Fields of Post-Abolition: Labor and ‘black’ experience among coffee workers in rio de Janeiro (1931-1964) 1 Campos do pós-abolição: identidades laborais e experiência “negra” entre os trabalhadores do café no Rio de Janeiro (1931-1964) André Cicalo* Resumo Abstract este artigo explora se e como sinais de This article explores whether and how uma experiência afro-brasileira vieram à signs of an Afro-Brazilian experience tona durante a existência do SCeC, um surfaced during the life of SCeC, a trade sindicato de carregadores e ensacadores union of coffee carriers and packers (car- de café que prosperou no porto do Rio de regadores e ensacadores de café) that Janeiro entre 1931 e 1964 Apesar da forte flourished in the port of Rio de Janeiro presença de trabalhadores afrodescenden- between 1931 and 1964. In spite of the tes no SCeC, o legado negro estava em large presence of Afro-descendant work- grande parte ausente do discurso oficial ers at SCeC, black legacy was largely ab- do sindicato, que, em vez disso, colocava a sent in the official discourse of the trade ênfase na classe, no nacionalismo e em union, which gave emphasis instead to outros valores não relacionados à cor. es- class, nationalism and other color-blind se fato não está completamente desconec- values. This fact is not completely dis- tado do contexto sociopolítico do Brasil connected from the socio-political con- naquela época, dominado pelo sistema do text of Brazil in that epoch, dominated trabalhismo e pela ideologia da democra- by the system of labor politics (trabal- cia racial. No entanto, saliento que marca- hismo) and the ideology of racial democ- dores de um “campo negro” não eram racy. However, I point out that markers completamente estranhos ao SCeC. eles of a ‘black field’ were not completely ainda sobrevivem nas memórias dos ensa- alien to SCeC. They still survive in the cadores e estão refletidos nos padrões ra- memories of ensacadores, and are reflect- ciais que tradicionalmente caracterizaram ed in the racial patterns that have tradi- o cais do porto do Rio de Janeiro. tionally characterized the docklands of Palavras-chave: pós-abolição; sindica- Rio de Janeiro. tos; identidade negra. Keywords: post-abolition; trade unions; black identity. * Marie Curie IoF Fellow, King’s College of london. london, UK. [email protected] Revista Brasileira de História. São Paulo, v. 35, nº 69, June 2015. Available at: http://www.scielo.br/rbh http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1806-93472015v35n69006 André Cicalo In March 1945, a reporter from the newspaper A Manhã asked dock- worker João Baptista Ribeiro Fragrante his opinion about the labor legislation promoted by Getúlio Vargas. The interviewee declared that: “before Getúlio Vargas, workers were nothing but economic slaves who achieved their ‘Free Birth law’ (Lei do Ventre Livre) in 1930 and their ‘Slavery Abolition law’ (Golden law or Lei Áurea) … with the Constitution of 1937!” In this way, Fragrante praised the labor rights that had been granted since the beginning of Vargas’ rule, which started with the Revolution of 1930 and evolved into the authoritarian and corporatist regime of Estado Novo (New State) in 1937. only with the system of protections established by Vargas, Fragrante clarified, would workers achieve “stability, holidays, justice, and a limit of working hours …”. With the previous legislation, in fact, “the proletariats did not even have the right to a Sunday recess, and enjoyed only some limited cover against work injuries” (“em 1937…”, A Manhã, 1945, p.3). Fragrante was introduced as a member of the Trade Union of Coffee Carriers and Baggers2 of Rio de Janeiro, Sindicato dos Carregadores e Ensacadores de Café do Rio de Janeiro (SCeC), a labor organization that existed between 1931 and 1985 in the port area of Rio de Janeiro.3 The ensacadores, the great majority of whom were Afro-Brazilians, unloaded coffee cargo arriving from the Southeast inland areas, processed and mixed the raw product at the port warehouses, and stored coffee blends in big sacks for shipping and export. These workers were trabalhadores avulsos (ca- sual laborers), that is, unskilled men who offered their manual work on a daily basis at the many warehouses on the docklands, without any contract of employment.4 The newspaper article added rich information about the interviewee’s background. Fragrante had been born thirty-eight years earlier in the inland state of Minas Gerais. He had arrived in Rio de Janeiro, illiterate, at the age of sixteen, “full of hope and ambitions” (“em 1937…”, A Manhã, 1945, p.3). In 1927, at the age of twenty, he started