861930

research-article2019
JUHXXX10.1177/0096144219861930Journal of Urban HistoryMcDonald

Original Research Article

Journal of Urban History
1­–21
The Origins of Informality in © The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0096144219861930
https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144219861930
Horizonte, 1889-1900 journals.sagepub.com/home/juh

Daniel L. McDonald1

Abstract
Sixty years before Brasília, Belo Horizonte was constructed as Brazil’s first modern planned
city (1894-1897). This article focuses on the role of land development in shaping inequality
in Belo Horizonte, the first of four major planned cities in Brazil. In Belo Horizonte, political
backers and urban planners viewed controlled land development as providing a clean break
with the past and creating an industrial, Eurocentric modern future in the wake of the abolition
of slavery (1888) and the end of Brazil’s post-independence empire (1889). This article argues
that more so than the architecture of its buildings or its urban plan, Belo Horizonte modeled
an “architecture of capital” in which creating an urban property market both emerged from
and was tasked with producing the city’s racialized narrative of modernity and progress. Belo
Horizonte’s emphasis on land speculation gave rise to one of Brazil’s first favelas, comprised of
the workers tasked with constructing the city.

Keywords
Brazil, land development, urban planning, informality, favela

Belo Horizonte has long been overshadowed in popular consciousness and academic literature by
Brasília. Constructed as Brazil’s new capital (1956-1960), Brasília came to embody modernist
urban planning and its contradictions.1 By moving the capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília, as
Beatriz Jaguaribe writes, “modernist architecture came to directly convey the fabrication of a
new national ethos.”2 Brasília heralded a new historical horizon with its own mythology of
modernity and progress by contrasting itself with Rio de Janeiro’s turn-of-the-century imitations
of French urban design and planning. The workers who built Brasília, however, concentrated in
unplanned settlements outside the planned city that planners and politicians assumed would dis-
appear once the “permanent” residents arrived to populate the city. But Brasília was not the first
planned city to supposedly herald a new historical epoch for Brazil nor embody such contradic-
tions. Built from 1894 to 1897, Belo Horizonte replaced Ouro Preto, a city closely associated
with Brazil’s colonial past, as the capital of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s most populous state and one
of its most important politically.3 A mining town born of a 1690s gold rush, Ouro Preto and its
baroque architecture symbolized the legacies of Portuguese imperial rule and slavery that

1Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

Corresponding Author:
Daniel L. McDonald, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Brown University, 79 Brown St., Box N, Providence, RI
02912, USA.
Email: daniel_l_mcdonald@brown.edu
2 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

