2. Fraternity

Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1925–1929

Beginning in the early years of the century, writers in São Paulo's black press invoked Brazil's traditions of racial fraternity in an attempt to constitute an alternate public consciousness. This consciousness would oppose scientific racism, whitening ideologies, racist immigration policies, and the racism of immigrants themselves. São Paulo's black journalists used fraternity, in other words, as a bulwark against attitudes that threatened to turn black Brazilians into foreigners in their native land.

Until the mid-1920s, this strategy was confined to the pages of the black press, with its rather narrow readership. In the second half of the 1920s, men of color in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro seized an opportunity to air their interpretations of racial fraternity on a much broader public stage. In 1926 a group of white men in the national capital, Rio de Janeiro, launched a campaign to build a monument to the iconic Mãe Preta or “Black Mother,” representing the African or African-descended wet-nurses who, throughout Brazil's colonial and imperial periods, breastfed and cared for the children of white planters, and of the privileged in general. The project, which promoted the Mãe Preta as the mother of all Brazilians and portrayed black and white men as brothers, earned the enthusiastic support of several black individuals and organizations in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The mainstream newspapers of those cities, as well as São Paulo's black press, captured the words of these men of color as they joined voices with white allies to place the Mãe Preta, and the ideas of racial fraternity she embodied, at the forefront of new definitions of Brazilian identity.

A series of transformations in national politics and racial thought made it possible for this group of black and white men in mid-1920s Brazil to define citizenship as cross-racial fraternity. The last years of the Republic were a time of heightened social and political instability. Rising nationalism in response to labor unrest by immigrants and to the long shadow of North American imperial expansion made symbols of national tradition, and, particularly, of stable patriarchal social relations from an idealized past, appealing to Brazilians of various class and racial backgrounds. Nationalism also shaped the ways Brazilian thinkers and politicians began to read racial mixture, imagining it no longer simply as racial whitening or cultural Europeanization but instead as the very essence of Brazilianness—what made their nation unique. These changes would help erode an older national consensus based on explicitly racist ideas about black inferiority and pave the way for a growing minority to champion the sorts of ideas of racial fraternity previously put forth by, among others, São Paulo's black writers.

It is significant that the idea to honor the Mãe Preta as the mother of a mixed national race and culture gathered momentum first in Rio de Janeiro, and only later, after considerable transformations, in São Paulo. African-descended Brazilians made up a larger and more visible part of the population in Rio than in São Paulo and were comparatively better integrated into the city's public life and popular culture. Even in the wake of turn-of-the-century urban reforms that had sought to make the city more European, white proponents of the Mãe Preta statue in Rio de Janeiro, echoing and expanding on nationalist reformulations of national identity, publicly proclaimed Africans to be essential contributors to Brazil. In this context, a group of black community leaders in Rio embraced the Mãe Preta and the ideals of racial integration for which she stood. Yet as a counterweight to white men's often self-serving definitions of racial fraternity, which lauded white Brazilians’ racial tolerance and praised black Brazilians’ passivity, the men who backed the Mãe Preta campaign in Rio used her symbolism to highlight the historical debts and ongoing injustices that made racial fraternity a still unfulfilled ideal.

A similarly successful elite-led, multiracial campaign lauding racial mixture would be difficult to imagine in the São Paulo of the 1920s, where local thinkers and politicians emphasized a white and immigrant regional identity, and where members of a small and marginalized minority of color increasingly self-identified as black. For this reason, when the Mãe Preta campaign did take hold in São Paulo in the late 1920s, it was a significantly different project from the one that Rio's white newspapermen originally proposed in 1926. In São Paulo, it was not white journalists, thinkers, and politicians but writers in the black press who led the charge for national homage to the Mãe Preta. In their hands, the figure of the Mãe Preta underwent a shift in emphasis, reflecting São Paulo's sharpening white/black divide. Especially by the end of the decade, most Paulistano black writers cast the Mãe Preta as the mother of a distinct and proud black race and used her to highlight the achievements of racially black, yet culturally Brazilian (and pointedly not African) men and women. Only in a handful of cases did writers and editors in São Paulo's black press adopt the emerging strain of cultural nationalism that celebrated racial and ethnic mixture. When they did, they, like black monument supporters in Rio, made it clear that the Mãe Preta stood for specifically black or African contributions to a hybrid Brazilian identity.¹

These alternate approaches to defining Brazil's racial fraternity contained the seeds of political styles that would diverge sharply as the century wore on, and would, in the eyes of later activists and scholars, come to appear almost as opposites. In the Mãe Preta campaigns of the late 1920s, however, both the idea of distinct black and white races, commonly associated with the late-twentieth-century black movement, and the ideal of mestiçagem, which black activists since the 1970s have denounced as a tool of elite domination, made up the political strategies of black thinkers and community leaders. Both were means to the same goal: asserting the belonging of Brazilians of color in a racially and culturally inclusive nation, while preserving their right to a distinct identity as blacks or as descendants of Africa. Together, these ideas helped men of color in Rio and São Paulo find inclusive spaces, and denounce persistent racism, in a rapidly changing political and ideological landscape.

A True Expression of the Brazilian Soul

If the national imperative to whiten Brazil's population through immigration had its greatest effects in the state and especially the city of São Paulo, the idea that the Brazilian project of European-style modernization could be accomplished and displayed through the reorganization of urban space reached its apogee in the national capital, Rio de Janeiro. In the first years of the new century, Rio's mayor, Francisco Pereira Passos, led a major project of urban renewal inspired by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann's much admired transformation of Paris in the 1860s. Just as Haussmann had replaced Paris's dark, winding medieval alleyways and crumbling buildings with wide boulevards, manicured public plazas, and magnificent palaces, Pereira Passos and his team of planners aimed to transform Rio de Janeiro into a splendid, airy city no longer plagued by cramped streets, dilapidated colonial buildings, and overflowing tenements.

Race was an important subtext of these projects for urban renewal. Rio's downtown was home to a large and visible population of poor and working-class people of African descent. Health reformers and politicians had long regarded these multiracial neighborhoods, particularly their overcrowded tenements, as foci of disease and centers of moral corruption. They were stains on the city through which Brazil presented its face to the world—eyesores for foreign visitors and deterrents for potential investors and immigrants. The demolition of Rio's downtown neighborhoods forced many poor residents of color out of the center city and cleared the way for reformers to rebuild Rio as “the Marvelous City [a Cidade Maravilhosa]” of wide avenues, plazas, and monuments—itself a monument to the nation's prosperity, civilization, and whiteness.²

In 1926 Cândido de Campos, the white editor of the mainstream Rio newspaper A Notícia, nonetheless began a campaign to reinscribe a black presence in the whitened, Europeanized landscape of Rio de Janeiro. Campos appealed to his readership to “glorify the black race [raça negra] by erecting a monument to the Mãe Preta” in the nation's capital city. For Campos, building a statue commemorating the black nursemaids of yore was the logical next step in the process of building and beautification that had transformed his city in previous years. Monuments, Campos reflected, “expressed the truth of [a people's] soul, revealing it in its intimate structure and affirming, in the eyes of foreigners, its particular individuality.” Brazilians had already displayed their civic spirit through multiple monuments to their founding fathers. And since the early 1920s, Campos reminded his readers, Rio de Janeiro had begun construction of a massive statue of Christ the Redeemer—the nation's spiritual father—on the Corcovado, a stunning rocky peak overlooking Rio's harbor. Now it was time for Rio's citizens to build a monument to the Mãe Preta, a figure who acted as mother to black and white Brazilians, and who “most vividly captures the significance of the black race in our destiny.”³ Campos's editorial sparked a promonument campaign that quickly gained the support of a small but visible group of intellectuals, politicians, doctors, lawyers, members of recreational and civic associations, and journalists like himself, primarily from Rio but also from many other corners of Brazil.⁴

What do we make of such an enthusiastic response, by prominent white men, to a proposed monument of a black woman in a city recently transformed to resemble Europe? In part, we might read it as a reflection of the success that city planners had in eliminating blackness from the center city in earlier years. No longer as anxious about the presence of poor pretos and pardos downtown as a previous generation of elite Cariocas (as natives of the city of Rio de Janeiro are known), Campos and his supporters could set about creating monuments that selectively honored people of color. And, as we will see, the ways many of Campos's supporters (and a few of his detractors) interpreted the Mãe Preta and “the significance of the black race in our destiny” limited the terms on which people of color might be included as Brazilian citizens, reinscribing older hierarchies of race, class, and gender. But the Mãe Preta monument campaign also reflects the beginnings of an important shift in how elite Brazilians thought about race in the 1920s, making it newly possible to imagine people of African descent as integral members of the nation.

One measure of the ways ideas about race were shifting in this period is the fact that Campos's project to monumentalize the Mãe Preta elicited scores of letters of support and, it appears, only one or two of opposition. Those exceptions, however, remind us how novel Campos's proposal was in a nation until so recently—and, among some, still—committed to ideologies of whitening.⁵ Two years after Campos's initial appeal, for instance, Couto Esher, writing in São Paulo's Diário Nacional, rejected the idea of a monument to the Mãe Preta (still not built in 1928) on the grounds that “a few black slaves who suckled the children of their masters did not contribute anything toward the formation of our race and our nationality.” A monument to a black woman in the nation's capital, he argued, would undermine the “struggle we Brazilians have undertaken to convince foreigners that we are neither negros nor mulatos” and would therefore “degrad[e] us in the eyes of the nation and the world.”⁶ The monument to the Mãe Preta, in other words, would communicate to foreigners that Rio, so meticulously rebuilt, was nevertheless the capital of a black nation. Nor was the symbol of the wet-nurse itself free of controversy. To many sanitation officials, preto wet-nurses were vectors of infection, capable of transmitting diseases and even undesirable racial and cultural traits to their white charges. By the 1920s the use of African-descended wet-nurses had waned significantly among members of Brazil's urban elite.⁷

Campos's proposal to “glorify the black race”⁸ through a monument to a wet-nurse was thus threatening enough to elicit opposition in some quarters. But what earned his proposal so many supporters was that most did not interpret the monument primarily as an homage to blacks themselves, and even less to wet-nurses. Rather, his supporters saw the monument as a tribute to Brazil's unique climate of racial understanding, framed in terms of the sentimental bonds of brotherhood. The monument, Campos wrote, would embody “one of [the Brazilian soul's] most moving and heartfelt and, therefore, most characteristic sentiments: love and gratitude toward the suffering race brought from Africa.”⁹ In one of the earliest public expressions of support for Campos's initiative, in April 1926, Washington Luís, president-elect of Brazil, called the monument “one more demonstration of fraternity, . . . a sentiment that unites all men as brothers, without any kind of distinction, [which] will be the accomplishment of the South American people.”¹⁰ The monument, in other words, was a tribute to the increasingly popular ideal of racial fraternity and, above all, to the conviction among many Brazilians that, as Washington Luís put it, “Brazil is the country destined to make this fraternity real.”¹¹

Yet the ideal of racial fraternity that white monument supporters envisioned fulfilling through their homage to the Mãe Preta was one that required no radical social transformations. On the contrary, their choice of the wet-nurse, an icon of nostalgia for the slave past, suggests these men's fondness for older social arrangements in the face of recent rapid changes in Brazilian society. To many monument supporters, it was the Mãe Preta's subservient place in a traditional, patriarchal Brazilian household that made her a comforting symbol in the face of an uncertain destiny. Campos himself called the Mãe Preta “a symbol of the Brazilian family . . . and of a past that is already evaporating into delicious legend.”¹² Although the practice of hiring black wet-nurses waned after abolition, some of Brazil's most powerful white men in the 1920s (like many of the monument's supporters) were old enough to have been raised by them.¹³ Paeans to the Mãe Preta in the mainstream press thus reveal a highly personal nostalgia for a fading black figure who was at once submissive toward and intimate with white Brazilians—a “guardian angel that slavery placed in Brazilian homes as a self-sacrificing servant.”¹⁴