working as an ensacador. In 1931 he was among the founding members of SCeC, of which he later also became secre- tary and president. enthusiastic about Vargas’ labor legislation, Fragrante stated that the Estado Novo had provided him not only with basic labor rights, but also with the material conditions to study and become an accountant, improving his life prospects (“em 1937…”, A Manhã, 1945, p.3). A black and white photo provides visual information about the interviewee: a very dark- skinned man who is sitting at an office desk, finely dressed in jacket and tie. The speaker’s reference to the Free Birth law and the Golden law, I admit, 2 Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69 Fields of Post-Abolition: labor and ‘black’ experience particularly caught my attention due to Fragrante’s phenotypic appearance. Sanctioned in 1871, the Free Birth law established freedom for the offspring of enslaved African and Afro-descendant people, while the Golden law abol- ished slavery entirely in 1888. Despite this, Fragrante’s mention of slavery abo- lition laws was applied to the apparently color-blind field of labor. The question remains as to whether there is anything racial or ‘black’ beneath Fragrante’s testimony. My premise is that any racial reference would be a blatant exception in the framework of SCeC’s public discourse. My analysis of the historical archive of this trade union, in fact, shows that ensacadores limited their official discourse to concepts of labor and professional unity, the Catholic faith, family, and the nation, with no regard to any black ethno-racial and political refer- ences. Nothing at all in the union’s archive would suggest that the ensacadores were predominantly Afro-Brazilians, aside from the good amount of old pho- tographs that I rescued from SCeC’s dusty cupboards. Figure 1 – João Baptista Ribeiro Fragrante in A Manhã Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69 3 André Cicalo Figure 2 – SCeC’s dilapidated portrait of Getúlio Vargas Starting from Fragrante’s newspaper interview, this article investigates whether and how a ‘black field’, or a ‘black experience’, emerged at SCeC under the veil of much institutional silence.5 In his study of maroon settle- ments (quilombos) in nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro, Flávio dos Santos Gomes points out the presence of a ‘campo negro’ (black field). He presents this concept as a complex and multifaceted social network that was deployed by African and Afro-descendant people, which produced social movements, conflicts and economic practices with different interests (1996, p.36; Cruz, 2000, p.277-278).6 I propose that, even though the presence of an Afro- Brazilian experience is largely downplayed within SCeC’s official documents, a black field still surfaces in multiple ways in the docklands in the mid-twen- tieth century. Firstly, a black field emerges through the demographic preva- lence of black workers in the port of Rio de Janeiro and, even more consistently, within specific trade unions. Secondly, it survives in the memory of ensacado- res, in some cases openly, and in some other cases filtered through the dis- course of class identity. The black field of ensacadores, as Gomes (1996) suggests for quilombos, was certainly intersected by networks of solidarity and conflict. Having said that, it was also influenced by the set of exclusions that black dockworkers had to face in Brazilian society, and that were reflected in 4 Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69 Fields of Post-Abolition: labor and ‘black’ experience the docklands somewhat automatically. Seen from this perspective, the pres- ence of a black field in the docklands of Rio de Janeiro is also something that goes beyond the official intentions of SCeC and the reflexivity of its members. exploring Afro-Brazilian discourses and silences in the specific context of ensacadores must take into account the socio-political situation of the era of labor politics in which SCeC was founded and developed, an era that has been labeled trabalhismo (Gomes, 2005). Inaugurated by the regime of Vargas in 1930 and continued under his successors until 1964, trabalhismo granted proletariats social advantages without precedent, but also overlapped with a phase of state corporatism (1937-1945) and overall restrictions to social and political actions. In addition, Vargas’ regime coincided with official attempts to downplay ethno-racial differences and inequalities. The mainstream dis- course became a nationalist ideology of mestiçagem (racial mixture) and racial democracy (referred to today as ‘myths’), and the