Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of Jabaquara and the Problem of Citizenship in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2005-003

1527-1900

Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado,

History of Colonial Brazil

This article reexamines the historical trajectory of escaped slaves who, encouraged by the abolitionist propaganda of the 1880s, established themselves in the runaway slave communities of Jabaquara and Pai Felipe, remaining in these quilombos through the decade that followed the abolition of slavery in Brazil on May 13, 1888. Both quilombos were located within the city limits of Santos, which served as the major port for coffee exports from São Paulo Province — especially after 1867, when completion of the province’s first railroad facilitated transport between the western coffee districts and the Atlantic. These quilombos drew support from, and even were organized by, free persons — mostly white intellectuals, lawyers, and coffee brokers who were active in Santos’s political and commercial life. However, the rapid growth of the black population (some authors claim, no doubt exaggerating, that Jabaquara received as many as ten thousand escaped slaves!) made it difficult for the white elite to maintain control over this group of uprooted people with a newly discovered political consciousness, a process that had a significant impact on the urbanization of Santos.1Seeking to survive at any cost, the quilombolas joined the port city’s informal sector, performing menial services in order to earn a precarious living. But the worst was yet to come in the period that followed the extinction of slavery. With abolition no longer a cause célèbre among Santos elite, ex-slaves became a mass of cheap labor that was used to help combat the labor movement that emerged among European-born dockworkers. The former quilombolas no longer were rebels in search of freedom but instead krumiros: strikebreakers recruited and organized by their old leaders to replace the militant dockworkers who organized the first strikes in Santos.2 While the quilombo remained intact almost to the end of the century, it was quietly dismantled in 1898 following legal proceedings that restored the land to its original owner. From that point on, the quilombo and its rebel population began to be effaced from local memory.During the 1880s and 1890s, Jabaquara’s history was tied both to the radicalization of São Paulo’s abolitionist movement as well as to the urbanization and modernization of Santos. The quilombo’s founding and early development coincided with increasing intensity of slave flight and rebellion on the plantations in the west and northwest of São Paulo Province, along with the expansion of abolitionism as a political force. Although it was organized and managed by the abolitionist movement, runaways and other members of the popular sectors were important in its day-to-day activities. This poses difficult questions for historians, as the significance of the quilombo seems to lie somewhere between the agency of slaves who fled to Santos and who actively resisted attempts to curtail their freedom, and the manipulation of local bosses who used the quilombo as a source of political muscle and cheap labor. Was Jabaquara really a quilombo, or was it just a makeshift camp of runaways, controlled from a distance by abolitionists? Were the runaway slaves in Jabaquara really maroons, or were they just a reserve labor pool to be used as political pawns by the emerging republican elite of a rapidly urbanizing port city? Can we speak of partial autonomy or of the existence of a “quilombo breach” within such a hybrid social formation?I begin my study with a critique of the traditional literature on abolition in São Paulo and Santos, written in a nostalgic vein during the first decades of the twentieth century either by militant abolitionists or by contemporary sympathizers. I underscore the conservative perspective embodied in this historical literature. My analysis contrasts the patronizing and authoritarian character of this political tendency, which I call “humanitarian-paternalistic,” with the political agency of slaves and the urban poor in constituting and maintaining the quilombo. Thus, the article seeks to address some controversial aspects of the political history of abolition, immigration, the rise of republicanism in the southeast, and the urbanization process in the region.One of the most important issues has to do with the political destiny of African-Brazilians. A major political priority in the 1880s, Brazil’s ex-slaves were gradually marginalized from the political sphere and barred from the more dynamic segments of the wage-labor market in the years immediately following abolition. This process proved particularly dramatic in Santos, where the waterfront labor force felt the effects of a full-scale immigration policy. Alliances forged within the humanitarian-paternalistic abolitionist cause began to lose their political