This image of the Mãe Preta expressed nostalgia not just for the subservience of blacks in the traditional patriarchal Brazilian family, but for that multiracial, hierarchical family itself as the cornerstone of a disappearing social order. The post–World War I period was one of rapid economic, social, and cultural changes. Economic fluctuations resulting from the war, as well as the wartime cessation of exports to Brazil, encouraged further industrialization in major southeastern cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. New industrial jobs and an invigorated urban economy, in turn, helped accelerate demographic trends already under way, like rural to urban migration and an urban population boom. The emergence of foreign-influenced mass culture—movies, sports clubs, jazz bands—along with changing gender norms—most notably, the emergence of the working, sexually liberated “modern woman”—signaled to many contemporaries the dissolution of traditional values and morals.¹⁵ Indeed, contemporary police publications, which singled out shifting gender norms as the primary index of Brazil's impending social degeneration, reserved particular venom for women of color—particularly, black maids or nursemaids—who succumbed to the vices of “modern” women in public, thereby betraying their position of trust in the bosom of white, wealthy, honorable Brazilian families.¹⁶ The idealized Mãe Preta's subservient and “angelic” nature provided a tonic for these social woes. As a writer for O Paiz put it, she “contributed her treasures of love, goodness, affect, and dedication so that we might have the noble, the pure, the perfect Brazilian home, today sadly shaken in its most intimate structure by the corrosive and destructive invasion of a cosmopolitanism of customs, which is the most flagrant negation of the old patriarchal virtues of our familial institution.”¹⁷

For some white supporters, the symbol of the Mãe Preta also stood as a reassuring reminder of a time before the arrival of immigrant workers and their class-based radicalism. The end of the previous decade had witnessed a sharp increase in worker unrest, largely by the European immigrants a previous generation of Brazilian leaders had so eagerly courted. By the second half of the 1920s the increasing militancy of the labor movement, along with many immigrant communities’ apparent resistance to assimilation, convinced numerous politicians, planters, and businessmen that national workers were preferable to foreign ones.¹⁸ The symbol of the Mãe Preta, rooted in the traditions of a colonial and imperial past that predated the arrival of recent waves of foreigners, was an ideal vessel for these nativist feelings. As a portrait of relations between white masters and black slaves, the image of the Mãe Preta included these two groups—living in unquestioned hierarchy—as founders of the nation, while excluding immigrants from that tableau. Indeed, in white writers’ articles supporting the Mãe Preta, the few mentions of foreigners and their mores were not flattering. Novelist and commentator Benjamin Costallat, in his ode to the Mãe Preta for the Jornal do Brasil, lamented, on behalf of “our poor children,” that these homegrown wet-nurses were being edged out by interlopers with foreign names: “the ‘frauleins,’ the ‘nurses,’ the governantes [governesses].” Here, as in other instances, the distaste for foreign labor combined with a nationalist defense of Brazilian culture.¹⁹

For writers who feared a disintegrating social order, then, the Mãe Preta provided a reassuring vision of a stable, patriarchal Brazilian society free of foreign agitators and cultural penetrations, in which women remained in the domestic sphere and people of color and the poor knew their place in the social hierarchy. Indeed, in a patriarchal society that increasingly eschewed scientific racism and congratulated itself on its racial tolerance, acceptable and apparently “natural” gender and sexual hierarchies could become proxies marking the “black race” as a whole as female, sentimental, and subjugated. In this vein, writers who eulogized the Mãe Preta sought to display their antiracist credentials by decrying her enslavement, but they almost as frequently recalled their own relationships with wet-nurses in terms that made plain their sense of access and entitlement, as white men, to black women's bodies. One enthusiastic monument supporter, for instance, self-described as “white,” boasted of having “sucked from [his Mãe Preta's] ebony breasts the liquor of life.”²⁰ The Mãe Preta's gender, moreover, set the tone for the ways monument supporters envisioned the outcome of the racial mixture they celebrated. When writer Antonio Torres submitted that a monument to the “black race” would be better served by “a Herculean black man, endowed with muscles à la Michelangelo, Bernini, or Rodin” than by the excessively “sentimental” image of the Mãe Preta, Campos politely but firmly rejected his suggestion. The black race he sought to glorify was precisely not virile, endowed with reason, vigorous, and potentially threatening, but rather womanly, sentimental, historically distant, and above all, passive.²¹ Campos, after all, had selected to honor the image of a black woman who was carefully circumscribed in space (the domestic sphere) and time (a rosy past). He had pointedly not chosen to glorify the many pretas who struggled for daily survival as laundresses or peddlers in the streets of contemporary Rio, visible reminders of persistent class and racial inequality. And he had chosen the historical, subservient image of the enslaved black nursemaid over that other, increasingly popular, female figure symbolizing Brazil's racially mixed identity: the mulata. For whereas the figure of the alluring, lascivious mulata carried potentially subversive meanings about the power of nonwhites over their supposed social betters, the hints of interracial sexual relations that surrounded the Mãe Preta symbolically reinforced white male elite control over people of color.²² Just as patriarchal ideas aimed to confine women to the domestic sphere by placing them on pedestals as domestic “angels,” the project to place the “angelic” Mãe Preta on a pedestal of marble as a symbol of Brazil's racial mixture immobilized the “black race,” relegating it to the past, underlining its servility, and heralding its eventual disappearance as a distinct entity.

Until that time, these articles suggested, the monument to the Mãe Preta would provide a model for politically quiescent black citizenship. Nearly every one of A Notícia’s scores of supportive articles characterized the Mãe Preta in terms that stressed her quiet consent to her lowly station: she was “suffering,” “martyrized,” “docile,” “altruistic,” “stoical,” “dedicated,” “resigned,” and a “slave to her love for the white child.” Cândido de Campos came closest to articulating the parallel between the Mãe Preta's idealized demeanor and the desired behavior of contemporary black Brazilians: she represented the “greatness of heart with which [blacks] transformed our moral lapses, which they could have thrown in our face, into infinite dedication, into gentle and humble goodness toward us.”²³ Evidently, these writers hoped that their contemporaries of color would deal with the legacies of slavery in much the same way that the idealized Mãe Preta dealt with its realities: by suffering quietly and expressing gratitude for their privileged position at the heart of the Brazilian family. The proposed monument thus entailed a pact. It would place a black woman at the symbolic center of the Brazilian nation, but in exchange for this act of tolerance and largesse, its promoters expected from Brazilians of color gratitude, forgiveness, and conformity. The monument would provide full and final restitution for slavery's evils, definitively proving, as Campos put it, that Brazil was a society “devoid of racial prejudice.”²⁴ This vision of racial fraternity as a fait accompli left little room for pressing claims against ongoing discrimination.

But if many of these white writers’ nostalgia for a bygone patriarchal slave society expressed a desire to resist the social transformations around them, their embrace of fraternity simultaneously captured an incipient shift in elite thinking about race, non-European cultures, and national identity that heralded more inclusive ideas about who made up the Brazilian people. In Brazil, as elsewhere in Latin America, the ravages of World War I instilled new doubt among thinkers as to the wisdom of a previous generation's imitation of European racial, cultural, and aesthetic ideals. If Europeans had so brutally massacred one another in the greatest conflagration in modern history, what was their much touted “civilization” worth? Perhaps, many Latin American intellectuals began to argue, their own people and cultures—for all of their once maligned mixture—had the elements to create a more vigorous, virtuous, and peaceful civilization than the corrupt and decadent ones of Europe. Beginning even earlier, the rise of the United States as a power with imperial ambitions in the Americas and beyond had also helped stir nationalist pride in many of the region's thinkers. Uruguayan author José Enrique Rodó’s essay Ariel (1900), for instance, earned wide acclaim among early-twentieth-century Latin American thinkers for its proud opposition of a spiritual, peaceful, and learned Latin America to a materialist, bullying, and morally bankrupt North America. In the previous decade, Cuban thinker and revolutionary José Martí contrasted a racially divided United States with a racially fraternal Cuba (and by extension, Latin America).²⁵

In the context of this emerging cultural nationalism, an array of Latin American intellectuals began to rethink the relationship between their racially diverse populations and national identity. In Mexico, José Vasconcelos looked to the mixture of whites, blacks, Indians, and Asians to form the “cosmic race” that would transcend all others and bring the nation into modernity.²⁶In Cuba, Fernando Ortiz, the once pessimistic author of seminal works on the racial and psychological inferiority of blacks, embraced race mixture and transculturación as the foundation of Cuba's national identity.²⁷ None of these thinkers abandoned the principle of the superiority of whites in the national mixture. But rather than seeing blacks, Indians, mulattos, and mestizos as impediments to modernity and progress, they upheld racial and cultural hybridity as the essence of their nations’ unique identities and as the source of an alternative modernity rooted in non-European elements.²⁸

In Brazil, these sentiments gained their fullest expression with the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) held in São Paulo in 1922. Timed to coincide with the centennial of Brazil's independence from Portugal, the event was intended as a declaration of cultural independence from Europe. Intellectuals like Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, and artist Tarsila do Amaral proposed new “modernist” views of national culture that rejected European racial theories and binary paradigms (like civilization vs. barbarism, or modernity vs. primitivism), and emphasized the generative power of the periphery's (in their case, Brazil's) cultural mixture. In the process, they dramatically challenged established myths of national identity. Most famously, Oswald de Andrade's “Cannibalist Manifesto” retold the story of the encounter between Brazil's natives and the Portuguese as an explicit allegory for how Brazilian artists should relate to Europe. In Andrade's account, native Brazilians did not passively accept the blessings of European civilization. Instead, drawing on early colonial accounts of ritual cannibalism among Brazil's indigenous Tupí people, Andrade portrayed modern Brazilian culture as the outcome of a native ability to cannibalize and digest foreign influences (especially the European and the African) to produce a new, authentically Brazilian identity.²⁹

Just as intellectuals in São Paulo began to rethink encounters with indigenous Brazilians as a source of differentiation from European cultural models, thinkers in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere began to revise the way they thought about the problem of mestiçagem as it referred to people of African descent. Rather than seeing racial and cultural mixture as last-ditch measures to heal a society afflicted with a population that was too dark, some thinkers, like anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto, came to see mixture as the source of a vigorous hybrid national identity, and as the very essence of Brazilianness.³⁰ The Mãe Preta monument campaign shows that this shift took place not just in the highest academic circles but also in the more accessible public sphere of journalism. The proposed monument, A Notícia editor Cândido de Campos argued, recognized the fact that the victims of slavery had become “one of the most dynamic elements of our racial and spiritual formation.” Specifically, Campos saw the Mãe Preta as a reminder of the “superior sentiments” that were the most notable black contribution to Brazilian national identity. In article after article, supporters of the monument agreed with this characterization, casting the Mãe Preta as the ideal embodiment of the “affective race.”³¹ The idea of the superiority of the “affective” or black race stemmed from the later writings of Auguste Comte, the father of orthodox positivism whose early thought had been fundamental to Brazilian intellectuals and politicians in the founding years of the Republic. Though in his early writings Comte had embraced doctrinaire racist ideas about the inferiority of Africans, in the 1840s and 1850s he reformulated his ideas to privilege sentiment over reason, women over men, and Africans over Europeans. Sentiments like familial love, altruism, and humanitarianism, he argued in the works that became most influential to nationalist Brazilian thinkers in the early twentieth century, were the glue that held societies together.³² For many supporters of the Mãe Preta monument (several of whom directly or indirectly cited Comte), Brazilians had the “black race” and particularly the Mãe Preta to thank for their sensitive national character, their collective generosity of soul. These characteristics stood in explicit contrast to the racism, individualism, and materialism of the United States, where, as one writer noted, “an extreme caste spirit reigns.”³³