promise that industrial de- velopment would be the solution for Brazil’s social problems. The widespread silence on ethno-racial matters within Brazilian trade unions at the time of the SCeC is reproduced by the paucity of studies that deal with this subject at any stage and at any geographical scale in Brazil (Rogers, 2011, p.124). only Cruz (2000; 2006a), McPhee (2006a; 2006b), and few other scholars have provided interesting insights on this subject, discussing the ‘black’ legacy among dock- workers in Rio de Janeiro in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The number of studies that explore racial matters in trade unions drops further in relation to the time of trabalhismo. This trend might be due to the assumption that labor organizations, belonging more obviously to the sphere of class, have little to say about ethno-racial questions, and even less at an historical moment when racial democracy was normatively championed as state ideology. The idea of trade unions as exclusively class-based, however, should be reconsid- ered, particularly for those labor unions in which race and ethnicity have left a significant mark for historical and social reasons (Rogers, 2011). I propose that, in my field of research, even silences represent a source of information, and the underground discourse of these silences can be explored and analyzed (Sheriff, 2001). This reasoning, however, does not suggest that the Afro- Brazilian legacy at SCeC was framed in terms of underground ethno-racial politics. The interest of these laborers, in fact, was to negotiate inclusion and citizenship through the idea of the laborers’ proletarian nature, and an appar- ently color-blind concept of ‘respectability’. Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69 5 André Cicalo This article is partly based on archival sources and engages with the exist- ing literature about race and labor on the docks of Rio de Janeiro. A large portion of the information used was found at SCeC’s premises, including min- utes (atas) of the union’s meetings between 1931 and 1964, and 17 issues of SCeC’s mensário, the monthly journal of the ensacadores, released between 1960 and 1961. other data were discovered in what remains of the record databases of members of SCeC, in addition to photographic material belong- ing to the organization. These sources were found in haphazard piles at SINTRAMAeRJ, the Trade Union of General Carriers of Rio de Janeiro, which replaced SCeC in 1985 and occupies SCeC’s premises in the port area of Rio de Janeiro. Aside from these documents, I consulted over one hundred news- paper articles concerning dockworkers’ trade unions in Rio de Janeiro via the online Database (Hemeroteca) of Brazil’s National library. Further sources consulted were retrieved from the Public Archives of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Aperj), where the ‘Political Police’ section holds records of the institutional relations established between trade unions and authorities between 1927 and 1983. This pool of documents represent the basis of what I define as the official (or institutional) discourse of SCeC. They show how the union presented itself to authorities, and reveal the language that the ensacadores’ leaders deployed in their interactions with the state. The rest of the methodology used for this research was based on interviews, participant observation and oral history collected from elderly former SCeC members, some of whom are still linked to SINTRAMAeRJ as pensioners (aposentados). The research was constrained due to the fact that, despite there being a number of surviving SCeC former members available for interview, most of these informants had joined the union towards the end of SCeC’s institutional life, with very few having experienced the early decades of the trade union This means that future attempts to reconstruct members’ experiences at SCeC will have to rely on the memory of younger cohorts, some of which are descendants of the trade union’s founders. Race and ethnicity in Rio de Janeiro’s docklands: an overview of the literature In colonial Rio de Janeiro, enslaved Africans were used to perform the heaviest and most low-status economic activities; among these, the transporta- tion of goods and people. With the intensification of port activities in the 6 Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69 Fields of Post-Abolition: labor and ‘black’ experience seventeenth century, the Governor of Rio de Janeiro, Rui Vaz Pinto, ruled that “the loading and unloading of ships should be performed by black enslaved people” (lamarão, 2006, p.22). In the nineteenth century, the moving of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil, the development of the local economy and the boom in coffee exportation required a higher number of manual workers in the docklands. The bags of coffee arriving from the plantations were col- lected across the city center by “groups of half naked and shouting black men”, who carried the product on their heads to the warehouses (Santos in lamarão, 2006, p.39-40).7 Farias et al. describe that many slaves-for-hire (escravos de ganho) managed to buy their freedom by offering this kind of casual work on the docks, and that the Mina ethnic group from West Africa enjoyed a sort of monopoly in this field (2005, p.111-118). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, due to the waves of european migration in Brazil and the abolition of slavery, a number of (white) migrants started looking for employment as dock- workers in Rio de Janeiro. As a consequence, the number of white workers in the docklands increased notably, even though this sector remained under the control of black workers (Cruz, 2006b, p.227; 2006a, p.225). In the first decades of the twentieth century, as a result of the industrial- ization process and the spread of socialist and anarchist ideas from europe, Brazilian workers started to organize, reacting to their extremely vulnerable working conditions. Dockworkers, for example, had not seen their labor situ- ation much improved since the time of slavery, and continued to be largely oppressed by their employers’ contractual power (Batalha, 2006, p.98-99; French, 2006). In 1903 groups of shippers founded the Union of Stevedores (estivadores),8 while in 1905 a group of carriers founded the Society of Resistance of Warehouse and Coffee Workers, historically and popularly known as Resistência. A number of scholars have emphasized the strong Afro- Brazilian composition of dockworkers’ trade unions (Cruz, 2000; 2006a; Galvão, 1997; Moura, 1995; Chalhoub, 2001), and Moura is quite specific in describing Resistência as a ‘black’ trade union (um sindicato negro) (1995, p.71), in spite of the presence of a white minority. Data presented by Cruz of 353 membership photos of Resistência members between 1910 and 1929 show, according to her own subjective interpretation, that 23.5 percent of members were brancos (white-skinned), 14.2 percent were pardos (brown-skinned and/ or mixed-race), and 62.3 percent were pretos (very dark-skinned) (Cruz, 2000, p.271). For this reason, as Galvão reminds us, the union was also known as the Companhia dos Pretos (Black People’s Company) (1997, p.22). Roberto Moura (1995) was probably the first scholar to insist on the Afro-Brazilian roots of Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69 7 André Cicalo the dockworkers’ unions of Rio de Janeiro. For example, he pointed out the significant contribution that Afro-Brazilian port workers made to the cultural identity of the city, particularly through samba, capoeira, carnival, and the practice of Afro-Brazilian faiths.9 Furthermore, Cruz has shown that the struc- ture of port carriers’ work was based on terminology and organization inher- ited from slavery, an historical reality that was broadly racialized due to the color and cultural specificities of the enslaved. For example, Cruz refers to the role that a ‘captain of the troop’ (capitão da tropa) played in the coordination of groups (troops or tropas) of casual port workers and for the negotiation of labor with potential employers, reproducing an organization typical of the slavery epoch (2010, p.118). Cruz also observes that the expression ‘troop of laborers’ (trabalhadores de tropa), already used during the slavery period, was semantically extended, and continued to be used for trade unionized cargo workers during the first half of the twentieth century.10 Roberto Moura (1995, p.71) and Sidney Chalhoub (2001, p.91-114) have interpreted recorded cases of conflicts between european migrants and Afro- Brazilian workers in ethno-racial terms. In fact, the growing number of european competitors between the 1870s and the 1920s seriously threatened the control that Afro-Brazilians exerted in the least prestigious niches of the job market (Cruz, 2006a; Farias et al., 2005, p.127). Cruz (2006a) and MacPhee (2006a, p.647-648), without discarding completely the presence of ethno-racial cleavages in the Resistência, have been more skeptical of this reading, while emphasizing the shared lower status of Afro-Brazilian and european laborers and their relatively harmonious cohabitation in port neighborhoods. Cruz’s research, in particular, shows that european immigrants