in the black press of the mid-1920s. Together with elites’ racial preference for white immigrants, many writers argued, these newcomers’ own racism would shape the fault lines of Brazilian citizenship in ways that would turn people of color into pariahs.

As they increasingly identified foreigners as the source of the worst kind of racism in Brazil, writers in São Paulo's black press sought to deploy ideas of racial fraternity and fusion as weapons against their new adversaries. B. H. Ferreira, in his polemic with Il Pasquino, informed his immigrant interlocutors that pretos were “citizens,” “in their own land, in their house,” to whom “the constitution of their nation granted liberty and equality!” In Brazil, moreover, racial fraternity was a national standard that immigrants were obligated to honor. Pretos were “not treated with hostility” by white Brazilians—indeed, Ferreira strategically argued, whites were often allies in the struggle against racism. “Small-minded racial prejudice is almost extinct in this great country, and it is noteworthy that the greatest, most talented Brazilians were the first to combat such a nefarious sentiment, and they did so with enough ardor to extinguish slavery—a foreign invention—in order to equalize negro and white Brazilians.”¹³⁰ Building on Evaristo de Moraes's earlier denunciation of scientific racism as foreign and inimical to Brazilian traditions of racial harmony, Ferreira turned accusations of unfitness for citizenship against racist foreigners themselves. To foreigners who persisted in the un-Brazilian practice of racial discrimination, Benedito Florencio offered his own suggestion: “The only thing to do will be [for immigrants] to look for other lands, transport yourselves to other countries where there exist no specimens of black people, of those imbecilic, backward, and inferior people who can be found here on so large a scale. Leave us here, at peace and ignorant; move to the great civilized cities, for there even exists an aphorism providing wise advice to those who are uncomfortable.”¹³¹ Florencio did not spell out the aphorism, but his colleague B. H. Ferreira did: “‘Those who are uncomfortable are the ones who should leave.’ And, as we well know, there are steamboats leaving Brazilian ports every day.”¹³²

In these arguments with racist immigrants, writers of color frequently reached for the language of nativism, which at the time was spreading across Brazil. By the mid-1920s many native workers, both white and black, shared their dislike of the Republic's immigration policies with a growing number of politicians and employers, who despite their own earlier hopes to whiten the nation, found European immigrants’ penchant for labor radicalism, or, in many cases, their unwillingness to assimilate, to be less than ideal. In São Paulo, so heavily populated by migrants, xenophobia ran high among sectors of both the elite and the working classes, providing people of color traction in the negotiation of their belonging as native-born Brazilians.¹³³ Nativist attitudes—particularly in the hands of racially progressive white allies—could aid writers like Florencio or Ferreira in their attempts to portray Brazilian identity as essentially fraternal and racism as a distasteful foreign practice. José Inácio Lacerda Werneck, a prominent white writer from Campinas who had once worked at the Diário do Povo (the same newspaper for which Benedito Florencio and Lino Guedes wrote before O Getulino), was one such ally. At one of O Getulino’s social events, Lacerda Werneck explained that black and white Brazilians were “brothers” by virtue of the mixture between Portuguese and African settlers, as well as by the “sentiments of the founders of the Republic, which, in its infancy, received the beneficial influx of equality and fraternity.” Though the immigrants may have had jus soli (rights deriving from birth on Brazilian soil) on their side in the struggle for Brazilian citizenship, blacks had jus sanguinis—the right to citizenship through blood or descent. “Neo-Brazilians,” Lacerda Werneck continued in a nativist argument that verged on xenophobia, were set apart by their foreign blood, language, and culture (and, he surmised, by having only a base material interest in Brazil). They were also set apart by their failure to abide by the Brazilian sentiments of racial friendship and brotherhood. “Damn all Brazilians,” he inveighed, “who dare to consider the black man a being outside of the national communion of our fatherland! . . . Let us always prefer to lose the friendship of a thousand foreigners, than for a black man to lose the friendship of a white man [and vice versa].”¹³⁴ In this formulation, racism, as practiced by Brazilians native and foreign, was as foreign to, and as unassimilable by, the national spirit as the undesirable immigrants themselves.