viability, as the Paulista abolitionist elite favored abolition without other socioracial transformations and promoted European immigration. As a result, ex-slaves were cast aside and restricted to the fringes of the political scene and of the wage labor force. Confined to these spaces, ex-slaves were left with little more than nominal and abstract citizen’s rights, which began to be institutionalized following abolition and the beginning of the Republic.I seek to document how fugitive slaves and quilombo residents — with a history of organized resistance in cooperation with the elite of Paulista society — lost their bargaining power and were forced to exit the main political stage. They were thereby blocked from occupying the political, social, and work spaces that corresponded with the republican ideal of citizenship that began to emerge following 1889. In their trajectory from rebels to strikebreakers, the former runaways of Jabaquara got a bitter taste of the difficulties in pursuing their newfound rights as citizens at the same time that they faced the loss of political and social visibility and a growing discourse that promoted racial “whitening” through European immigration and through the gradual elimination of blacks and Indians. The postemancipation period in southeastern Brazil championed a new political vocabulary and new social relations guided by the ideological tenets of conservative modernization. However, these new elements were little more than a thin veneer in areas that remained governed by paternalistic and dependent relations that re-created many aspects of the universe of slavery and that continued to constrain the ex-slaves.The issue was touched on in a recent newspaper article in the Tribuna de Santos commenting on the urban problems of the Bairro do Jabaquara and Morro do Jabaquara neighborhoods today: “Two of the most important neighborhoods in the history of Santos have a forgotten past. Facing problems with security [drug trafficking], the lack of public schools, heavy vehicle traffic, and complaints about the road system, the residents of Jabaquara and Jabaquara Hill cannot find anything that could remind them of the role that their area once played in city politics, especially during the abolitionist campaign, when this area became known as the ‘the Promised Land of the slaves.’”3 The várzea (flatlands) that once housed the quilombo is now a typically middle-class neigh-borhood near downtown, surrounded by the much poorer community occupying the Morro do Jabaquara hillside. Compressed between the Santa Casa da Misericórdia hospital, Ulrico Mursa Stadium, and the main roadways leading to the port, Jabaquara and Morro do Jabaquara were spared from the “verticalization” process that covered much of Santos with tall concrete structures, due to the lack of sufficient space for apartment buildings. Its inhabitants feel privileged to live in houses, and today’s residents are more concerned with preserving the middle-class neighborhood and securing resources to combat erosion than with remembering the winding paths and gardens of the past, when it was the “Promised Land” for escaped slaves. The complete absence of any trace of the quilombo or its inhabitants in the current landscape seems to reinforce this collective loss of memory.Many years have passed since the little huts made of wood, straw, mud, and zinc sheets were torn down. Receiving material support from Santos merchants, these houses had been put up hastily, beginning around 1882, to accommodate the increasing numbers of runaways who had fled from the coffee plantations.4 The lands known as Jabaquara, located roughly between São Bento Hill, Saboó, Monte Serrate, Vila Matias, and the sea, began to be occupied as far back as the seventeenth century, but they were among the last to be struck by the urbanizing fever resulting from the modernization of the port facilities and the sanitation campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps because Jabaquara took longer to fall under the sway of the real-estate speculation that accompanied the first phase of construction of new port facilities by the Companhia das Docas between 1897 and 1909, and because so little is known about the early occupation of these lands, both traditional local historians and modern scholars have continued to describe Jabaquara as a remote location covered by virgin forest, which suggests that the fugitive slaves who lived there developed a quilombo community in the most traditional manner that this term evokes.The romantic historiography that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, which sought to promote the humanitarian and liberal character of the militant abolitionist movement, painted a somewhat idyllic picture of the landscape of Jabaquara. However, an examination of legal proceedings over the boundaries of Jabaquara lands reveals a radically different setting. Although urban historians have used court records of land disputes to describe the conflicts that emerged