were not only ac- cepted as members of dockworkers’ unions but they also often occupied im- portant administrative roles in those organizations (2006a, p.206). Cruz, in addition, reminds us that socialist and color-blind ideals were at the basis of the Resistência’s statute, approved in 1905, whose motto was “one for all and all for one”, promoting the union of all workers without “distinction of nation- ality, color and religion” (Cruz, 2006a, p.194). Consequently, Cruz and Albuquerque (1983, p.151) believe that conflicts in dockworkers’ trade unions in the early twentieth century were more typically due to political rather than ethno-racial reasons. Nonetheless, drawing on Gomes’ work (1996), Cruz de- fends the idea that Afro-Brazilian dockworkers established an underground ‘black field’ within the ethnically heterogeneous space of port neighborhoods. This social and material space, in Cruz’s view, constituted a frame within which a black identity could be preserved and developed (Cruz, 2000, p.277-278). 8 Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69 Fields of Post-Abolition: labor and ‘black’ experience expanding upon Cruz’s point, it seems that ‘black territories’ were not based exclusively on links of solidarity but also on the disconnections and discrimi- nation that Afro-Brazilians suffered in a white-hegemonic society. In a news- paper article dating from 1907 and quoted by Cruz, for example, a worker complained that employers barely distinguished laborers from thieves and vagrants, because from the employers’ perspective everybody was a “scoundrel and nigger” (canalha e negrada). A newspaper article from 1918 also showed a similarly racialized portrait of dockworkers, when a worker from Resistência equated the achievements of the union’s class struggles to the abolition of slavery, which occurred on 13 May 1888. Before [Resistência], it was common for carriers to be beaten with a multi-tailed whip. There was no appeal (apelação) … they hit the black [my italics] … and the police pretended not to know … This situation was natural for many, because their sad condition as coffee workers was a prolongation of what May 13 had abolished. (in Cruz 2010, p.117, my translation) Although the literature on dockworkers I have mentioned refers exclu- sively to Resistência and concerns the pre-Vargas era, these references repre- sent an extremely important background for a study of SCeC’s ensacadores. Archival material, in fact, shows that SCeC was formed, at least in part, by defectors from Resistência, which had traditionally controlled the transporta- tion and storage of any goods, including coffee, in the port area of Rio de Janeiro. The same Fragrante with whom I opened this article must have been a member of Resistência. In fact, as Fragrante himself mentioned in his inter- view, he had started working as an ensacador de café in Rio de Janeiro in 1927, four years before the establishment of SCeC. The minutes of the union’s as- sembly also show that, at least in its initial phase, some SCeC workers kept their membership of Resistência, an option that the directive board of ensaca- dores decided to ban in 1932 (atas book 1932, p.9). The atas book of 1947 (p.71) shows that Resistência made repeated use of labor Justice (Justiça do Trabalho) to invalidate the recognition of SCeC and to reincorporate it. Disputes between SCeC and Resistência characterized the docklands until the mid-1940s, primarily because Resistência could not accept losing control over coffee processing and transportation. Such data illustrate that SCeC and Resistência had a very similar constituency. My interpretation of 1249 photos of SCeC members between the 1930s and 1960s reveals that pretos and mula- tos, that is, dark- and brown-skinned people to whom I could subjectively Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69 9 André Cicalo ascribe some black-African heritage, represented not less than 70 percent of SCeC’s total collective.11 Figure 3 – Health membership card of an ensacador Figure 4 – An ensacador displaying his old work card (libreta) Being a ‘respectful’ classe: unity, Catholicism and the nation in SCeC’s official discourse Cruz suggests that the Afro-Brazilian heritage and constituency of the Resistência did not entail an ethno-racial politics of identity within the union. As she notes, [Resistência’s] workers were investing precisely in the breaking of racial hierar- chies that [Brazilian] society aimed to preserve. They emphasized equality, and championed the irrelevance of color, origin and religion. They created rules of 10 Revista Brasileira de História, vol. 35, no 69