Many writers in São Paulo's black press echoed Lacerda Werneck's nativist idea that true Brazilians were those who not merely had been born on Brazilian soil but also had commingled their “blood” with that of other Brazilians for generations. To these writers, the idea of racial fusion—which in the hands of some white proponents had eugenicist overtones—provided yet another opportunity to assert the belonging of people of color at the expense of immigrants. One contributor to O Getulino who signed “U. C.” argued, over the course of two editorials titled “Racial Fusion,” that Brazil lacked the “homogeneity” of a nation, something that could only be achieved through “aggregation and fusion into a single race.” In a clever inversion of standard whitening ideologies, U. C. presented massive white immigration as a torrential flood that “weakened” and diluted the incipient national race. Euclydes Oliveira of O Getulino, for his part, argued that Brazil's racial fusion had eliminated all “distinction among races.” Yet it was precisely because distinct races did not exist that antiblack racism reflected stupidity or “ignorance of the most rudimentary principles of ethnography” and threatened to “dismember” the unified “raça Brasileira.”¹³⁵ In both of these examples, writers implicitly portrayed people of African descent as essential components of a unified, racially mixed Brazilian identity, while singling out immigrants—their genetic material, foreign culture, and racism—as threats to the national body.

José Correia Leite's newspaper, O Clarim d'Alvorada, issued nativist views in a more humorous but equally biting tone. A regular column in the early editions of O Clarim featured a pompous fictional Italian immigrant, “Professore Dottore Juó P. Carreta.” No doubt written by Leite, the column mocked the speech patterns of Italian immigrants (the “Professor Doctor's” heavily Italianized Portuguese was sprinkled with expressions like Madonna and Mamma mia). Professor Carreta's first appearance, titled “Naziunale” (an Italo-Portuguese rendition of the word “nacional” or “national”), poked fun at immigrants’ aspirations to Brazilian nationality. “I really like Brazil and the Brazilians. But I become indignant when I hear it said that I am not a national. And why not, if my wife is a pretty little mulata who speaks Portuguese correctly?” Leite had the “Professor Doctor” attempt to give further proof of his belonging in Brazil, adding that he had “tons of money,” and that his children studied at the “commercial [school] with [the children of] Matarazzo [a prominent Italo-Brazilian industrialist].” “And so why am I not a national?” Leite had him conclude, leaving the question open for his readers to supply the evident answer: No amount of money, learning, or social connections could turn this bumbling foreigner into a true Paulistano and Brazilian.¹³⁶

The column demonstrated, by contrast, black writers’ and readers’ proficiency in the culture and language of their city, state, and nation. Indeed, Leite's comical column echoed (and might have been based on) the poems of social commentator Juó Bananére (the Italianized pseudonym of Alexandre Ribeiro Marcondes Machado), which appeared in prominent São Paulo newspapers in the early twentieth century. These were written in the voice of an Italian immigrant eager to prove his literary prowess and his identity as a Paulistano through sonnets dedicated to the people and places of the city, yet whose Portuguese grammar and orthography were irrepressibly, and comically, Italian.¹³⁷ Leite's humor, and its goal of demonstrating blacks’ aptitude for urbane citizenship through contrast with inept outsiders, was also reminiscent of earlier articles in the black press that mocked the language and experiences of caipiras, or hicks from the interior, as people who arrived in the city woefully unprepared for modern life.¹³⁸