as Santos expanded into the rural hillsides around it, it is still not sufficiently clear what kind of situation the escaped slaves encountered when they were resettled by abolitionists. This area, along with other zones peripheral to the rather limited urban center at the time (such as Vila Matias, which already in the 1880s was the subject of an intense property dispute), gave rise to several lawsuits that shed light on the situation runaways had to confront once they had settled in and around the port city.Although Jabaquara has often been described as an independent territory apart from the city, where a slave needed only to set foot in order to become free, local historians of the abolition campaign have always asserted that the quilombo resulted from the active efforts of Santos abolitionists who endeavored to shelter the increasing number of runaway slaves seeking freedom in this “Promised Land.” Unlike other quilombos in the area — such as Pai Felipe’s community, which had been established by runaway slaves themselves and which in the 1880s was precariously situated on lands in Vila Matias — Jabaquara supposedly had been founded by young abolitionists on an uncultivated plot of land belonging to Benjamin Fontana, in order to shelter runaway slaves who, since the late 1870s, had been taking the road to freedom via Cubatão, at the foot of the coastal escarpment.Jabaquara’s origins certainly reflected the young abolitionists’ wish to accommodate the growing tide of fugitives, including increasing numbers of women and children.5 Yet, this strategy was also intended, according to Fran-cisco Martins dos Santos, to keep the runaway slaves under strict control. To be sure, the Jabaquara refuge had been organized under the aegis of paternalism from the start, with the aim of maintaining social control over a population whose “natural instincts” made them dangerously predisposed to disregard the social norms of subordination and dependence, norms whose survival was at the very core of abolitionist concerns in São Paulo.6 Notwithstanding these conservative origins, it is important to remember that Jabaquara’s establishment in 1882 reflected the radicalization of the Paulista abolitionist movement following the demise of Luiz Gama and the subsequent rise of Antônio Bento as leader. Gama, a famous freedman and abolitionist, became noted as a maverick lawyer who defended slaves’ claims to freedom in São Paulo’s courts, basing his arguments on the purported illegality of slavery itself. Antônio Bento, although a conservative judge, spearheaded a more radical flavor of abolitionism and encouraged abolitionists to take more direct action in bringing slaves to freedom. These developments were followed by the organization of the radical abolitionist movement of the Caifazes, which decisively placed popular abolitionism at the forefront of the political scene.7 In this sense, the abolitionist movement proved far more complex than the one-sided version promoted by the militant abolitionists who triumphed as the political elite in the early republic.8A civilizing discourse became most firmly established within the upper echelons of the abolitionist movement, comprised of renowned politicians, planters, and journalists such as the republican Bernardino de Campos and his brother Américo de Campos, along with younger members of the elite who promoted their political, academic, and professional careers through their commitment to this humanitarian cause. From this perspective, as Francisco M. dos Santos has observed, abolition represented a necessary step in curtailing “the strong contribution of retrograde blood in the formation of the nation’s future generations.”9 However, this essentially conservative humanitarian-paternalistic orientation proved to be much less pronounced at the intermediate level of the movement, whose militants included, according to José Maria dos Santos, idealistic young republicans, incendiary orators, agitators, and poets such as Raul Pompéia, and at the decidedly popular base of the movement that brought together workers, artisans, coachmen, street peddlers, and others.10 Indeed, it was at the most popular level of the movement that one could identify a series of voices that set themselves apart from the dominant humanitarian-paternalistic chorus. Both in the Caifaz movement and in popular militancy on the streets, these abolitionists remained committed to action, experiencing the day-to-day problems raised by the constant arrival of runaway slaves, including the management of the Jabaquara refuge.Santos represented the final step of an abolitionist strategy that began with the patient efforts of Caifaz militants to convince plantation slaves to flee and to orient their escape toward the coast. The Caifazes established and maintained contacts and shelters along the way to provide safe routes and keep the fugitives beyond the reach of plantation owners, authorities, and slave catchers. Always led by someone from the movement, the escaped