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  • A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro
  • Mary Ann Mahony
A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro. By Brodwyn Fischer (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2008) 488 pp. $65.00

Getúlio Vargas, a Brazilian populist leader, is widely remembered for acclaiming “A Lei! Ora a lei!” (“The Law! What about the law?”), and, in this prize-winning book, Fischer seeks to answer him. Her study explores the ways in which the majority of the residents of Rio de Janeiro came to suffer a “poverty of rights” in the twentieth century, despite living in a nation in which republican constitutions ostensibly guaranteed their citizenship. To do so, she draws on the methodologies of legal history, public policy, and urban studies, as well as social science history, to argue that the expansion of the Brazilian state led to fewer, rather than more, formal rights for the majority of Cariocas, as residents of the city are known.

Part I of the book traces the growth of Rio de Janeiro, exploring government efforts to develop urban plans and building codes that would both assure a beautiful metropolis and provide for public health and safety. Fischer shows that such public policies never took the rights of subaltern Cariocas to live and work within the city seriously, though the limits of state power and the city’s need for labor meant that neither workers nor their shacks could be completely removed from the urban landscape.

Part II looks at Vargas’ efforts to guarantee workers’ rights and regulate the labor market, arguing that the new labor legislation marginalized the majority of Carioca workers, who did not have and could not acquire the documents necessary to prove their existence and their legal employment. Workers without documents did not enjoy the protection of the law; they became a permanent, informal social group subject to exploitation of all sorts.

Part III, which discusses crime and criminals, makes clear that Cariocas without documents suffered the highest rates of incarceration of all defendants who came before Rio’s criminal court judges. Part IV looks at slum dwellers’ successful efforts to defend their communities from land grabbers, showing how slums became a permanent feature of twentieth-century Rio. At this point, Fischer connects her research to political and sociological studies of citizenship and urban slums during the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Fischer’s study draws on many types of sources. She has delved deeply into the Carioca archives to locate urban plans, building codes, [End Page 330] city-council minutes, correspondence with politicians, national laws and local regulations, court cases, newspaper accounts, samba lyrics, and oral histories. She uses both quantitative and qualitative analyses to draw her conclusions, although the most gripping portion of the book—that involving Carioca slum dwellers’ struggles to protect their homes and communities—is based on qualitative arguments alone.

Brazilians often remark that “the law is for people who have no friends,” a position that Fischer’s book endorses. The Carioca poor who suffered from “rights poverty” relied upon sympathetic politicians, first ladies, newspaper editors, judges, and other individuals in positions of power for protection. These patrons manipulated the law on their clients’ behalf in exchange for votes and other favors. Thus, rights poverty meant that the Carioca poor could never escape the web of patron–client relations.

Mary Ann Mahony
Central Connecticut State University
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