As these writers, along with many other Latin American intellectuals, began to revise doctrines of European racial and cultural superiority, they posited the Mãe Preta as an icon of a proudly mixed national race. Contributors to A Notícia praised the Mãe Preta as an emblem of fraternity, both in the sentimental sense of “coming truly to love those who suffered the bitterness of our yoke” and in the biological sense of the “fusion of bloods from which we, as a people, were born,” the centuries-long “transfusion of blood” that fed Brazilians’ “racial plasma.”³⁴ With the exception of one writer who called for a monument to an indigenous mother,³⁵ most writers who supported the Mãe Preta as a symbol of Brazil's “fusion” or “transfusion” of blood imagined this amalgamation to have taken place principally among peoples of African and European descent. Implicitly, proponents of the monument appear to have agreed with Antonio Torres, who explained in his editorial that the Indian, unlike the fighting, laborious African, “preferred to disappear, thereby proving his inferiority as a race.”³⁶ Even as it erased indigenous people, however, the Mãe Preta campaign's positive recognition of the presence of black “blood” in the creation of a Brazilian race marked a significant interpretive shift away from ideologies of whitening.

For several writers, the “transfusion of blood” (or of other bodily fluids, like breast milk) for which the Mãe Preta stood was a metaphor not just for biological mixture but also for a transfer of character or cultural traits. A writer for Rio's A Vanguarda, for instance, explained that through the Mãe Preta, the “black race . . . molded the energy of the Brazilian soul, lovingly transfusing from its own veins to those of the dominant white race all the vigor of its ruby-red blood in the extraordinarily pure milk of the wet-nurses.”³⁷ On the one hand, this use of transfusion—which denotes blood passed directly from vein to vein rather than from parent to child through sexual reproduction—suggests that the Mãe Preta was not biologically related to the white Brazilian family described by the statue's proponents. Similarly, as a surrogate mother, the Mãe Preta shared her milk with children who were not her biological offspring. In this sense, discussions of the transfer of cultural traits through asexual and disembodied “transfusions” of milk and blood partly effaced Brazil's history of racial mixture, even as they purported to celebrate it.³⁸ On the other hand, these uses of transfusion show enthusiasts of the Mãe Preta relying on the language of biology to celebrate the contributions of Africans to a Brazilian culture that they, as whites, proudly called their own. This too stood in contrast to traditional ideologies of whitening, in which proponents hoped interracial sexual mixture might facilitate the propagation of European cultural and racial traits among the general populace.

Those intellectuals who participated in this shift away from whitening ideologies and toward a proud embrace of Brazil's African heritage—for many resisted it—connected it to ever more vigorous pronouncements that Brazil was a nation uniquely free of racial hatred. Both the “racial and spiritual” contributions of Africans, Campos argued, “placed [Brazilians], in the world, in a unique position in relation to the black race.” It was black Brazilians’ racial and cultural influence that, “exerting [itself] upon the profound chemistry of our sentiments, has rid us of racial prejudice to an extent unseen among other peoples of the planet.”³⁹ In a few instances, discussions of the Mãe Preta lent themselves to outright rejections of scientific racist verdicts of black inferiority. In his contribution, for instance, Simão de Laboreiro, a prominent Portuguese intellectual residing in Rio, refuted, one by one, a range of theories about the origins of racial difference—from biblical stories about the tribe of Ham to scientific theories about the influence of climate or the significance of cranial size. Instead, he provided a radical historical interpretation of the origins of racism: there were no superior or inferior races but rather “races debased by the domination of others,” a situation reflecting an “unjust” political order. All races, Laboreiro concluded, sounding the familiar note of Christian fraternity, were “children of the same God.” Laboreiro's analysis of the Mãe Preta as a symbol of racial fraternity strongly resonated with the interpretations black writers in São Paulo had begun to put forth in the 1920s, particularly in its treatment of the relationship between law and sentiment. The monument, he argued, would supplement an already existing legal equality for people of color with a sentimental component—feelings of respect, gratitude, and equality—without which legal provisions had no meaning.⁴⁰

Although celebrations of submissive black women, cultural mixture, and the supposed sentimental superiority of the black race were laden with much of the racist baggage they purported to leave behind, they nevertheless constituted a significant change in the terms through which a visible and growing group of white intellectuals sought to symbolically include black people in the nation. This was a change black thinkers had been promoting for at least two decades, and they eagerly seized the opportunities it provided to make their demands heard.

“Worthy of the veneration of the povo”

In Rio de Janeiro, an array of self-identified pretos (including members of black lay brotherhoods or civic associations, workers, journalists, intellectuals, and popular orators) conveyed their enthusiasm for the Mãe Preta monument to Cândido de Campos almost immediately, and he happily republished their opinions (often in his own words). Though their expressions of support for the Mãe Preta echoed the themes and language of white writers, in the hands of people of color, ideas about race mixture, tolerance, and homage to the “black race” took on significantly different political overtones. Even filtered through Campos's pen, black supporters’ words clearly communicate their attempts to invert the emphasis in elites’ interpretations of the monument. Where Cândido de Campos and others saw the Mãe Preta proposal as a tribute principally intended to glorify Brazil's racial mixture and only peripherally to honor the “black race,” black supporters struggled to make the “black race” and its contributions to Brazil the central aspect of the proposed celebration.

One of the most visible black supporters of the Mãe Preta monument in Rio, not surprisingly, was the famous negro lawyer and scholar Evaristo de Moraes, who had so eloquently condemned Congress's proposed race-based immigration bans in São Paulo's black press several years earlier. A strong believer in the power of national discourses of racial fraternity to shape laws, politics, and society in antiracist ways, Moraes published two enthusiastic articles in A Notícia in support of Campos's project. In his first article, Moraes hailed the Mãe Preta monument as a long-awaited antidote to Brazilian intellectuals’ “almost total forgetting of [blacks’] leading role in the formation of Brazilian nationality.”⁴¹ He then went on to retell Brazilian history, placing people of color at its center. The Mãe Preta, Moraes wrote, concurring with other disciples of the later Comte, was indeed an ideal symbol of the “affective race.” Yet affection was by no means a synonym for passivity. The “enslaved race,” he reasoned, “communicated affection to the Brazilian people through its blood and its behavior, . . . [helping Brazilians] to adopt the humanitarian ideal and ensure their victory over economic utilitarianism.” In other words, Brazil owed to the black race the very traits that students of Comte, as well as many other nationalists, identified as the source of their nation's humaneness and of its superiority over the brutal materialism of the United States.⁴² For Moraes, the affectionate nature blacks had bequeathed the Brazilian people was behind many of the transformative moments in Brazilian history—above all, the peaceful abolition of slavery. The “black race” had thus been the agent of “its own liberation.”⁴³

Though Evaristo de Moraes was perhaps the most prominent of all the people of color to express public support for the Mãe Preta monument, he was not the first. This distinction went to a committee of four men of color who visited A Notícia’s offices on 6 April 1926, the day immediately after Campos's initial call for the monument. Campos described three of them—David Paulino Coelho, Liberato José Rodrigues, and José Olympio dos Santos—as “workers, rough and simple men.” In calling them “rough,” Campos must have been referring to what he perceived as the men's lack of formal education, for the accompanying photograph shows them neatly dressed in starched white shirts, ties, and crisp blazers. Leading the committee was Vicente Ferreira, an enigmatic figure of black activism from 1910s and 1920s Rio de Janeiro (and later, São Paulo) about whom historians know relatively little. Campos described him as the “well-known popular orator, so modest, yet so honorable in the humility of his existence.”⁴⁴

Ferreira was indeed an intriguing combination of grandeur and humility. He was, as Campos indicated, well known in Rio de Janeiro for his frequent fiery public speeches in city squares, in front of government buildings or churches, at the tombs of great historical figures, and (as his visit to A Notícia shows) on the premises of major newspapers, where he occasionally secured broader coverage of his views.⁴⁵ Ferreira appears to have believed in his right to address himself to people of any racial or class background. He spoke (not without some resistance by white mourners) at the funeral of the prominent poet Olavo Bilac in 1918; in front of the Palácio do Catete (the presidential palace in Rio) on whether or not Brazil should enter World War I; and to coffee warehouse workers and stevedores of the “Resistência,” a labor organization made up mostly of black and mulatto men. It was thanks to a letter by Ferreira, eliciting Washington Luís's opinion on the monument campaign, that A Notícia had the privilege of publishing the president-elect's prominent contribution on the subject. The title of “professor” that always accompanied Ferreira's name (as it did in Campos's article) probably reflected the mixed reactions that this assertiveness elicited among his audience—respect from some, mocking derision from others. For Ferreira was a self-taught man who could read, but not write. He dictated his letters and articles and gave unscripted speeches. He lived precariously, sleeping at guesthouses when he could afford it and otherwise surviving through the hospitality of friends. He was, as the Paulistano activist José Correia Leite later described him, “gaunt” and wore “tattered clothing” “but [had] a certain presence that commanded respect.”⁴⁶

Vicente Ferreira led his committee of four to the offices of A Notícia to convey what Campos loosely paraphrased as “words of gratitude and fondness—a cry of the soul, vibrant in its joy, warm, pulsing with affection.”⁴⁷ Campos's portrayal of these black men in the racialized language of “affection” should make us skeptical of his fidelity to those men's actual words. But there is no doubt (as the article's photos attest) that Ferreira and the others had appeared in person—bearing a bouquet of flowers—to express their enthusiastic endorsement of the monument. What might Ferreira have praised in the monument? José Correia Leite later described Ferreira as a man who “was always . . . stirring up trouble on behalf of the black race.” He remembered that Ferreira described himself as a staunch nationalist and Republican and that he “lived in the midst of intellectuals,” constantly attending public lectures on political and philosophical matters. One of the intellectuals Ferreira greatly admired, Leite recalled, was Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, a leading light of Comtean positivism in Rio. Ferreira also, according to Leite, once became so enthusiastic at the end of a public lecture at Rio's Law School against Gobineau's Aryanist theories and in favor of Brazil's “superior mestiço race” that he stood up to deliver his own impromptu speech “on behalf of the black race.”⁴⁸ Though we may never know exactly on what terms Ferreira supported the Mãe Preta monument in 1926, it is likely that he favored its homage to the black race, its resonance with late Comtean images of the superiority of the “sentimental” race, and its nationalist rejection of doctrinaire scientific racism.⁴⁹