slaves traveled on cargo trains or by foot, counting on the collaboration of many along the way. In the last leg of the journey, the runaways descended the dangerous coastal escarpment of the Serra do Mar to Cubatão or Bertioga, and from there an easy stretch to the Santos refuge. Establishing safe escape routes to Santos seems to have been one of Antônio Bento’s chief goals. It was he who developed a systematic network of rest stops and shelters along the roads that connected southern Minas Gerais, eastern São Paulo, and the Paraíba Valley to Santos. Abolitionists relied on the collaboration of railroad workers, coachmen, mule drivers, rural smallholders, and even plantation owners and men and women of the urban elite from the city of São Paulo and some of the cities of the interior, who took in runaway slaves and hid them on their properties.11Yet Santos had attracted runaway slaves even before the Caifazes began to organize mass flight from the plantations, which began in 1882 and intensified only after 1885. Furthermore, Antônio Bento’s preoccupation with the systematic organization of a safer escape route actually responded to existing escape routes established by slaves themselves, who had begun to seek freedom in the port city on their own account already in the late 1870s, or perhaps earlier.12 One likely explanation is the growing fame of Santos as a liberal and abolitionist city. But the trend also reflects the characteristics of the coastal region, which had long been surrounded by quilombos, like the one in Cubatão.13Moreover, as a port city, Santos was accustomed to the constant traffic of people from very different regions and national origins, which ultimately diluted the rigid character of slave society that persisted in other parts of the province and opened breaches within which the escaped slaves could settle.14 Furthermore, while the city’s fame as a free haven began to attract a growing number of runaways, it should be noted that only some of them settled in Jabaquara, within the sphere of influence closest to the humanitarian abolitionists. The traditional historiography hailed Jabaquara as the largest and most elaborate quilombo of its day. When we analyze its structure, using clues from the numerous legal battles over these lands, we see something else entirely. Such an analysis also makes population estimates for Jabaquara, such as Francisco dos Santos’s figure of ten thousand slaves, seem quite exaggerated.15 This, however, does not contradict the fact that Santos served as a magnet for successive waves of escaped slaves. This becomes evident when one follows the entire process that moved slaves toward the coast, beginning with the flight of individuals on through the mass flights of the 1880s.A portrait of the abolitionist movement in Santos in the 1880s is incomplete if we only emphasize the participation of the political elite or of activists and sympathizers committed to a humanitarian-paternalistic perspective. Indeed, the philanthropic tea parties of women in the Santos elite, the commercial subscriptions to purchase manumission papers for slaves, and the concern for maintaining the groups of recently arrived slaves under strict control constitute important aspects of an active, though conservative, political movement. However, within the urban environment of Santos, these conservative figures, with their paternalistic ideas, thrived alongside a variety of popular activists who were much less committed to the issue of social control. Linked to the popular abolitionist movement in the city of São Paulo whose plebeian activists have been rendered anonymous or deprived of surnames in the historical record — as in the case of Chico Dourador or Antônio Paciência — the Santos movement took on a markedly popular character as well.16 The Portuguese immigrant Santos Garrafão, who along with his black companion owned a popular eatery in the city, as well as the mulatto sailor Eugênio Wansuit, were often mentioned as collaborators of Quintino de Lacerda as heads of the quilombo. Moreover, it is important to remember that the abolitionist movement provided the initial political education for future leaders of both the conservative Republic and the nascent organized labor movement.17 The ties between militant abolitionism and the socialist workers’ movement in Santos were not merely fortuitous. In analyzing the tradition of political struggle in the so-called Brazilian Barcelona, Maria Lúcia Gitahy found abolitionist militants involved in the first Socialist Center of Santos, founded in 1895, as well as in strikes that broke out on the waterfront, including the aforementioned sailor Wansuit, arrested in the strike against the Companhia das Docas in 1912.18The quilombo of Jabaquara is closely associated with Quintino de Lacerda, a freedman whose life trajectory, political positions, and role as leader of the runaways sheltered at Jabaquara mirror the contradictory and ambivalent character permeating São Paulo’s abolitionist