Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia

1 Finding a Cure for Bahia

chapter 1 FindingaCureforBahia Bahia’s public health reformers never convinced Catholic authorities to take action against the malicious germs lurking in their sanctuaries, but goals of disinfected and hygienic churches remained symbolic of their modernizing, reformist vision for society as a whole. With the final abolition of slavery in 1888 and the advent of a new federal republic the following year, Bahian society entered a particularly anxious era that fostered ambitious views of modernization and reform. Doctors had long been authority figures in Salvador, the site of one of only two medical schools in Brazil. With the turn of the century, however, they insisted increasingly on the need for radical social change and entered politics as energetic, reformist governors and advisers.1 In 1889, the first year of the republic, medical doctors and public health reformers in Bahia swept into political power with hopes of curing Bahia of its backwardness. Many would have agreed with the vision of Bahia as a retrograde state in need of change. Salvador’s Afro-Brazilian majority might have pointed to continued police persecution of their religions, to a depressed economy that In our churches kisses murmur promiscuously in all corners, on the images, on the altars. . . . And from the religious kiss, innumerous afflictions are transmitted. In the saliva that drops from the lips that kiss the feet of an icon there are thousands of malicious seeds, microscopic germs, that remain in the shadow of the niches, waiting for other lips to carry them away. —othon chateau, “O beijo nas imagens,” Gazeta Médica da Bahia, 1906 14 finding a cure for bahia kept most of the city in overwhelming poverty, and to the exclusion of blacks from political power despite the formal end of slavery. The city’s traditional white oligarchy, in contrast, might have bemoaned the failure of Bahia’s police to enforce the standards of “civilization,” the economic collapse that made them marginal in the national sphere, and the new fluidity of a society without any formal legal divisions to protect their status. More significant, Bahia’s white elite saw Bahia’s backwardness as intimately tied to its racial makeup. Indeed, as the twentieth century began, blacks were commonly viewed across Brazil as racially inferior. It was this assumed connection of whiteness and progress that convinced São Paulo’s elite to seek out “modern” European immigrants to replace “traditional” black workers in the 1880s.2 Bahia, in contrast, lacked the economic dynamism to attract immigrants in any significant numbers, but the idea still held appeal. Although isolated Brazilian intellectuals periodically protested that the races were equal, they confronted an ever-growing body of Western research which asserted—with all of the authority that such “science” could muster—that whites ranked above blacks and that Brazilians of mixed heritage, mestiços, were a horribly unstable and degenerative category. Brazilians struggled to reshape such racial orthodoxies to their own realities, and, as the century progressed, acted creatively on a variety of fronts to form their own theories of race.3 But at the turn of the century few of Bahia’s elite doubted that the state’s African heritage was a serious obstacle to their vision of progress. Deeply skeptical about the capacity of Afro-Brazilians to participate as full members of society, they instead placed their faith for the future in exclusive social policies. In contrast, Bahia’s medical reformers of this era demonstrated faith in Bahia’s population and mistrust of its reigning social order. They refused, therefore, to view Bahia’s backwardness as an inevitable result of its blackness . This position, while radical at the time, carried significant weight: the medical profession was the foremost authority on matters of race in Brazil until the rise of the social sciences in the 1930s. The most egalitarian views came from the field of public health, yet, remarkably, even Bahia’s emerging field of forensic medicine—indelibly marked by racial determinism—also stressedthetransformativeroleofsocialreform.ThuswhiletheBahianelite sought progress despite Bahia’s racial makeup or through quixotic European immigration programs, medical reformers insisted that the existing population be taken seriously as a basis for Bahia’s future. Bahia’s problems were not racial, they believed, but social; they diagnosed a broad swath of problems that could be remedied with energetic reform. Passionately, they finding a cure for bahia 15 denounced the city’s deficient schools, insufficient public sanitation...