Rio de Janeiro's Federação dos Homens de Cor (FHC, or Federation of Men of Color) also professed its support to A Notícia. Little is known of this group, but from its name and occasional references to it in the Paulista black press, it appears that it was a social and mutual aid organization established, like an earlier group of the same name in São Paulo, to defend the interests of people of color in areas like education and employment.⁵⁰ Jayme Baptista de Camargo, the FHC's president, explained the group's support for the monument in terms that clearly outline the federation's goals and values: “This Center, which has always accompanied with lively interest all civic movements that affect either our pátria or Humanity, and which had even, some time ago, aired the idea of erecting a monument to the Black Race, cannot abstain from applauding, in a rapture of enthusiasm, the lofty suggestion that your brilliant evening paper A Notícia launched for the glorification of that race.” The monument was a “just acknowledgement” of a history of black civic virtue and active participation in nation building, a conception of belonging similar to the one expressed in the histories contemporaneously published by São Paulo's Clarim. The monument would honor “the group of slaves, exiled from African soil, from their free pátria, brought in chains to the inhospitable shores of America, where little by little, with unheard-of sacrifice, unspeakable suffering, they saw the rise of prosperous cities, where white children [filhos] were suckled by the ‘Mãe Preta.’”⁵¹ Not only was there no mention, in Camargo's letter, of racial mixture, but his account of the nature of the debt whites owed to black men and women was the sharpest in all of A Notícia's promonument articles. With his letter, Camargo included copies of the FHC's newspaper, A Federação, so that Campos might republish some of their previous articles advocating for a statue to the black race. Unfortunately for scholars interested in the history of black journalism in Rio, Campos ignored this request.⁵²

The FHC was seemingly unique as a black organization in publishing an independent newspaper in 1920s Rio, for no scholarly accounts mention a black press in the national capital at that time. Indeed, nearly all accounts of black political activism in Brazil leave early-twentieth-century Rio out of their narratives, precisely because the formal and explicitly “black” organizations of the sort that emerged in São Paulo (which these histories have typically traced) were largely absent from the national capital at this time. Accounting for this situation—without casting Cariocas of color as politically passive or less racially conscious than their Paulista counterparts—requires thinking again about the particular circumstances that gave rise to, and then transformed, a vibrant black press in São Paulo in the 1910s and 1920s.⁵³ Sociologist Florestan Fernandes has argued that the small size of the community of color in São Paulo, along with strong racial prejudice, immigrant competition, and the related paucity of opportunities for upward mobility for both pretos and pardos in that city, were precisely the elements that helped create an elite—composed of both pretos and pardos—whose members identified as negro and shaped their political activism explicitly around the issue of race. These circumstances made São Paulo unique in the quantity and strength of its specifically race-based publications and organizations in the early twentieth century.⁵⁴

Although literate Cariocas of color contended with the same general national ideologies of race as did their counterparts in São Paulo in the 1920s, they did not share the particular experience of becoming an ever smaller discriminated minority in a city sharply divided between white and black. Pretos and pardos together constituted just over 37 percent of Rio's population at the advent of the Republic, with pardos making up the larger of the two groups (25%). The next census to count color (1940) shows that even after the urban reforms that sought to whiten the center city, and after decades of European immigration, pretos and pardos still made up a significant portion of Rio's population—almost 29 percent.⁵⁵ Moreover, since the nineteenth century, some of the city's people of color, particularly lighter-skinned pardos, had access to a range of social and political institutions that were controlled by, but not limited to, white compatriots. Several important figures of Carioca, and indeed national, public life were men of color. A few, like abolitionist journalist José do Patrocínio and, later, lawyer Evaristo de Moraes, occupied prominent positions as opinion-makers in Rio's society while preserving their public identities as men of color. In the 1910s and 1920s a small but influential group of writers of color—themselves men who rose from humble beginnings to become professional journalists—covered yearly carnival festivities for Rio's mainstream newspapers, celebrating and defending from police repression the African-derived cultural practices of Rio's poor black and brown population.⁵⁶ Many other upwardly mobile men of color, however, like the famous mulatto novelist Machado de Assis, quietly disavowed their African heritage.⁵⁷ In either case, in contrast to São Paulo, men of color with intellectual or political aspirations in Rio appear to have had alternatives to independent race-based organizing and publishing. And though no studies exist comparing racial discrimination in the two cities in the first half of the century, personal accounts from working people of color who lived in both places suggest that in Rio, greater avenues for integration into mainstream society existed for people of color of more modest backgrounds as well.⁵⁸

This should not be taken to mean that Rio lacked traditions of activism among people of African descent. At least since the turn of the century, blacks and mulattos had been constant and visible participants in the city's elite and popular politics. In particular, historians of Rio de Janeiro have uncovered evidence of widespread participation by people of color in cross-class and cross-racial popular movements and uprisings, like a series of revolts against the sanitation and urbanization campaigns of the early 1900s, uprisings against racism and physical cruelty in the navy, or strikes and walkouts by black laborers (particularly the stevedores and coffee warehouse workers of Rio's port zone), to name just a few.⁵⁹ Participation in these broad-based movements rather than in specifically race-based organizations, moreover, did not mean staying silent about racial oppression. Stevedores and warehouse workers in one majority preto union with Portuguese leadership, for instance, fought in the 1910s to ensure better conditions, pay, and leadership opportunities for its members—what one activist called “a new 13th of May,” in reference to the date of the abolition of slavery.⁶⁰ Like their São Paulo counterparts, people of color in Rio engaged in intense and sometimes deadly disputes with their (mostly Portuguese) immigrant neighbors over a range of issues inflected by race—gaming, hiring, living conditions, or competition over women. But they also participated in class-based protests and organizations alongside immigrants.⁶¹

In the cultural realm, people of African descent in Rio were central participants in the creation of samba and carnival, which, by the late 1920s, were becoming widely accepted elements of Carioca (and eventually national) popular culture. In their form and content, these performances often undermined established hierarchies of race, class, and gender.⁶² No comparable process was under way in São Paulo, where white elites largely continued to emphasize their city's European cultural heritage, and where most members of a tiny black middle class concerned with decency and propriety struggled to distance themselves from any “foreign” African cultural markers. Perhaps for this reason, in the 1920s, São Paulo's black press remained almost silent about Afro-Brazilian cultural productions, like samba, then gaining favor among elites in Rio. In the few instances in which samba did appear in these newspapers, writers presented it nostalgically as a “traditional” song and dance form of their slave ancestors, implicitly or explicitly lamenting its contemporary devolution into what one author dismissed as “savage samba,” an “epilectic convulsion.” These articles, written in the second half of the 1920s, bemoaned the transformations under way in samba precisely at the time when musicians in Rio were developing the sounds that would define samba's “Golden Age,” and when black musicians and community leaders founded Rio's first samba schools.⁶³ It is possible that these incursions by Rio's community of color into their city's and nation's public sphere clashed with the values of São Paulo's journalists of color. In particular, it is worth contrasting the sense of buttoned-down, grave decorum conveyed in photographs of male writers and readers of São Paulo's black press in this period with the flashy image of the malandro, the transgressive, womanizing hustler persona defiantly embraced by some men of color, often musicians or performers, in Rio de Janeiro. Presenting oneself as a malandro—for all its apparent celebration of a roguish avoidance of work and of other social constraints—might itself be understood as a form of activism, a strategic performance staged by some Cariocas of color in response to the same sorts of exclusionary ideologies (racism, vagrancy, and so forth) that plagued upwardly mobile men of color in São Paulo.⁶⁴ Yet it was a response specific to Rio de Janeiro, where entrepreneurial, talented performers of color could, with great effort, carve out spaces for their art in the public life and cultural institutions of their city.

The result of these particular local conditions in Rio de Janeiro were relatively few organizations like the FHC (significantly, a transplant from São Paulo) and almost no independent black newspapers.⁶⁵ As a result, the responses of Cariocas of color to the Mãe Preta proposal—when they made it into print at all—appeared primarily in mainstream newspapers and came from organizations different from the social clubs through which São Paulo's class of color typically made its forays into public life. For instance, the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário e São Benedito dos Homens Pretos, a black lay brotherhood, was the group (of any racial background) that made the largest impact in A Notícia’s coverage of public support for the Mãe Preta monument.⁶⁶ Black lay brotherhoods had been integral to the culture of Brazilian cities since the colonial period, projecting, to outside observers, an appearance of conformity to Catholic doctrine and authority even as they became spaces for the development of race-based identities and the maintenance of African-derived religious practices.⁶⁷ On 3 May 1926 the brotherhood held a mass to give thanks to Cândido de Campos, followed by a “solemn session” in which members expressed their “heartfelt solidarity and decided support” for the proposed monument.⁶⁸ People of various class and racial backgrounds filled the mass, including Cândido de Campos (the guest of honor), negro lawyer and public intellectual Evaristo de Moraes, Jayme Baptista de Camargo (leader of Rio's FHC), orator Vicente Ferreira, and representatives of another of Rio's black brotherhoods, the Irmandade de São Sebastião e Santa Ephigenia do Homem Preto. Also present were members of a local black theater troupe, the Companhia Negra de Revistas, which at the time crowned its popular revue Tudo Preto (All Black) with a final act titled “Apotheosis of the Mãe Preta”—a choice that suggests the broad resonance of the symbol of the Mãe Preta among Rio's population, elite and nonelite alike.⁶⁹ In Rio, unlike São Paulo, not only could professionals of color publish directly in mainstream newspapers, but nonelite preto religious brotherhoods with a long history of official sanction could organize multiracial public events, and ensure enthusiastic, front-page illustrated coverage in major papers like A Notícia.⁷⁰

In exchange for their greater integration in their city's public life, black organizations in Rio, like the Rosário brotherhood, appear in this case to have operated with less independence than the more marginalized black associations of São Paulo, whose members would a few years later direct their own campaign in favor of the Mãe Preta in the black press. Without newspapers of their own, and in keeping with a long-standing practice of reaching out to powerful white patrons, members of the Rosário brotherhood relied on Campos and other members of a white elite to participate in their celebrations and republish their ideas about the Mãe Preta. Yet this did not wholly limit the brotherhood's attempts to reshape the message of the Mãe Preta statue. Congratulatory letters to Campos from Olympio de Castro, a lawyer and the vicar of the brotherhood of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, drew liberally on the ideas and language circulated by white monument supporters, whom he called “worthy of the veneration of the povo [the people, particularly the humbler classes].” Underneath this endorsement, however, Castro's letters and speeches redeployed ideas about Brazilian racial fraternity to make strikingly pointed demands. He referred to the monument as a “prova [“proof,” but also “test”] of the sentiments of the Brazilian people.” Like other supporters of color, Castro made it clear in the speech following his mass that the monument was primarily an act of just restitution to the “black race” and its contributions to Brazilian history.⁷¹ But he went further. In one of his letters of support to Campos, Castro echoed his São Paulo counterparts on the necessary relationship between legal equality and antiracist sentiment. Though the “black race had been integrated into the pátria by law, through full rights of citizenship, there remained one great work still to be accomplished—the work of redemption, that is, the extinction of prejudice, which is also a cruel fetter.”⁷² The dramatic claim that Brazil was not yet free of racism thus found its way into newspaper coverage that generally presented the Mãe Preta as a confirmation of Brazil's unique racial harmony.

