A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro (review)

Brodwyn Fischer's superb monograph analyzes the citizenship rights poor cariocas (natives of the city of Rio de Janeiro), migrants, and immigrants exercised in the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, she fills some significant voids in mid-twentieth century Brazilian and Latin American historiography and makes important connections to the scholarship on similar themes for both earlier and later periods. Fischer focuses her analysis on the unorganized working class families and individuals who remain understudied in a historiography that has lavished most of its attention on class-conscious labor unions and other political activist groups among the poor (e.g., Afro-spiritist religions). Her monograph combines qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine four major aspects of urban life in twentieth-century Rio: urban planning and regulation; labor and social welfare law; criminal justice; and property disputes. The breadth and depth of Fischer's research in each of these areas is impressive, and each makes original contributions to ongoing debates in a period of Brazilian urban history that has undergone prodigious development in the last two decades. This monograph's breadth makes the job of adequately summarizing and evaluating it in a brief review unfeasible. Here I limit my comments to a few prominent themes and arguments.

One of Fischer's central arguments is that "only their [the unorganized poor] struggle for property rights ever reached the status of a broad-based social movement" (p. 6). For Fischer, the unorganized poor most frequently made common cause over the defense of the family's home, which has historically been strongly linked to ideas of family honor. This was a logic that carioca elites themselves espoused with conviction, and thus it made a particularly useful rhetorical wedge to combat the exploitation of poor citizens. The defense of the home and by extension the poor family's honor had permeated the rhetoric of previous broad-based social movements against a variety of institutions and practices, including slavery, military impressment and conscription, civil marriage laws, obligatory vaccination, and slum eradication. The difference for the period that Fischer studies was the extension of legal protections to poor cariocas that opened new fronts in the struggle for citizenship rights.

In addition, the expansion of the franchise made it necessary for politicians to be more responsive to the needs of poor constituents and to politicize disputes over the poor's urban property rights. Fischer's data demonstrate the consistent preferential treatment that poor cariocas with formal housing rights received from the police and the courts. This likely reinforced the desires of those living in informal dwellings to acquire legal title because it meant more than just property rights. Indeed, one element of Fischer's regression analysis that is likely to stir debate is the relatively weak correlation she finds between a defendant's color and the likelihood he or she would be imprisoned, have charges brought against them dismissed, or receive an innocent verdict. She finds that other characteristics more consistently determined favorable treatment by authorities: literacy, professional employment, the possession of identification documents, and residence in formal, private housing.

Another issue that emerges again and again in the text is how so many of the carioca poor credit President Getúlio Dorneles Vargas (1930–1945; 1951–1954) with giving them access to legal protections that helped them to mobilize and to defend their urban property rights. At some points, it seems to be a ringing endorsement of Vargas's legacy that is at odds with darker interpretations of Brazil's most influential twentieth century politician. Even so, Fischer is careful to point out that the reforms that Vargas brought about were piecemeal at best. Poor citizens themselves had to organize, form alliances, and fight for these rights. While poor cariocas lost many of these battles, they scored a series of important victories when poor neighborhoods began to cooperate...