movement. A former slave belonging to the Lacerda & Brothers company, whose owners were historical republicans, Quintino has been described in much of the bibliography on abolition as a “good black man,” since “his congeniality, personal dignity, and courage afforded him sufficient prestige to command the respect and labor of those hundreds of souls, who understandably were filled with hatred, painful ambitions, and desires of all sorts.”19 Quintino remained very close to his white sponsors and mentors, including Bernardino de Campos and Silva Jardim, and after the founding of the Republic, he demonstrated unwavering political allegiance to them. However, his strongest ties were to Benjamin Fontana: he became his tenant on Jabaquara lands, as well as his employee, his spokesman, and a front-man for his operations. Thus, Quintino constituted the main link between the political elite and the underemployed mass of freedmen, whose presence could pose a threat to public order in Santos.20 He fulfilled this role by containing and disciplining his subordinates in an exceptionally efficient manner, keeping them on the outskirts of the city, as far as possible from the central district, where they might have made the more sensitive city dwellers uncomfortable.In this process, Quintino developed two faces, the first displaying humility and subordination vis-à-vis whites, consistent with the role that the humanitarian elite assigned to ex-slaves in the emerging postemancipation society these leaders struggled to design. A second face, which he displayed to the runaways, stood in radical contrast to the first — a staunchly authoritarian character who unabashedly manipulated symbols of power borrowed from a cultural repertoire with African and salvationist overtones. Other leaders of this sort could be found, for example, in Campinas in 1882, where freedman Felipe Santiago organized a violent slave rebellion around his magical and religious powers, imposing a literally uncontested authority over his followers.21 Unlike Santiago, though, Quintino’s authority was not in opposition to the whites but, quite to the contrary, remained subordinate to them. Thus, the power that Quintino had over his people was constantly contaminated by messages of subservience, which surreptitiously suggested that the ex-slaves were to accept the subsidiary role that the paternalistic abolitionist project believed was fitting for blacks. It was by conforming to this role that Quintino de Lacerda worked his way up the social ladder and built an exceptional political career.As leader of Jabaquara, Quintino became a popular and widely respected figure in Santos during the 1880s. Until his death in 1898, he lived within Jabaquara, in a large house surrounded by a courtyard, where he kept a general store. The inventory of his estate confirms that the store must have provided important income for Major Quintino, as it was stocked with all kinds of goods. In her biographical sketch of Quintino, Ana Lúcia Duarte Lanna writes that this courtyard was where “the festivities of the old quilombo area were held. Quintino’s birthday celebrations were important moments of fraternization. The whole hillside population and many city inhabitants stopped by the front of his house to congratulate him and kiss his hands.”22 Furthermore, according to this author, the relationship between Quintino and his subordinates was marked by fear and admiration: those whom he protected — that is, the former runaway slaves precariously settled in Jabaquara in the postabolition years — treated him with the deference that only the very powerful commanded.Unlike most other popular abolitionist leaders, Quintino’s career was not eclipsed by the Golden Law abolishing slavery, as his role in regimenting the blacks of Jabaquara remained important under the Republican order that was established the year after abolition. Named inspector of the Jabaquara district, Quintino later received the title of major in recognition of his role in defending the city during the 1893 promonarchist Revolt of the Armada. His career reached its apex in 1895, when Quintino was elected member of the first Municipal Council of Santos in the Republican era, earning an exceedingly hostile reception from his white colleagues. Once again, his political allegiances, especially to then-president of São Paulo Bernardino de Campos, served him well, as he was sworn into office under the intervention of state forces. It should be noted that all the positions of authority he occupied served to consolidate his leadership over the former runaways in the years that followed abolition, the same years in which the development of port facilities and the rise of the all-powerful Companhia das Docas accompanied the emergence of an organized labor movement in Santos.23 It should also be recalled that Quintino had mobilized an army of quilombolas to defend the city in 1893, an action that was to be repeated every time Major Quintino was called upon by his mentors to provide