“Today is the day of the Mãe Negra”

In São Paulo, writers responded to the proposal for the monument from an increasingly active set of separate, explicitly black, and primarily male social institutions. Alongside the (by then) well-established black press, a new activist association had emerged in São Paulo in 1926—the Centro Cívico Palmares (Palmares Civic Center). Named after the legendary fugitive slave community that thrived in northeastern Brazil for most of the seventeenth century, an unequivocal symbol of black resistance to slavery, the Centro Cívico Palmares brought together old and new figures in São Paulo's black politics. José Correia Leite and Jayme de Aguiar, coeditors of Clarim, joined the center, as did their new colleagues Gervásio de Moraes, Lino Guedes, and Benedito Florencio, all formerly of Campinas's Getulino. The renowned black orator Alberto Orlando was also among the center's estimated 100 to 150 members, as were Arlindo Veiga dos Santos, a Latin teacher and secretary at the Faculdade de Filosofia e Letras, and his brother Isaltino Veiga dos Santos.⁷³ The center originally had cultural objectives—principally, creating a library of black history and literature. But it soon became an association for the “defense of blacks and their rights.”⁷⁴ The center began to offer secondary school courses for members wishing to continue their education, as well as a theater group and a medical clinic. Its members were also involved in racial advocacy, as when, in August 1928, they protested racial discrimination in São Paulo's state police force, the Civil Guard.⁷⁵

Members of São Paulo's black institutions and newspapers enthusiastically supported Campos's idea for the monument when it was first proposed in 1926. Although São Paulo's black activists had less access to the mainstream public sphere than did their Rio counterparts, they had their own press in which their opinions were, by 1926, no longer directly mediated by relationships with white editors or technicians. Though on the surface, their interpretations of the Mãe Preta often echoed those of her elite white champions in Rio, Paulistano black writers turned dominant readings of her motherhood to their own political purposes.

Writers in São Paulo's black press reconfigured the dominant theme of the mainstream Rio campaign—nostalgia for the Mãe Preta's tender and submissive motherhood—to promote the inclusion of blacks into national identity. This strategy took several forms. Some writers (displaying their fervent Catholicism) drew on her iconographic resemblance to the image of the Madonna, a symbol of maternal love central to the Western tradition. Clarim, for instance, reprinted a poem by white author Saul de Navarro that described the Mãe Preta's motherhood through the attributes of saintliness, echoing descriptions of the Virgin Mary—her “martyrdom” and “Christian capacity for sacrifice,” as well as the extreme “purity” of her milk, which carried the virtues of “goodness” and “pardon.”⁷⁶ That a black woman could take on the role of the Brazilian Madonna confirmed the belonging of black people more generally in a Catholic Brazil. Other writers echoed white Cariocas’ nostalgia for the love of black caretakers and expressed sympathy with the white child who lost his wet-nurse. The usually combative Getulino, for instance, ran a piece lamenting that black wet-nurses, “who had a predominant and salient role in the daily life of past times,” had become “an entity whose influence today fades and vanishes with the changes of daily life and customs.”⁷⁷Clarim’s coeditor, Jayme de Aguiar, demanded respect for “one whom our greatest writers tirelessly remember in their beautiful and truly Brazilian stories and romances—the mucamas, those doting mothers, who even today, once in a while, seek out their [white] child to remember times gone by.”⁷⁸ In their efforts to construct a national narrative that recognized the presence of black men and women, several of São Paulo's black journalists set aside the disturbing aspects of the Mãe Preta's role in favor of more conciliatory ones.

That black thinkers in an increasingly activist press would choose to write nostalgically about the Mãe Preta might strike us as peculiar, or worse, as evidence of their capitulation to dominant attempts to sugarcoat the history of slavery. Yet this strategy allowed black male writers to affirm their belonging in a (male) citizenry among which there existed a shared memory of the Mãe Preta's tenderness. By invoking this memory, black writers, as literate Brazilian men, positioned themselves alongside the great authors and statesmen who expressed love for their “black mothers” in countless poems, essays, and articles. Similarly, black newspapers frequently published articles (some written by black journalists, some by white contributors) that waxed poetic about the Mãe Preta's “opulent,” “swollen,” or “rounded” breasts.⁷⁹ In so doing, black writers and editors relied on the sentimentalized maternal breast of black women—a resource they evidently felt was theirs to share—as the basis for a proposed fraternal bond among men of different colors and classes. The sexualized imagery that accompanied celebrations of the Mãe Preta's breasts also hinted at a more adult kind of relationship between black women and their male partners, who in these accounts could be imagined as either black or white. By republishing and in some cases penning these eulogies to the Mãe Preta's bosom, then, black writers reaffirmed bonds of masculinity with their white counterparts by alluding to shared experiences of intimacy with black women not just as infants, but also as adults.

For much of 1926 the Mãe Preta monument proposal continued to feature prominently in Rio's A Notícia. Letters of support from local governments, historical societies, businesses, and individuals from around Brazil continued to flow in, while newspapers across Brazil opened subscription campaigns to help raise money for the purpose. Cândido de Campos created a monument commission, headed by noted Brazilian writer H. M. Coelho Neto, to oversee the project.⁸⁰ In Rio's municipal government and in the national congress, representatives lauded the Mãe Preta in long, romantic speeches and pledged funds for the monument's construction.⁸¹ Despite this nostalgic goodwill, however, the project eventually lost impetus in Rio de Janeiro, and the proposed monument was never built in that city.⁸² But in São Paulo, black writers who had lent their support to the monument were not ready to let go of the Mãe Preta's powerful symbolism, nor of the visibility she brought to emerging formulations of citizenship as racial fraternity.⁸³

The man who would lead the effort to tie the Mãe Preta to the increasingly political space around the Centro Palmares was journalist and editor José Correia Leite. In February 1928 Leite, with his friend and coeditor Jayme de Aguiar, embarked their newspaper, O Clarim d'Alvorada, on its “second phase,” hoping to shift its focus from an earlier ideology of racial uplift to a new program of “action,” “combat,” and “struggle.”⁸⁴ In one editorial from this second phase, which outlined the obstacles between black Brazilians and full citizenship, Leite foreshadowed the attributes that would make the Mãe Preta such a compelling symbol for black activism for the remainder of the decade: “Once the negro ceased to be that formidable productive machine, he was abandoned on the road to progress. . . . Soon thereafter, the negro was replaced by the immigrant; the poor soul was left disoriented, bedazzled by his voter's registration card and his title of Brazilian citizen, but he was not taught how to read or write; [he was] classified by high sociologists as a descendant of an inferior race.” Building on the diagnoses of Paulista black writers since the early years of the century, Leite noted that citizenship for black Brazilians remained incomplete, a mere “title,” in the face of scientific racism, immigration, and restricted access to education. In response, Leite urged the “negro family” to “unite,” to “acquire our collective patrimony” and “explore our glorious nationalism.”⁸⁵ In part, this call for black Brazilians to develop a nationalism specific to their shared historical inheritance as negros appears to reflect a new stage in Leite's evolving self-perception as a light-skinned mulatto raised by white Italians who, through his political commitments, now claimed proud belonging in a “negro family.” But his use of negro also reflected the most recent stage in the shifting racial self-conception of writers in the Paulista black press more broadly. Over the course of the 1920s, writers generally moved from using the term homens de cor, which allowed for a range of colored identities, to preto, a defiant identification with dark skin, and increasingly, in the second half of the decade, to negro, which eschewed color categories and proudly placed all people of African ancestry within a unified, distinct racial community.⁸⁶ Leite's editorial suggested that tending to the “collective patrimony” and “glorious nationalism” of this “negro family” was a project for black intellectuals like himself. It required not just basic literacy but an educated intellect capable of contradicting the theories of “high sociologists” or rendering tribute to black historical figures. These were the weapons that would help black people—currently “abandoned,” “disoriented,” and “bedazzled”—achieve their rightful symbolic position in the nation.

The idea of making the Mãe Preta the central symbol of this new project came to Leite through Vicente Ferreira, the “gaunt,” sometimes “tattered,” yet always imposing black popular orator from Rio de Janeiro. Ferreira, one of the principal black supporters of the Mãe Preta statue in Rio, moved to São Paulo in 1927, sensing, as José Correia Leite later described it, that he would have a “broader field” for his racial politics and oratory in São Paulo, a city with multiple black social and political institutions. In a speech to the Centro Cívico Palmares in 1928, Ferreira argued for the need to revive the campaign to honor the Mãe Preta. With the monument proposal bogged down in bureaucratic inaction in Rio, Ferreira proposed an inexpensive and elegant alternative: declaring 28 September the “Day of the Mãe Preta,” an official holiday.⁸⁷ The date referred to the passage of the Law of the Free Womb in 1871, which stipulated that all children born to slave mothers would subsequently be free. Ferreira's idea struck a chord with Leite, who at the time was searching for a grand gesture that would help keep Clarim going in his coeditor's absence (Jayme de Aguiar had taken a leave to get married).⁸⁸ In the issue of 28 September 1928—the first for which he, a self-described “semiliterate man,” was solely responsible—Leite launched the campaign for the holiday. It was a public relations success. For the next few years, Clarim and other newspapers in São Paulo's black press succeeded in popularizing the idea of a commemorative day for the Mãe Preta among black thinkers and writers, as well as white journalists and politicians, in their state and beyond.

In promoting his idea for the “Day of the Mãe Preta,” Leite, like Cândido de Campos before him, appealed to the Brazilian press as a whole. His edition of 28 September, which Leite distributed among the offices of São Paulo's major newspapers, called for the press to follow up its historic role as Brazil's “conscience” in the abolitionist campaign by supporting the holiday for the Mãe Preta.⁸⁹ This appeal to the mainstream print media marked an important shift for São Paulo's black press. Despite constant efforts to reach a wider audience, these papers’ main readership had always consisted primarily of members of black organizations. But for a brief time following the September 1928 issue, mainstream newspapers from surrounding cities and states paid overwhelmingly positive attention to Clarim. Responding to Leite's call, “some newspapers of the mainstream press published, on their front pages, ‘Today is the day of the Mãe Negra.’” Others, Leite recalled, reported this news in internal pages.⁹⁰ By choosing a project that had originated among white writers in Rio, and by directing his appeal for a Mãe Preta holiday to members of the national press, Leite created a moment of national attention, of crossover, for his small black newspaper. In the state legislature of São Paulo, representatives pledged money for the effort. They promised to enforce observance of the holiday in all government departments and required schools to arrange lectures on the date's historical significance. Leite's project also won the approval of President Washington Luís (who had expressed support for the monument proposal in A Notícia) and of the president of São Paulo State, Júlio Prestes.⁹¹

This attention was extremely important to Leite, who later recalled that with the September 1928 issue, Clarim “embarked on its course to become a medium for struggles, for denunciations, for claiming [our] rights. It became a different sort of newspaper, unlike previous or contemporary ones.”⁹² It is telling that Leite dated the transformation of Clarim into an activist paper to the campaign for the Mãe Preta holiday, for the paper had been engaged in racial activism from its very inception: calling for unity among São Paulo's many black organizations, criticizing racism in Brazil, and by 1928, turning more openly to social protest. But with the Mãe Preta campaign Clarim ceased to speak exclusively to audiences of color. Its writers found a way to inject discussions of race, citizenship, and the place of African-descended people in Brazilian identity into a national forum through their own words. It was the coming together of black intellectuals and the white press in discussion over a shared icon of Brazil's past that, for Leite, constituted real political activity.

In his efforts to appeal to a broader white audience, Leite was careful to adopt the celebratory rhetoric about Brazilian racial fraternity produced by Campos and his supporters. A holiday for the Mãe Preta, Leite remarked, “will, we are sure, earn the sympathies of all Brazilians. It is the best way to prove to the world our politics of human fraternity, and to declare our gratitude to those humble contributors to our progress.”⁹³ Yet unlike white monument supporters, Leite and his colleagues did not see the Mãe Preta primarily as a celebration of the racial tolerance of white Brazilians. Rather, they deployed that symbol in their project to define the “cultural patrimony” and “glorious nationalism” of a distinct racial community of negros, and to highlight these virtues on the national stage. Toward this goal, they built on the ways black writers and activists in both São Paulo and Rio had interpreted the monument in 1926, as a symbol of the contributions of the black race.

