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Artífices da cidadania: Mutualismo, educação e trabalho no Recife oitocentista

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3088860

1527-1900

Hendrik Kraay,

Urban and sociocultural dynamics

In this carefully researched book, Marcelo Mac Cord traces the history of Recife's Sociedade das Artes Mecânicas (Society of Mechanical Arts), later renamed the Sociedade dos Artistas Mecânicos e Liberais (Society of Mechanical and Liberal Artists), from its founding in 1841 to 1880, when the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios (Arts and Trades School) was formally opened. By then, the artisan society had received the privilege of adding “imperial” to its name, and Pernambuco's provincial government had placed it in charge of managing the school.The society's founders were carpenters, stonemasons, coopers, and cabinetmakers who had close connections to the lay brotherhood of São José do Ribamar, which, until the liberal reforms of the 1824 constitution, had enjoyed the privileges of a guild (corporação de ofício). Led by master carpenter José Vicente Ferreira Barros, these members of Recife's building trades founded the society “to recreate lost privileges and to affirm their skills and virtue” (p. 30). In part a mutual aid society, the society also organized night classes for its members, and in these respects it can be seen as typical of the early labor movement. But the society maintained close ties to the old brotherhood: it met and held its classes in the church, and there was much overlap between the society's executive and the brotherhood's board of directors. The society embraced the midcentury Brazilian rhetoric of progress but challenged the fetish that favored foreign tradesmen and technicians. Through their advocacy of primary and technical education, these men of color (mostly described as pardos and pretos) challenged a provincial government that had failed to develop its education system and claimed respect for themselves as upstanding workers and citizens.In painstaking detail, Mac Cord traces the society's internal politics, its difficult relationship with the brotherhood (which led to the society's expulsion from the church in 1866), its creative adaptation to the 1860 imperial legislation that regulated societies (and forbade them from having multiple purposes, a problem for a mutual aid society that also ran night classes), and its leaders' careful cultivation of connections to the Pernambucan political elite — what Mac Cord describes as “effective clientelistic strategies” (p. 227). Conservative leaders like José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo and Manoel do Nascimento Portela received honorary memberships, but in the 1840s, the society kept its distance from the radical liberal Praieiros who actively courted people like the society's members. Mac Cord argues that by espousing elite values of order, skill, and discipline, society leaders like Ferreira Barros effectively manipulated the provincial elite (p. 160). These efforts were crowned with success in the 1870s, when the close ties with the Conservative Party (in power from 1868 to 1878) won the society a privileged position in the new liceu's management. On an individual level, too, there were notable successes, and Mac Cord describes how the society and the liceu served as a “trampoline” to launch men like Ferreira Barros's sons into the lower-level civil service and prominent roles in the organization of provincial exhibitions (p. 374).Heavily influenced by the work of E. J. Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson on the English working class, Artifíces da cidadania is a careful reconstruction of a fascinating urban group. It is an important contribution to the emerging literature on associational life in nineteenth-century Brazil. The artisans' struggles for professional and social recognition reveal much about imperial Brazil, including the importance of state patronage in urban society and the silence about race in public rhetoric. While Mac Cord carefully documents the qualidade (quality) of these men whenever it was recorded, there is no evidence that they talked publicly about race, an unsurprising silencing on the part of men who sought to distinguish themselves from slaves and to conquer respect and recognition. Although part of the title, the theme of citizenship is developed more implicitly than explicitly. The painstaking research that went into this book is commendable, and sources include brotherhood and society registers, provincial legislative debates about the society, scattered newspaper reports, and even the documentation of at least some of these men's work on government contracts (few private construction contracts have survived). Like many good dissertations published quickly after the defense, however, it would have benefited from editing to make it more concise, as well as from a broadening of the perspective to reflect more fully on the significance of these Pernambucan artisans in Brazilian history. Stopping the book in 1880 leaves one wondering how these men steered their society through the 1881 electoral changes that disenfranchised most voters (no doubt including many society members) and the abolition campaign that arguably constituted Brazil's first mass political movement.