Robert M. Levine

Some Views on Race and Immigration During the Old Republic

BY T H E 1920s, the Brazilian population included a rich spectrum of racial and national groups dominated by an elite profoundly European in origin and outlook. At the same time, it was marked by extensive intermixture among the lower classes and public lip-service to racial tolerance, a condition attributed by Gilberto Freyre and others to Brazils heritage, its physical environment, and its paternalistic division of labor. Most Brazilians believed that economic achievement and ability, not color, determined class standing, subscribing to the hypothesis of Brazil as a racial democracy unique among the nations.

Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888: Bergad, Laird W.: New York: Cambridge University Press, 298 pp., Publication Date: September 1999

her study break away from some dominant periodizations, but it also distances itself from social histories centered on peasants, slaves, workers, and other popular groups. Wealthy people, the select members of households with gross assets worth 20,000 pesos or more, are its subject matter. Chowning argues that these individuals too were “voiceless” and that, ironically, their history still remains mostly unwritten. The gist of Chowning’s study is a discussion of long-term changes in the conditions of well-to-do social groups in Michoacan, a mountainous, economically diverse, and politically prominent region in west-central Mexico. Through a painstaking examination of wills, estate inventories, hacienda accounts, business contracts, and parish and judicial records, Chowning pieces together the lives of over a thousand individuals linked to the area. She focuses especially on the experiences and fates of five generations of the Huarte-Alz6a-G6mez family, which required an endeavor close to the one exemplified by C. Hams’s magnificent A Mexican Family Empire: The Latifundio of the Sanchez Navarro. However, Chowning’s task is relatively simpler; rather than devote entire chapters to the family’s affairs, she touches on the topic in short sections and skillful prologues accompanying each chapter. Yet Chowning’s chore is complicated by her consistent effort to address not just economic and social aspects, as Harris did, but also intellectual and political processes, which she does in part through a careful consideration of proceedings from the state congress and local newspapers. Chowning’s main contribution is to redefine Michoacan’s century-long economic course. She argues that the region’s economy was not marked by unwavering decline, but instead that a cyclical trend (collapse in 18 IOs-I820s, economic recovery by midcentury, decline in the 1860~-1870s, boom during the Porfuiato) characterized the region and probably others in Mexico as well. Her work considers independence and in particular, the Reform to be central defining moments in the country’s and the region’s history. In considering the Reform, Chowning argues that in the short term this liberal transformation had disruptive consequences and caused considerable material losses to the wealthy, but in the long term it may have prompted them to forge convenient alliances with influential middle-class liberal politicians. Although the elite’s approach to liberal groups was essentially ambiguous, these types of alliances may partially account for the ability of wealthy Michoacan landowners to hold onto their property. In discussing the region’s politics, Chowning concludes that during the first three decades or so after independence, Michoacan’s elite did not engage in the bitter ideological battles and power grabbing that occurred elsewhere in Mexico. Politics became more partisan and confrontational in the mid-l840s, although during the Reform itself wealthy michoacanos stayed at the margins. Elites slowly came to embrace liberalism, thanks to its emphasis on material improvements over anticlericalism. Important segments of the region’s elites avoided politics during the Porfirian economic boom, but when the world crisis of 1907 made the fragility of that boom apparent, wealthy and well-connected men from Michoacan began to embrace revolutionary politics. Chowning’s work will reawaken interest among scholars in the re-evaluation not only of Mexico’s liberal Reform, but also of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal transformations experienced by other Latin American regions. It may also open new discussions about the historical significance and role of the wealthy, a group that remains relatively marginal in a good part of the dominant historiography on Latin America. The book is intended primarily for professional historians and graduate students; it will be a required item on the shelves of any research or college library.

Faces of Brazilian Slavery: The Cartes de Visite of Christiano Júnior

Photographs probably expanded more horizons and redefined more ways of knowing the world than any other product of nineteenth-century technology. The first daguerreotypes appeared in the Western Hemisphere merely months after the triumphal announcement of Daguerres process by the French Academy in 1839. In the next three decades, millions of photographic images were produced. Three distinct categories predominated: studio portraits, scenic views for collectors and, after the early 1850s, photographic images transferred to woodcuts and, later, lithographs for publication as line sketches in illustrated newspapers and magazines. Photographic “science” complemented neatly the elites striving for ways to affirm the regions material progress. Photographers played a vital role in presenting to the world a vision rooted in the aspirations of the dominant members of society.