In particular, Leite and his allies were less than enthusiastic about white Carioca writers’ presentation of the Mãe Preta as a symbol of racial fusion. Though white monument supporters’ formulations of fusion moved away from an explicit project of whitening, they did not abandon the notion of white superiority, and in some cases, they continued to suggest the eventual disappearance of a distinctive black racial identity in Brazil. Nor had these formulations fully displaced earlier ideologies of whitening among elite Brazilians. The idea that Brazil was the product of racial fusion also stood in tension with Leite's project of commemorating the historical contributions of the “black race” in order to improve the status of its present-day members. That political program depended on the presumption that the “black race” was, and continued to be, a distinct entity within the Brazilian population. Thus, in their support for Leite's idea to create a holiday for the Mãe Preta, most writers in São Paulo's black press firmly rejected the value that white proponents of the monument had placed on the blurring of racial groups and, above all, on the disappearance of a distinct black race.

The “mother of Brazilians,” Black and White

Most writers who supported Leite's campaign in 1928 and 1929 saw the Mãe Preta as mother to two distinct but equally Brazilian races, black and white, whose members had worked side by side to build Brazil's greatness. In part this interpretation continued an earlier trend in São Paulo's black press to “blacken” the population of color and to portray that city, and indeed Brazil as a whole, as places divided exclusively between the binary poles of black and white—a trend vividly illustrated by a Clarim article from the late 1920s that referred to whites as members of the “raça oposta,” or opposite race.⁹⁴ But writers’ interpretation of the Mãe Preta as a mother of two distinct races also reflected recent turns in the city's black politics. By 1929 the Centro Cívico Palmares had begun to decline due to internal disagreements and the leadership's autocratic tendencies.⁹⁵ In the wake of the center's demise, José Correia Leite intensified his use of Clarim as a platform to call for the confederation of all black organizations in the state of São Paulo. In February 1929, a year into Clarim’s new phase of “combat” and “struggle,” Leite called for a Congress of Black Youth, through which “the blacks of S. Paulo [would] form a unified front and work with loyalty toward the unification of the class.”⁹⁶ Other prominent writers and activists, like Latin professor and former Centro Palmares member Arlindo Veiga dos Santos, joined Leite in his intensified calls for negros to unite politically around their racial identity.⁹⁷

The series of articles by men like Leite and Santos calling for a Congress of Black Youth in 1929 captures the black press's increasingly critical tone toward the history of slavery and racism in Brazil, and its progressively bolder demands for redress. In one of his appeals to “black youth,” for instance, Leite urged them to fight the “ghost of captivity,” the “hideous shadow that tarred the institutions of this pátria and built the fortune of our high and mighty aristocracy.”⁹⁸ In this context, writers still upheld the Mãe Preta as a symbol of the sentiments of justice and humanity presumably shared by Brazilians of all racial backgrounds, but they made her a vehicle for ever sharper denunciations of the shortcomings of those ideals. They also differed from white supporters of the monument in making her stand for the concrete contributions of, and debts owed to, the “black race.”

Perhaps the most striking example of how the Mãe Preta could be deployed to affirm the historical and contemporary presence of a productive but aggrieved black race was the drawing Leite chose to put on the front page of Clarim when he announced his campaign in September 1928. The drawing portrayed a young black woman holding a white infant in her arms. Their faces form the centerpiece of a composition that plays on the themes of black and white, and the stark contrast between them. The woman's dark head is crowned by a billowing white cloud and offset by the brightness of the child's impeccable white pinafore. The shoulder of the young woman's dress has fallen loosely around the crook of her bent elbow, exposing the top of her dark bosom, on which the child places his hand in a gesture of possession. Below and behind the young woman, almost entirely obscured by shadows save for the whiteness of his clothing, stands a small black boy, presumably the wet-nurse's own son.

This drawing of a slave nursemaid with her white charge fits in a genre of wet-nurse images common to Brazil and other Atlantic slave societies. Foreign artists traveling in Brazil, struck by the prevalence of black wet-nurses and their vital role in slaveholding households, frequently depicted these women holding or suckling their white charges.⁹⁹ Images of African-descended women posing with their current or former charges continued into the age of photography, providing some of Brazil's earliest examples of portraiture, and affirming the wet-nurse's iconic status in Brazilian visual art.¹⁰⁰ The particular drawing Leite chose for the cover of his paper in 1928, in fact, appears to be based on a nineteenth-century oil painting that hangs in Brazil's Imperial Museum, until recently thought to depict the young emperor Dom Pedro II in the arms of his (unnamed) black nursemaid.¹⁰¹ This original portrait, however, like nearly all depictions of the Mãe Preta in Brazilian art, does not include the mother's own black son.

The illustration on the cover of O Clarimd'Alvorada of September 1928 showed the Mãe Preta with both her white and black children. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

Clarim’s decision to reference familiar iconography in its own front-page illustration was consistent with the black press's frequent citations of literary and folkloric representations of the Mãe Preta. Both the older oil painting and the newer drawing highlighted Pedro II, a towering figure of Brazilian history, who especially after 1922 (the centennial of Brazilian independence and the date that Pedro II and his wife were reburied in Brazil) was remembered in increasingly positive terms as a model ruler.¹⁰² The allusion to the popular emperor thus helped associate the figure of the Mãe Preta with the heroes of Brazilian history. Yet by adding the figure of the wet-nurse's black son to their portrait, Clarim’s editors dramatically unsettled traditional wet-nurse iconography, as well as white interpretations of the Mãe Preta. In Clarim’s expanded drawing (quite possibly commissioned by the paper's editors, like many of their illustrations), the black mother who holds the white child close to her chest is simultaneously turning her back on her own child. This image set the tone for a commemoration of the Mãe Preta that, while celebrating the fraternity between the wet-nurse's black and white sons, also spotlighted the remembered grievances if not of the enslaved woman herself, then of the sons that she bore.

“Nursemaid with Child in Her Arms” (artist unknown; early to mid-1800s). Like most nursemaid iconography, this oil painting, on which O Clarim’s 1928 drawing appears to be based, depicts only the Mãe Preta and her white child. Museu Imperial/IBRAM/MINC.

Several writers confirmed this message, reading the symbol of the Mãe Preta as an explicit condemnation of slavery and its consequences for black families. The Black Mother “fed and caressed, on her black breast, the whites who stole from blacks the very drop of milk that represented the vitality, the primordial element of their existence.”¹⁰³ “Our grandmothers,” David Rodolpho de Castro of Progresso lamented, “were never able to breastfeed, let alone raise their sons [filhos], for they were forced (under pain of the whip) to deny their rounded breasts to the fruits of their love. . . . This prohibition had a sad end: mothers would abandon their sons for those of the masters, who as adults would repay such dedication with the lash.” The love white children shared with the Mãe Preta, so amply celebrated in the monument campaign, came at a price for the children born of her womb. Black sons did not experience the “pleasure of receiving maternal caresses,” nor the luxury of suckling from the Mother's “rounded breasts”; all they received was “bean broth, corn meal mush, and water.” Unlike more common celebrations of the Mãe Preta's expansive maternal love, Castro's stressed the unnatural burden of dual motherhood, and the resentment this generated in the abandoned child: “A mother of another's sons, who remains in perpetual abandonment of her legitimate sons, is like a flower without its scent.”¹⁰⁴

These writers’ use of the Mãe Preta as a symbol of abandoned black sons helped make her an emblem of a wronged race imagined principally as masculine. This is not surprising, given that nearly all writers in São Paulo's black press were male, and that they were keenly aware of maleness as a prerequisite for citizenship. An extremely rare inclusion of female perspectives in one issue of Clarim, however, gives us insight into what the Mãe Preta could mean for women when they were given the chance to speak publicly on the subject. On 28 September 1929 the small Paulista town of Botucatu held its own celebration of the Mãe Preta, organized by their Clarim representative (a woman named Alexandrina Ferreira) and hosted by the Guarany Recreational Society. After a series of speeches by town worthies, organizers yielded the floor to a group of young women who delivered their own speeches and poems in praise of the Mãe Preta. The article does not make clear the women's racial identities, but their speeches, ending in phrases like “Long live the Mãe Preta! Long live the raça Negra!,” suggest that they were likely negras themselves.¹⁰⁵ For these women, the Mãe Preta's sufferings as a mother—perhaps even more than her sons’ suffering—was a metaphor for the horrors of slavery more broadly. For Diva de Campos, the Mãe Preta's martyrdom made her the emblem of a race “from which was stolen the right to live.” For Yolanda de Camargo, the Mãe Preta was the “mother of Brazilians, who shared her blood with the little white masters [sinhozinhos], often sacrifcing her own sons.” For this writer, the sharing of blood was not a metaphor for cultural transfusion (as it was for many white Mãe Preta supporters) but rather a symbol of a physical sacrifice even more taxing than shared breast milk.¹⁰⁶ These women's readings stand in contrast to many contemporary male black writers’ interpretations of the Mãe Preta, which often switched quickly from the theme of motherhood to the theme of male slaves’ physical contributions to nation building. The Mãe Preta, in several male writers’ formulations, symbolized a “strong and virile” black race, “which contributed the most toward the formation of our nationality.”¹⁰⁷ Remembering physical labor in primarily male terms did little to acknowledge the Mãe Preta's own painful labors of childbirth and childrearing, or the fact that women were also among the Brazilian slaves who labored from sunup to sundown in Brazil's fields.

Yet if reminders of the productivity of enslaved black men had been important for people of color who supported the monument project in Rio, they were particularly important to black writers in late 1920s São Paulo, who deployed them in response to decades of employment discrimination in favor of allegedly harder-working European immigrants. Since the mid-1920s, writers in São Paulo's black press had complained of the ease with which immigrants had replaced people of color as workers and even citizens, turning them into “foreigners” in their native lands. By the late 1920s their indignant denunciations grew even stronger. In 1929 one of São Paulo's Italian immigrant newspapers, O Fanfulla, published an article complaining about the number of people of color on São Paulo's streets. The writer, clearly intending to give offense through the comparison, claimed that São Paulo was slowly coming to resemble the city of Salvador da Bahia in the darkness of its denizens’ complexions. Black writers learned of the insult when São Paulo's Diário Nacional reprinted a section of Fanfulla’s article in October 1929.¹⁰⁸ This sparked a barrage of angry retorts in the pages of Clarim, such as Luis de Sousa's, which pointedly reminded foreigners that blacks were “descendants of the race that most contributed toward the greatness of Brazil, since its first moments.” The incident convinced Sousa even more of the need to convene a Congress of Black Youth: “We must at all costs hold our meeting, to show the foreigners that PRETOS IN BRAZIL ARE BRAZILIAN!!”¹⁰⁹

In his writings calling for a Congress of Black Youth, Clarim contributor Arlindo Veiga dos Santos best exemplifies the strains of militant nativism and nationalism—at times bordering on xenophobia—that were developing among some black thinkers and activists in late 1920s São Paulo. Santos held conservative views about religion (he was a fervent Catholic), government (he was a monarchist), and society (he was a strong believer in a patriarchal Brazilian family). That his intense antiracism revolved around both extreme nationalism and a belief in the fixity of a “black race” fits with these conservative leanings. Santos formulated some of the sharpest criticisms of antiblack racism in his time and frequently linked racism to immigrants. “Brazil,” he wrote, paraphrasing Miguel Pereira and Belisário Penna, two leaders of the early-twentieth-century campaign to sanitize and modernize Brazilian cities, “is a vast hospital.” But it was not, as sanitation campaigners had argued, degenerate racial types and their purported genetic and medical ills that made Brazil sick. Brazil, rather, suffered from “the worst sort of illness, which is racial prejudice; in other words, the sick mentality of our leaders, who allow an entire People to perish, because they must be replaced, because they are mixed, because they are black and should be white, at all costs, even at the expense of the destruction of Brazil by the wave of international immigrant Aryanism.” Though he criticized the “pro-Aryan” or “proforeign” leanings of some Brazilian leaders, Santos strategically presented Brazilian traditions as essentially racially tolerant: “The children of foreigners, in order to achieve absolute nationalization, must enter loyally into the rhythm of [our country's] racial solidarity.”¹¹⁰ By law, the children of immigrants in this period automatically received status as nationals—this was the jus soli that had been the subject of nativist discontent in O Getulino in the early 1920s.¹¹¹ Santos's warning to immigrants seeking “absolute nationalization” shows that he identified an extralegal condition for Brazilian citizenship—loyalty to and full acceptance of “racial solidarity” as the spirit of true Brazilianness.

