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107 5 The Strange Marriage of Love and Interest Economic Change and Emotional Intimacy in Northeast Brazil, Private and Public L. A. Rebhun “If the mayor had love, my son would walk!” The woman spoke with deep indignation in response to my question: Que significa “amor”? (What does “love” mean?). I had heard many different answers to my question during fieldwork in Northeast Brazil. Some people answered with concerns about the emotional ties that bind families together, especially those between mothers and children, citing a familiar aphorism: “Amor só de mãe” [Mother love only]. Others answered with discussions of romance, and the major changes in courtship that had swept the region in the past 50 years. And a third group, like the woman quoted above, gave me unexpected answers. “What do you mean?” I asked. Walking up to her adolescent son, seated at a nearby table making baseball caps on a sewing machine, she pulled out his crutches from behind the sewing table. “In your country, do they have polio?” she asked, and then answered herself: “No, because there the mayors have love for the little children and give them vaccines!” In 1990 the country was in the midst of an ultimately successful polio vaccination campaign, but her son had been crippled long before, and as she later detailed, she had fought long and hard for the medical care promised all citizens in the national health plan but too often not delivered to the poor. The sewing machine itself gave eloquent testimony to her maternal devotion : her son could work it with hand controls instead of the usual foot pedal. She detailed a long battle with city officials to find someone willing to consider ways for a boy with paralyzed legs to make a living, someone who had the imagination and skills to create the hand-controlled machine. “I could not rest,” she told me, “until I knew he would be able to take care of himself once I am gone.” But, she repeated, “if the mayor had love,” she would not have had to undertake this battle; he would have been vaccinated, or he would have received better medical care, physical therapy, and occupational support and training without her having to work so hard for it. On the surface, it would seem that this woman’s phrasing of her political complaints within the idiom of love has little to do with the shifts in couple formation accompanying urbanization and the increased integration of this backwater area into 108 Part II: Love, Sex, and the Social Organization of Intimacy the national economy. However, I think it reflects the same changes in the morality of human connections as changes in romance and family form. The woman’s criticisms point directly at the issues of who owes what to whom, the moral-emotional ties that bind together communities. The shift from semi-arranged cousin marriage to romantic courtship that I was documenting speaks to the same issues of obligation , consideration, love, and loyalty as the woman’s criticisms of government neglect . In the pages that follow, I trace the lines of this argument, beginning with a description of my fieldwork and field site, followed by a consideration of theories on emotion and on romance, and concluding with a discussion of the “politics of affection ” (Fernandez 2000) that shape both public and private life in Northeast Brazil. Social Change in a Rural City From December 1988 through December 1990, I lived in Caruaru (population 300,000), a city in the interior of Brazil’s Northeast. Caruaru, second largest city in Pernambuco state, located two hours by bus inland from state capital, Recife, boasts the largest regional agricultural market, where tourists shop for ceramic figurines and block prints depicting rural life, and locals stock up on food, clay dishes, and clothing, among other necessities. Much of the agricultural produce of the interior first goes to market in Caruaru, retailed to locals while truckers pick up their loads wholesale to bring to Recife and beyond. Although the tourist art garners more national and international attention, the clothing industry constitutes a larger sector of the economy, especially the production of blue jeans, baseball hats, and plastic sandals, mostly by pieceworkers at home or in small factories. Many inhabitants of Caruaru migrated there from rural homesteads to the east of the city in the agricultural Agreste region, or from the Sertão, the famously arid cowboy country to the west. Despite its relatively large population, Caruaru...

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