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The decline of export competitiveness brutally pruned the foliage of the Nordeste's class structure. If successive southern-dominated governments assuaged the great northern oligarchs with regular political kickbacks (often in the guise of "drought aid"), more modest fazendeiros were left to the mercy of market forces. From about 1875, control over production began to pass into the hands of the owners (often foreign or foreign-born) of modernized usinas. "The capability of the usinas to handle a greater load of cane called for further monopolistic consolidation of land resources; in the wake of this process, small and middle landowners became uprooted." The fate of ex-slaves, of course, was unimaginably more difficult in an economic system that no longer required the same huge levies of labor-power. As the Nordeste's economy slumped into a coma, supernumerary labor was either pushed into the sertão's "black, barren fields of hunger" (Tavora) or induced to gamble with disease and exploitation in the rubber forests of Amazonas.
What did NOT happen in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was what neoclassical theory would have predicted as an automatic reflex: the emigration of northern labor to southeastern growth poles. Instead, beginning in the late Empire, national and local governments began to heavily subsidize mass immigration from Italy, Germany, and Portugal. Even the elites of the Nordeste fervidly embraced "Europeanization." An extraordinary example was Bahia during the terrible "Two Eights" drought-famine of 1888-89. While state authorities were roadblocking retirantes' route to the cities and forcibly interning them by the thousands in camps, they continued efforts to lure European immigrants with expensive subsidies (few were tempted).
Southeastern coffee planters, for their part, wanted only "white" overseas laborers after Emancipation, and soon made this federal policy in the new Republic (The racial preference was later amended to include Japanese as well as southern Europeans.) "Why were the coffee planters in the southeast more willing to finance immigration from Europe than from the northeast?" Leff believes that "part of the answer may have been the prevalent racial attitudes on the part of the coffee planters, which led them to prefer European to mulatto workers," while Deutsch points to "cultural biases on the part of Southeastern planters against native Brazilian workers."
Both underestimate racism as public policy. Gerald Greenfield has shown how Liberal discourse about drought and development in the late 1870s revolved around urban perceptions of the "dark, primitive world of the hinterland" and "retirante inferiority and aversion to labor." "To the extent that Brazil during the latter portion of the nineteenth century embraced the tenets of positivism, enlightenment notions of progress, and the concoction of scientific racism of thinkers like Buckle and Spencer, the backlanders became not merely curiosities from a bygone age, but detriments to the nation's progress. Evolving institutions of national culture, largely based in Rio and revealing marked influence from Western Europe and the United States, stressed the nation's greatest potential while lamenting the inadequacies, intellectual as well as moral, of much of the nation's population." The Brazilian Republic, moreover, was probably the first government anywhere explicitly committed to large-scale "positive Eugenics." Leading fin de siecle savants like the Bahian scientist Nina Rodrigues corroborated fears that "race mixing was responsible for all social deviance such as banditry, religious heresy, and the like." Whereas mass European immigration into the United States in the 1890s was conceived as simply providing human fuel for the economy, Brazil's elites also wanted to use immigration to radically transform the nation's racial physiognomy. They were obsessed with "de-Africanizing" and "whitening" Brazil.
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