Writers who used the Mãe Preta as an emblem of black contributions to Brazilian nationality since its “first moments” echoed these growing feelings of nativism. In so doing, they made common cause with a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment among members of São Paulo's elite. In 1927 São Paulo State finally ended its policy of subsidized European immigration, and by 1928, the year Leite launched his Mãe Preta holiday campaign, the influx of migrants to São Paulo from other parts of Brazil (which included many people of color) overtook that of international immigrants for the first time in decades.¹¹² One of the factors facilitating this turn toward national laborers and against immigrants among a segment of the Paulista elite was the rise of fascism in Europe since the early 1920s and its evident appeal to many Italian immigrants in São Paulo.¹¹³ When São Paulo's Diário Nacional reprinted the Italian-language Fanfulla’s insult to black Brazilians, for instance, the article's author cast racist immigrants as perpetrators of a broader “fascist attack” on Brazil, aimed at transforming Brazil into a “colony of Italy.” From an intensely nationalistic position, the unnamed author reminded his readers that “it was not the foreigner who cleared forests and planted our coffee; it was the preto,” and concluded with an explicit disavowal of the objectives of decades of pro-European immigration policy: “The European immigrant, for us, was nothing more than a substitute for the negro.”¹¹⁴ Articles celebrating the strong (male) black laborer in São Paulo's mainstream press by the late 1920s resonate with this incipient defense, among some of the state's intellectuals and employers, of “national” workers—a word that once had such a negative, racialized connotation. At the time that it launched its Mãe Preta campaign, Clarim, for instance, proudly reprinted an article from the mainstream Correio Paulistano lionizing the “magnificent black man, whose blood,” suffusing Brazil's coffee crop, created the nation's “formidable wealth.”¹¹⁵

The idea of the Mãe Preta as the mother of two races, espoused by the majority of writers in São Paulo's late 1920s black press, thus had three basic elements. First, it affirmed the sentimental bonds between the races (symbolized by the white child at the black mother's breast), thus helping writers to assert the fundamental Brazilianness of racial fraternity, and to position racists as outsiders. Second, it established black writers’ bonds of commonality and co-citizenship with white intellectuals, as men with intimate feelings toward the same object. Yet while white intellectuals in Rio had been content to recall only the tenderness of their own memories of the Mãe Preta, imagining a process of racial fusion through her shared milk, black writers in São Paulo noticeably inserted the figure of the abandoned black child into an iconography traditionally restricted to the black mother and her white charge. In so doing, they transformed the threesome of black mother, white baby, and black child into a monument to the pain of slavery and the grievances of the black race. Drawing a distinction between the race that had emerged from her womb and the race that had suckled at her breast allowed black writers to emphasize a third meaning for the Mãe Preta, tied to the question of competition with immigrant workers. The image of the Mãe Preta recalled blacks’ solidly Brazilian history primarily by positioning them as native sons and contrasting them to the parasitical, racist foreigners who were sons of neither her breast nor her womb. Although the idea of a distinct black race stood in tension with emerging celebrations of Brazilian racial fusion among white and some black champions of the Mãe Preta in Rio, it made sense in São Paulo, given prevailing attitudes that drew sharp distinctions between whites and nonwhites. The nativist defense of blacks associated with this binary view, moreover, dovetailed with the attitudes of some white Paulistas who, in the late 1920s, began to prefer the memory of patriarchal labor relations with black Brazilians to the labor radicalism of the immigrants they had once taken such pains to import.

The Mother of Brazil's “triumphant mestiço race”

Despite the ascendancy of this vision of distinct black and white races in the Paulistano black press of the late 1920s, a visible minority of writers in this period proposed that the Mãe Preta be remembered as the mother of one Brazilian race born of fusion. This view, which built on earlier (also minoritarian) celebrations of racial fusion in the black press of the 1910s and early 1920s, posited the Mãe Preta as “the mother of Brazil—mother of Brazil, we say, because she symbolizes, in a sublime manner, all the courage of a race present during the first moments of the formation of . . . this triumphant, mestiço race.”¹¹⁶ In a defense of the Mãe Preta statue against the attacks of white opponents like Couto Esher, who feared that the statue would prove to outsiders that Brazil was a black nation, a Clarim writer who signed simply “Raul” argued that the Mãe Preta stood, in a way, for the virtues of racial impurity. Race mixture, Raul contended, was an essential part of not only Brazilian reality but also that of any civilized society: “whoever might be embarrassed [by Brazil's mixed race] should ship out to some uncivilized region, where there exist no crossings of any kind.”¹¹⁷

While it is useful to analyze this defense of racial fusion in distinction to the more prevalent idea of two races, these interpretations should not be read as corresponding to two clear, opposing factions. Leite, a defender in many circumstances of the “two race” model, was almost certainly the author of the unsigned editorial defending the Mãe Preta as a symbol of Brazil's “triumphant, mestiço race.” Raul's defense of race mixture ran under the headline, “Yes, there are negros in Brazil.” These positions were not fixed but could often coexist in the minds of individual writers who saw different kinds of political opportunity in the idea of cultural fusion and in the project of independent black organizing. Indeed, the prevalence of pseudonyms among the writers who promoted the “one race” view makes it difficult to know exactly who they were. Pseudonyms, especially ones made up of single names like “Raul,” were relatively common in the black press. It is possible that “Raul” was the given name of an infrequent contributor to Clarim, or, more likely, that it was one of many pseudonyms used by the paper's regular writers.¹¹⁸ Raul's proud use of the term negro to describe Brazil's people of color suggests he was negro himself. Yet in at least one case, as we will see, a supporter of the “mestiço” interpretation of the Mãe Preta was almost certainly a white writer, signing with a pen name. If the view of the Mãe Preta as the mother to one race was espoused partially or perhaps primarily by white contributors to these papers, this explains its minority position in a black press increasingly committed to racial distinctiveness. Still, black editors endorsed these views by republishing them, without clarifying the authors’ racial identities or distinguishing among white- and black-authored perspectives.

Despite the difficulties of pinning down the identities and political sympathies of writers who portrayed the Mãe Preta as mother to a single Brazilian race, one issue clearly distinguished them from those who espoused the “two race” view: their attitudes toward Africa. Black thinkers like Arlindo Veiga dos Santos tied their racial activism to nationalist and nativist sentiments, continuing an earlier trend of seeking to distinguish pretos or negros, who were Brazilian, from Africans, who were foreign. Writers who favored the idea of racial fusion, however, tended to see Africa more positively and associated the Mãe Preta with it. A writer who called himself “Ivan,” defending the monument proposal in Getulino in 1926, described the Mãe Preta as the prototypical slave woman who bore the suffering of her people, from capture and transportation in Africa through the Middle Passage: “Exiled from Africa by the merciless tyranny of a race that . . . imagined itself privileged, black women wrote with their blood the history of their martyrdom; they sang in moans the epic of their infamous disgrace!” Yet they bore it all, “writing the pages of their groaning history . . . with the resigned impassivity of the desert sands of their homeland.”¹¹⁹ Another article, signed by “Helios,” explained that the Mãe Preta paid tribute not to the “black race” as such but to the “raça africana, symbolized by the Mãe Preta.”¹²⁰

“Helios,” according to historian Miriam Ferrara, was the pen name of Paulo Menotti del Picchia, a white Paulista poet and a leading modernist intellectual.¹²¹ Ivan's identity remains unclear; it is possible, though by no means certain, that he too was white. Yet if the editors of Clarim and Getulino prominently published the works of white collaborators in their pages, this was because it suited their political and intellectual projects. Like writers who saw the Mãe Preta as an emblem of two distinct races, these authors highlighted the contributions of Brazilians of color to the nation. Their celebration of the Mãe Preta's African origins portrayed Brazilians of African descent—like European and indigenous Brazilians—as hailing from a revered ancient civilization that had contributed, through processes of racial and cultural fusion, to shaping Brazilian nationality. “Unconsciously,” Ivan wrote, the Mães Pretas “insinuated themselves into the fabric of our race, into the formation of our customs, into the making of our generations of yesterday and today!” As he listed the Africanisms that the Mãe Preta had bequeathed a Brazilian race, Ivan prefigured Gilberto Freyre's theories about African influences on modern Brazilian culture. “Our language is full of expressions that are modifications of their dialect, transformations of terms of endearment, the first heard by our infantile ears. . . . Brazilian music was forged in the mournful melody of the jongos they intoned, in their cult to the divine flower of saudade! The spirit of the Brazilian people still quakes under the influx of superstitions derived from the delicateness of the African soul and from the submission to fetishism.”¹²² This celebration of cultural mixture recognized the particular ways that distinct groups had participated in the creation of a unified Brazilian race and culture, allowing for Brazilians of different ancestries to take pride in these contributions.

Presenting the Mãe Preta as a symbol of African cultural contributions was a different political project than presenting her as a symbol of black men's labor. Both views of fraternity, in their own ways, identified a representational realm as the most important space in which to argue for black Brazilians’ belonging in the nation. Yet the idea of two Brazilian races responded to one face of the emerging nationalism of the 1920s, namely, the growing rejection of foreign influences, especially of immigrant workers themselves. Black intellectuals who defended the integrity of the “black race” in this context drew on nativist nationalism, and placed racism toward the top of both white and black nativists’ list of grievances against foreigners. The proponents of cultural fusion, for their part, took up the nationalism of Brazil's modernists—indeed some, like “Helios” (Paulo Menotti del Picchia) were modernists—asserting the uniqueness of Brazil by celebrating the vitality that non-European cultural and aesthetic values lent to national culture. In this intellectual tradition, the trope of racial mixture—embodied in the Mãe Preta—opened up opportunities to proclaim the racial and cultural Brazilianness of African-descended people.