political services.The trajectories followed by Quintino and Jabaquara contrast with those of Pai Felipe and the quilombo that he commanded. According to Francisco Martins dos Santos, Pai Felipe’s quilombo was much older than Jabaquara and was founded independently by slaves. These runaways initially took shelter in Cubatão and later, with the arrival of the abolitionists in the 1880s, moved to Vila Matias — at that time a rural neighborhood contiguous with Jabaquara — which was becoming a popular destination for the poorest people of Santos.24 Carlos Victorino’s nostalgic account of Santos during the last quarter of the nineteenth century reports that on Saturday nights the young abolitionists would pay visits to the quilombo to drink quentão (a hot beverage made from cane brandy and spices) and to watch the samba dances. Then “on Sundays, Pai Felipe would open his quilombo to the youths and men known as abolitionists, treating them with the utmost courtesy and telling them amazing things about the plantations, things that would make your hair stand on end!” Pai Felipe would entertain the visitors with stories, while “his people danced samba in the courtyard to the sound of drums, tambourines, and rattles, and to this rhythm the still-young mulatas and the robust creole men would swing their bodies, move their hips, and point their feet to make a slow circle until they found their partners, bumping into one another on purpose in a belly-to-belly umbigada dance.” Then “suddenly the drums would stop; the dancing also ceased and, with Pai Felipe’s permission, the quentão was distributed.”25Even though he maintained a cordial relationship with the whites, Pai Felipe led “his people” in an independent manner, avoiding all interference from the abolitionists, which explains why direct evidence regarding the internal functioning of his quilombo is virtually nonexistent. The few commentaries that do exist belong to a semantic universe in which all blacks, ex-slaves, and runaways remain captive to reified narrative structures whose objective is to portray any trace of Afro-Brazilian social and political organization in terms of a folklorized version of the “authoritarian-paternalistic” character of African leaders. This discursive strategy, which is so evident in the nostalgic literature cited above, has been adopted by many historians in subsequent generations, using these essentially ideological constructs as if they were documentary sources. Indeed, Victorino’s description of Pai Felipe, often repeated by later historians who rely on this single source in their accounts of the quilombo, clearly alludes to the authoritarian character of Pai Felipe, “an old black man, with razor-sharp intuition,” who commanded “his people prudently.”26 Such descriptions employ the same imagery already used to describe the leadership qualities of Quintino de Lacerda. Governing “his people” with an iron fist, Pai Felipe immediately strikes us as having the kind of traditional relationship grounded in the indisputable power of the chief, perhaps evocative of African royalty. In his history of samba in São Paulo, J. Muniz Jr. refers to Pai Felipe as the Rei Batuqueiro, a sort of “Drummer King.”27 Francisco Martins dos Santos asserts that Pai Felipe was an enslaved African king who, despite the proximity of the abolitionists, remained the chief of his own quilombo, beyond the reach of Quintino.28 According to local historians who wrote about abolition, royal power, authoritarianism, and the wisdom of elders were all qualities common to the slave leaders who were in command of “their people.” But while the romantic and traditionalist tone of these accounts may captivate the minds of dreamers with their utopian or folkloric images, such descriptions camouflage these authors’ judgments as to the slaves’ incapacity to organize themselves under the ideals of democracy and citizenship. The qualities emphasized here are very different from those found in the leadership that, just a few years later, began to develop in Santos itself and which produced one of the most militant labor movements in Brazil. This labor movement was grounded in the port workers’ potential for political and social consciousness. It remains difficult, however, to distinguish the actual experience of the quilombolas from what the humanitarian-paternalistic abolitionists wanted to see and wanted us to believe.Occupying lands in Vila Matias that were the object of intense property disputes in the 1880s (which culminated in the assassination of Matias da Costa), Pai Felipe’s quilombo disappeared from Santos’s collective memory without a trace, except in the name of its leader, who is remembered as the founding father of samba in Santos. Jabaquara’s fate was not strikingly different, as the quilombo had been formed on lands divided among several owners over the course of centuries and which during the decades surrounding abolition became involved in intense disputes due to rapid urban expansion and development.