The fact that writers in the mid-1920s black press responded to immigrants’ racial slurs with accusations of foreignness shows the extent to which, for journalists of color, these were the same order of insult. Trading accusations of racial inferiority and foreignness was part of a single conversation about Brazil's future—what kind of nation it would be, and what place, if any, each group would occupy within it. In a whitened, racially exclusivist Brazil that continued to welcome immigrants as ideal citizens, Brazilians of color would indeed be condemned to the position of “foreigners”—outsiders or second-class citizens. In the mixed, racially inclusive Brazil that black writers imagined, foreign immigrants and racist Brazilians would become the outsiders. The stakes were high, for these were mutually exclusive visions of the nation. In the mid-1920s, currents of nativism and anti-immigrant stereotypes aided black writers in their attempts to portray racism as a violation of the Brazilian national spirit, and to reaffirm their own status as national insiders. But making nativism a key part of their claims to belonging meant that many activists began in the mid-1920s to envision the categories of preto and negro in ways that rejected any foreign ethnic or cultural ties. As writers argued that Italian Brazilians were not really Brazilian, in other words, they had little stomach for the idea that they themselves were African Brazilians. In the black press of the mid-1920s, Leite's call to imitate immigrants, especially in the use they often made of their ethnic difference to negotiate a place in the nation, was drowned out by a much stronger tendency to reject ties to Africa.

“Africa is for the Africans”

In the first two decades of the black press, writers generally did not see ties with Africa or an African diaspora outside Brazil as either a significant threat or a significant resource. Before 1924, only one author, J. d'Alencastro, found it necessary to vigorously distance himself from Africa. In the course of his 1918 editorial exhorting men of color to demonstrate their good morals and to embrace Brazilian standards of racial fraternity, he proclaimed, “We are not Africans, we are Brazilians!”¹³⁹ He found few allies in this cause, however, as most writers in the 1900s and 1910s were far more focused on affirmatively demonstrating their mastery of Brazilian political, social, and cultural norms than they were on rejecting ties with Africans. It was also rare for writers in the early press to see Africa as a useable resource for their project of racial advancement. In only a few instances did authors seek to depict their ancestral place of origin in a positive light, as a place of civilization and dignity. The poet Deocleciano Nascimento, editor of O Menelik and author of a poetry collection titled Ethiopian Muse, was a pioneer in reminding his contemporaries of color of their ties to a proud African past. In the first issue of O Menelik (1915), he wrote that the paper's title sought to honor “a name which has been, but should not be, forgotten among men of color.”¹⁴⁰ This homage to an African anticolonial hero contrasted with most contemporary histories of Africa, which, filtered through the distorted lens of European colonialism, tended to present Africans as uncivilized or in need of tutelage and therefore offered little help in arguing that black Brazilians should be full citizens. Perhaps Nascimento sought to reclaim the “great king of the black race” from the slurs of immigrant neighbors. Or he may simply have reveled in reminding his audience of Menelik's historic humiliation of Italy.

After 1924, however, as preto authors began to incorporate nativism into their political repertoire, rejections of Africa like d'Alencastro's increasingly reverberated throughout the black press. Eager to counteract the ideas and practices that cast them as foreigners in their native land, and dedicated in turn to tarring actual foreigners as undesirable, many writers in the black press sought vehemently to distance themselves from any suggestion of an African connection. This tendency was already visible in the articles Theophilo Camargo wrote in dismayed response to debates over the 1923 Fidelis Reis bill. Just as those debates made it clear that many Brazilian legislators and thinkers saw African Americans as Africans first, and Americans second,¹⁴¹ they also suggested, in their repeated references to “our Africans,” that black and brown Brazilians were more African than Brazilian. In response to this characterization, Camargo reaffirmed preto Brazilians’ love for their Brazilian fatherland, a place for which they had fought and suffered. Were they ever to be expelled, “our beloved, idolized pátria will remain only in our memories, just as, in olden days, the African jungles remained in the memories of our forebears.”¹⁴² The implication was clear: Our ancestors were from Africa, but we are from Brazil.