The reassessment of Africa in Brazilian modernism and in the emerging national ideal of cultural fusion provided black writers with an opportunity to deploy information about Africa and the African diaspora in ways that black nativism did not. During the years of the Mãe Preta celebrations, some writers in São Paulo's black press sought to vindicate a continent they considered to have been wronged by the prejudice of observers from the United States and Europe. A Clarim writer who took the pseudonym “Booker,” for instance, defended the “black continent” as “the sacred land of our grandfathers, so unjustly considered an immense jungle full of beasts and imbecilic blacks.”¹²³Clarim also published an article by a traveler who, having heard much about Liberia as a “republic of cannibals,” went there to see for himself. He described instead a promising, peaceful, self-governing country “in the independent history of which the word ‘war’ does not appear.” This was not the case, he clarified, in the African colonies “blessed with the ‘civilization’ of the great powers,” where “revolutions proliferate.”¹²⁴ By the decade's end, the influences of Brazilian modernist thinkers and artists, of a European vanguard's interest in all things African, and of pan-Africanist movements made themselves felt in papers like Clarim and Progresso, intensifying an earlier, more tentative interest in Africa and the diaspora.¹²⁵ As in an earlier period, “August Ethiopia” continued to capture the imagination of black writers as an ancestral place of origin. They referenced the mythical lineage of newcomer Ras Tafari (later Haile Selassie), reputed to descend directly from the legendary Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Above all, black writers presented Ethiopia as an icon of black resistance to European imperialism, as well as a successful example of modern (and Christian) black self-government under historic leaders like Menelik or new ones like Ras Tafari.¹²⁶

Thus positive images of Africa, legitimized by the emerging modernist idea of a shared African past common to all Brazilians, could be refashioned to suit some of the goals of black activism, like Leite's aspiration to delineate blacks’ “glorious nationalism” and “collective patrimony.” Interpretations of the Mãe Preta as mother to a single shared race, whether penned by black or white authors, outlined new possibilities for the inclusion of black Brazilians in a nation proudly portrayed by an intellectual vanguard as partly African in origin. And though the emphasis on mestiçagem in these articles preempted black claims for symbolic belonging as blacks, they made African ethnic and cultural specificity the bargaining chip that black Brazilians brought to the negotiating table of Brazilian nationality.

The idea of the Mãe Preta as a symbol of an ethnically distinct African past that subsequently dissolved into a mixed Brazilian nationality appears, for a few black writers, to have accompanied a more tolerant view of immigrants. Even as writers like Arlindo Veiga dos Santos intensified their anti-immigrant rhetoric in the late 1920s, others, like José Correia Leite, became increasingly convinced of the need for blacks to emulate immigrants in their strategies of ethnic integration. In 1929, for instance, Leite wrote that following the immigrant example was crucial for independent black organizing. Immigrants, he noted, “establish beneficent societies, newspapers, clubs, etc. They are unified, and so live perfectly protected by the strength of their unified class; and they are always powerful by virtue of their efficient work. And us?!! It is true that we are not foreigners, but we still have much to accomplish in order to succeed, in view of our great lack of cohesion.”¹²⁷ Around the same time O Progresso, edited by Lino Guedes and Argentino Celso Wanderley, reported on the Syrio-Lebanese community's construction of a monument to showcase its integration into the Brazilian nation. The Syrio-Lebanese community had managed to secure a coveted spot for the monument in downtown São Paulo, had commissioned a world-famous sculptor of nationalist art to create the monument, and had chosen to donate the monument on the date of Brazilian independence, marking their patriotism.¹²⁸ Like Leite, Progresso’s reporters saw in these immigrants a model for black organizing, and like him, they admired the efforts made by immigrants to improve their status in Brazil. Drawing on the ideal of citizenship as brotherhood, the writer for Progresso described the inauguration of the monument as a “charming civic celebration of fraternization between Brazilians and Syrio-Lebanese.”¹²⁹

In the late 1920s Progresso’s editors were active proponents of two statues to black historical figures: one to abolitionist Luiz Gama (to be built in São Paulo) and the other to the Mãe Preta (in Rio de Janeiro).¹³⁰ It is evident from their coverage of the Syrio-Lebanese monument that it successfully achieved some of the goals that Progresso’s writers imagined for the monuments they hoped someday to build.¹³¹ Above all, the Syrio-Lebanese community's model appears to have confirmed for these black thinkers the potential benefits of celebrating one's deep ethnic origins—in a civilization of mythic proportions—as a resource for achieving fuller belonging as Brazilians. The article in Progresso included a picture of the Syrio-Lebanese monument, depicting its complex symbolic representations of the group's racial and ethnic integration into Brazilian society. The base of the monument shows ancient “Syrians’” contributions to world civilization (the Phoenicians’ pioneering role in navigation and discovery, and the development of the alphabet), and modern Syrians’ contributions to Brazilian prosperity through commerce. At the top of the monument, a female figure representing the Brazilian Republic embraces a Syrian maiden who offers a gift to a Brazilian Indian. The reliefs tell a story in which Syrians drew on their deep, distinctive past to issue what historian Jeff Lesser calls “a clear statement of a hyphenated identity” as desirable “ethnic” Brazilians.¹³²

A year after Progresso’s publication of the article and picture of the Syrio-Lebanese monument, Clarim ran an essay with a picture of a mockup of their preferred version of the still unbuilt Mãe Preta monument. The version Clarim’s editors endorsed, by Brazilian sculptor Yolando Mallozzi, was in many respects similar to the Syrio-Lebanese monument, especially in its use of female figures to represent Brazil's different ethnic groups. In the picture of the mockup, an African woman stands tall at the very top of the monument, holding a young baby in her arms, while two other figures (apparently a European and an indigenous woman) sit at her feet. Around the base of the monument, carvings (difficult to see in the reproduced photo but, according to Leite's memory, depicting scenes of black participation in Brazilian history) line the monument's base, as in the Syrio-Lebanese case.¹³³ Most striking, however, are the similarities in the accompanying essay's symbolic treatment of the relationship of each ethnic group to Brazilian society. The author, Helios (Menotti del Picchia) described the proposed monument to the Mãe Preta in terms of the contributions of African peoples to Brazilian national identity. “Upon three columns is the racial monument of our nationality to be erected: upon the light porphyrian column of the Latin race, upon the bronze column of the Indian race, and upon the vigorous and black column of onyx, carved in the land of Ham, under the African sun, and brought over in the Dantesque holds of the slave ships.” Helios went on to add that the “black column,” or the Mãe Preta herself, would represent the sacrifices of different African ethnic groups: “the pain of the cabinda, the tears of the benguela, the homesickness [banzo] of the congo.” The monument to the Mãe Preta would be a monument to the “African Race,” whose women went on to nurture the “heroic generation of creators of this new world.”¹³⁴ Helios's description of Mallozzi's proposed monument to the Mãe Preta—like the Syrio-Lebanese monument several black writers so admired—linked blacks to an ancestral ethnic homeland while affirming that Africans, via the Mãe Preta, had been instrumental to the creation of the younger, “new world” of Brazil. Thus, even as nativists like Arlindo Veiga dos Santos increasingly built their claims to Brazilian belonging on the rejection of all things foreign, others, defining Brazilian culture as dependent on elements from beyond its own boundaries, began to find value in an African past and to propose imitation of and even friendship toward immigrants in Brazil.

The ultimate fate of the proposed Mãe Preta monument suggests that Leite was sadly correct in his assertion that the black community had much to envy immigrants in their organization, unity, and political self-representation. Whereas the Syrio-Lebanese community succeeded in building their monument in the early 1920s, a monument to the Mãe Preta would not be built until the 1950s, and even then, it would not communicate the sorts of messages black intellectuals in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro had originally envisioned.¹³⁵ São Paulo's Syrio-Lebanese community was able, in the early twentieth century, to mobilize the considerable resources of some of its members—as well as images of the group as talented merchants descended from an ancient civilization of explorers and traders—to portray their desirability as new Brazilians. Black intellectuals in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as representatives of a far less cohesive, much less prosperous group, lacked the resources and institutional bases from which to mount a comparably successful public relations campaign. Moreover, they worked against the weight of centuries-long racial and cultural stereotypes about Africans and their descendants that, despite incipient changes in racial attitudes among a sector of the Brazilian elite, and despite their own labors, made it difficult to bring the project to fruition. Perhaps, too, the enthusiasm of the visible and well-connected white men who had initially backed the monument spent itself in self-congratulatory prose about Brazil's racial tolerance well before they managed to cast the homage to the Mãe Preta in bronze. Yet this prose too became a durable legacy, one that black thinkers would take up in the following decade.

THE WRITINGS GENERATED by campaigns to create a monument and then a holiday for the Mãe Preta among a group of black and white Brazilians in the second half of the 1920s reflected shifting discussions of Brazil's multiracial society and the parameters of citizenship within it. By presenting Brazil as a place where black and white men were made brothers by their shared relationship with a symbolic black mother, a group of black and white intellectuals pushed forward a nascent view of a racially inclusive Brazil that challenged earlier visions of a white or whitened Brazil. Among many white champions of the Mãe Preta, however, the discourse of racial fraternity was rooted in nostalgia for the slaveholding past, emphasizing white generosity and reinscribing older hierarchies of race, class, and gender onto a shifting social landscape. Black thinkers and activists in both Rio and São Paulo, for their part, worked to reformulate their white colleagues’ interpretations of the Mãe Preta, using the symbol instead to argue for their belonging as Brazilians—whether as members of a distinct black race or as members of a mestiço race forged in part through the unique contributions of Africans. Their concern with striking a balance between demanding inclusion and asserting racial or ethnic difference would continue to resonate in the writings and speeches of black activists for the rest of the century.

Black thinkers’ writings about the Mãe Preta between 1926 and 1929 suggest very complex associations between racial identities and racial politics. Since the 1970s, as we have seen, many scholars and activists have tended to celebrate a biracial view of race as real and liberating while dismissing a mestiço view of race as evidence of an anemic or compromised racial consciousness. Opponents of this view have retorted that binary racial identifications were illegitimate importations from the United States, and that only a view that acknowledged Brazil's extensive experience of race mixture could be authentically national. The campaigns to honor the Mãe Preta in the late 1920s black press show that both views of race—a biracial one and a mestiço one—emerged relatively early in the century as proposed paths to blacks’ symbolic inclusion in the nation. Both views were equally “Brazilian,” in that both emerged from local and national dynamics and concerns, and neither perspective was more intrinsically or immediately liberating than the other. In articulating both of these views, black thinkers and writers in the late 1920s sought to engage with the shifting grounds of nationalism—nativist and modernist—among potential white allies. In both cases, they also turned the mainstream ideas of fraternity, nostalgia, nativism, and mestiçagem to their own purposes—especially toward explicit discussions of the limits of Brazilian antiracism.

During the 1920s these different strands never resolved themselves into clear factions but rather coexisted peacefully in a many-voiced campaign to celebrate the Mãe Preta. In the early 1930s, however, the two men most closely associated with each of these two visions—the conservative nationalist and nativist Arlindo Veiga dos Santos and the left-leaning internationalist and pan-Africanist José Correia Leite—would clash over the direction of black politics in Brazil. The view of the Mãe Preta as the symbol of a solidly Brazilian black identity that excluded immigrants, the majority view in the black press of the 1920s, would become enshrined in formal black politics in the early 1930s—specifically, in the Frente Negra Brasileira (Brazilian Black Front), led by (among others) Arlindo Veiga dos Santos. A version of the minority perspective celebrating racial and cultural fusion and stressing Brazil's African origins, however, ultimately became more visible in Brazilian public life. With Getúlio Vargas's rise to power in 1930, this second perspective, in an iteration closer to the arguments that white proponents of the Mãe Preta monument had put forth in Rio de Janeiro in 1926 than to the interpretations of black writers, became the centerpiece of official images of national identity. Ideologies of mestiçagem in the 1930s and 1940s became increasingly associated with the city of Rio itself—a city with significant white, preto, and pardo populations and a vibrant, hybrid Afro-Brazilian culture. In this context, intellectuals and activists of color outside of Rio would face the challenge of enunciating their own, regionally specific views of black or African identity within and against a spreading national ideology of mestiçagem.