For Camargo, leaving Brazil (as some African Americans evidently wished to leave the United States, for places like Brazil or Africa) would be a most grievous exile. Several of his colleagues agreed. Not long after his contribution, some authors began to write in a belittling tone of pan-African politics, particularly singling out Marcus Garvey's “Back to Africa” movement. In a letter to Benedito Florencio in December 1924, a writer signing his name as Claudio Guerra entreated his correspondent to admit publicly to the “absurdity” of importing Garveyist ideologies to Brazil. A “Back to Africa” movement, Guerra conceded, was “extremely natural” for blacks in the United States, where discrimination denied them citizenship and made them into true outsiders. “Let them go to Africa, kick out the owners of the place, learn the native languages or impose their own, [let them] wear a loincloth or else convince the natives to wear a suit. . . . In short, let them do whatever they want to or can.” Yet for Brazilians of color to embrace flamboyantly “black nationalist” movements like Garveyism would amount to a betrayal of the opportunities for advancement that their comparatively tolerant nation gave them. More than that, Guerra implied, defecting to a “Back to Africa” movement meant effectively renouncing one's claims to citizenship in Brazil. “Africa is for the Africans, my black brother [meu nego].” “[Africa] was for your great-grandfather, whose bones have turned to dust. . . . Africa is for anyone who wants it, except for us, that is, for blacks who were born in Brazil, who in Brazil were raised and multiplied.”¹⁴³

At the same time that some writers in the black press eagerly distanced themselves from Africa, they also rejected any solidarity with diasporic calls to militancy, especially those coming from the United States. One writer asked, “Are the blacks of the world preparing to make war on whites? If this is not an imminent danger, it is at least an aspiration, and could well become a reality.” Another mocked the idea that “blacks, who only yesterday were slaves, now wish to become lords by founding in Liberia an independent republic. They have already adopted a doctrine, which is a parody of Monroe's: Africa for the Africans.” A third writer suggested to dissatisfied people of color that they follow Benedito Florencio's advice to racist immigrants: “‘It is the uncomfortable ones who should leave’—we are in our own home.”¹⁴⁴ The same logic that writers hoped would preserve their status as true Brazilians in the competition with immigrants, then, also set the parameters for the “right” kind of black Brazilian citizen—namely, one who was prepared to make no claims to a different ethnicity in return for full belonging in a nation strategically defined as racially inclusive. The marriage between nativism and racial fraternity that prevailed in the Paulista black press of the mid-1920s thus proposed a mutual understanding between whites who were personally friendly with and publicly tolerant of blacks (and willing to reject the racism of foreign whites), and blacks who made no gestures toward either ethnic difference or racial organizing (and who were willing to reject the “racism” of foreign blacks).

Despite this general trend, O Getulino carried on its commitment to inform readers of developments involving the raça negra across the globe.¹⁴⁵ But even this exception shows the difficulties writers in the black press faced when they sought to support claims to full citizenship through ties to Africa and the diaspora. Sources of information on Africa and the diaspora were scarce and, more important, primarily produced by European colonial powers (or the United States). The supposed primitivism of Africa, expressed in the fields of anthropology, history, natural history, journalism, fiction, and film was, after all, one of the tools that European imperialists and white supremacists in the Americas used to strip African-descended people of their humanity and citizenship. It should come as no surprise, then, that with little chance of revising popular notions about Africa, acutely aware of its negative implications for their politics of integration, and faced with open rhetoric in Congress that painted Brazilians of African descent as foreign to the national body, many writers of color in the mid-1920s fervently attempted to emphasize all distance, and deny any political affiliation, between Africans and Brazilians of color. The supposed racial hatreds of people of color in other parts of the Americas likewise encouraged these writers to emphasize all distance, and deny any political affiliation, between themselves and other Americans of African ancestry.

IN DECEMBER 1924, O Getulino published its last known issue from Campinas, leaving José Correia Leite and Jayme de Aguiar's O Clarim d'Alvorada as the foremost paper for and by negros in São Paulo State. Benedito Florencio, Lino Guedes, and Gervásio de Moraes all moved to the city of São Paulo, where all but Florencio (due to frail health) became active contributors to O Clarim. The reasons for their move are not clear, although historians have suggested that one of the outcomes of worsening race relations in Campinas was the slow decline of black associational life in that city. O Getulino had become the last bastion of black activism in Campinas by the mid-1920s.¹⁴⁶ In relocating to the state capital, Getulino’s writers passed the torch of editorial activism to O Clarim and helped to consolidate the city of São Paulo, for the rest of the decade and perhaps the century, as the main urban center for black journalism in the nation.

Together, O Getulino and O Clarim are important markers of the black press's transformations between the late 1910s and the mid-1920s. In the breadth, depth, and complexity of its coverage of issues affecting people of color, and in its bold new sense that it spoke for people of color across the nation, the black press changed dramatically from its early years to the mid-1920s. In the process, writers of color in Campinas and São Paulo shifted from presenting themselves as community leaders, poets, and occasional commentators to what one writer aptly called “modern thinkers” in the vanguard of racial activism.¹⁴⁷ Writers at O Getulino and O Clarim saw themselves by the mid-1920s as carrying on the tasks of previous activists of color like abolitionists Luiz Gama and José do Patrocínio, but suited to new conditions of racial and political thought—they were “new fighters for the complete emancipation of our class,” in the words of one appreciative reader.¹⁴⁸ They became activist intellectuals, using the pen to fight injustices and using their learning—in ethnography, history, law, and politics—to dispel ideas about their foreignness and to argue for their symbolic inclusion. They came to see themselves no longer as an elite of color but as part of a broader preto or negro racial group, on whose behalf they delegated themselves as speakers. When Lino Guedes and Gervásio de Moraes attempted to relaunch O Getulino in São Paulo on the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1926, their new masthead no longer advertised a local newspaper aimed at defending the “interests of the men of color” of Campinas. Its editors instead called it an “organ for the defense of the interests of the preto men of Brazil.”¹⁴⁹

In his first exposé of employment discrimination in São Paulo, Euclydes Oliveira had turned to history to underscore blacks’ native status and to express his outrage at their exclusion from the job market: “Negros stepped on these shores with the first explorers, . . . raised roofs, worked the land, watered it with the sweat of their brow, and made it bear fruit, and they have loved and love this fatherland that is theirs!”¹⁵⁰ In the early black press, such proclamations had been directed only at readers from the “class of color” and a few white patrons. In the second half of the 1920s, however, increasingly activist writers self-identifying as pretos or negros would seek to use their newspapers’ new stature to attempt to engage broader national audiences in discussions of this crucial topic: the history of Brazilian racial formation and its implications for contemporary definitions of national identity and citizenship. In July 1925, O Clarim’s editors published the following iconic history of Brazilian negros:

African negros, imported in Brazil since the first days of its discovery, have always shown themselves worthy of consideration, for their affective sentiments, their stoic resignation, their courage, and their hardworking nature. We owe them immense gratitude. They were the most useful, disinterested colonizers of our land, who made it fertile with their labor. They had great love for their instincts of independence, the proof of which is the formation of the maroon colony [quilombo] of Palmares. They sacrificed themselves, nonetheless, for their masters, who were not always benevolent but who were, in any case, less barbarian than those of other countries, especially the United States. Negra women were generally the wet-nurses of the children of white men, and [these children] treated them with extraordinary devotion and tenderness. In wars, negros fought like heroes.¹⁵¹

Black men and women's rights to citizenship, then, were based on Brazilians’ debt of gratitude for a history of sacrifice, and for the power of people of color to inspire feelings of “tenderness” and affective sentiment among their lighter-skinned conationals. This complex ideology of belonging, formulated in symbolic terms, mirrored writers’ perception that, in their immigrant cities, racial exclusion implied the unwarranted “foreignness” of African-descended Brazilians. With its deployment of sentiment to demand symbolic inclusion and reparation, this ideology of historical and cultural belonging would set the tone for the activism of the rest of the decade.