modernizing elites in Minas Gerais wished to relegate to the past. What place does Brasília’s
forgotten forbear hold in the history of Brazilian cities, and what can it tell us about the nature of
modernization and capitalism in Brazil?
This article focuses such broad concerns on the specific history of land development in Belo
Horizonte when during its construction planners prioritized creating an urban real estate mar-
ket—and as a consequence, created one of Brazil’s first favelas or informal shantytowns.4 Belo
Horizonte pioneered the use of planned cities to offer a new national narrative of history just as
Brazil ended two defining institutions: slavery (1888) and its post-independence empire (1822-
1889). As such, its planners and political backers looked to land development to attract and cir-
culate the capital they believed crucial to their utopian vision of an industrial society based on
free, preferably “white” European labor. More so than the architecture of its buildings or its urban
plan, Belo Horizonte modeled an “architecture of capital” in which creating an urban property
market both emerged from and was tasked with producing the city’s narrative of modernity and
progress. A rigidly designed, managed, and marketed property market would both create and
evidence Belo Horizonte’s modernity, consigning the purportedly disorderly, baroque nineteenth-
century Ouro Preto to the past. Ultimately, prioritization of land’s speculative value forced the
workers who built Belo Horizonte into unplanned and precarious settlements just like their coun-
terparts sixty years later in Brasília. Planners and politicians alike considered these settlements as
impermanent and took actions to remove the poor further and further from the city center. In later
years, this played an important role in creating the typical spatial layout of twentieth-century
Brazilian cities of a wealthier, formal center city ringed by a working-class periphery, often com-
prised of informal settlements like favelas.5 Above all, Belo Horizonte heralded how Brazilian
planned cities would progressively reorganize society around market relations in pursuit of
modernity in the twentieth century, fostering new inequalities and aggravating old ones.
For urban historians, the case of Belo Horizonte shows the need to examine how the creation,
selling, and marketing of urban property shaped unequal urban spaces in addition to outright state
coercion. Unpacking the creation of real estate markets merges approaches from the history of
capitalism, especially its sensitivity to the cultural and social contexts of economic processes, with
urban history’s focus on space.6 The first informal shantytown called a favela, now fixtures in
Brazilian cities, is thought to have been created in Rio de Janeiro in 1897 on the Morro da
Providência, also known as the Morro da Favela, by soldiers returning from the Canudos War
(1894-1897). Laborers constructing Belo Horizonte, however, formed the Alto da Favela, also
called the Alto da Estação, prior to 1897, making it among the first recorded uses of “favela.”7 The
entangled relationship between the informal city, where residents lacked legal land title, and the
formal city thus emerged in part from elite focus on land development and the racist notions of
modernity that underpinned Brazil’s first modern planned city with far reaching consequences.
Indeed, planned cities became a crucial element of state-led developmental capitalism in
Brazil’s interior regions. As one supporter put it, Belo Horizonte would “become the Chicago of
Brazil.”8 Design influences, aesthetics, and technologies shifted: Belo Horizonte’s (1897) take on
Pierre L’Enfant’s Washington, D.C., became Goiânia’s (1933/1937) English garden-city, while
Palmas, Tocantins (1989), attempted to humanize Brasília’s monumental modernism (1960).9
But the mission of projecting state power, concentrating capital, incorporating economic hinter-
lands, and making new, modern citizens remained strikingly consistent.
At their core, modernist planned cities privileged capital and state power over inclusion,
thereby generating an unequal citizenship that manifested in both a lack of individual rights and
across urban space. Belo Horizonte modeled how narratives of modernity went hand in hand with
land development to create second-class citizens, namely native-born and Afro-descendent
Brazilians. The city’s political backers and the Construction Commission of the New Capital or
CCNC (Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital) attempted to subsidize European immigrants to
build Belo Horizonte with varying success, despite the availability of native-born workers. Even
McDonald 3

still, the CCNC facilitated an unequal citizenship within its own ranks with the goal of preventing
even its preferred laborers from interfering with the urban property market by expelling them
from important areas of the planned urban core and through strict control of the formal property
market. Even when Belo Horizonte failed to sell as many property lots or attract the population
planners envisioned, the commitment to maintaining the property market in the urban core caused
most population growth to occur in the city’s peripheries, including the formation of some of
Brazil’s first favelas.10 As late as 1940, several blocks of the city center remained unoccupied.11
Elites in Minas Gerais envisioned Belo Horizonte as a key part of a modernization program
grounded in racist conceptions of progress and modernity.12 Colonized mostly after a 1690s gold
rush, Minas Gerais (literally, “General Mines”) was built on unfree labor, primarily by enslaved
Africans. Its once booming mining sector, however, had entered a long decline beginning in the
1750s. When Brazil became the last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888, Minas
Gerais was home to some 30% of the estimated 800,000 enslaved persons freed and the largest
black population of any state.13 Like their counterparts elsewhere in Brazil, mineiro (“of Minas
Gerais”) elites embraced an ideology of “racial whitening” (branqueamento), the idea that Brazil
would become whiter through miscegenation.14 They were dismayed, however, that few European
immigrants came to Minas Gerais.15
Mineiro elites hoped a new capital would encourage European immigration and command an
economic hinterland like their model, Chicago. Ouro Preto, the state capital since 1720, with its
gold-adorned baroque churches, winding cobblestone streets, and striking mountain vistas, was
so strongly associated with Brazil’s history of empire and slavery that President Getúlio Vargas
later made the city Brazil’s first national monument in 1938.16 Mineiro elites recognized that
Minas Gerais lacked a true metropolis like São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Isolated by mountainous
terrain, Ouro Preto struggled to govern a landlocked state larger than present-day France, much
less integrate its sprawling territory economically. A new capital city also would, they hoped,
reduce their state’s dependence on Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro, for access to the sea.17 When
a military coup toppled Brazil’s post-independence monarchy and installed a republic (1889-
1930), elites in Minas Gerais saw an opportunity to rid themselves Ouro Preto’s symbolic bag-
gage and physical limitations.

Debating a New Capital: 1889-1893

From 1889 to 1893, proponents, called mudancistas, and detractors fiercely debated whether and
where to move the state capital.18 Almost invariably, politicians embedded the idea of a new capi-
tal within a vision of a capitalist modernity that would transform the entire state, not just the capi-
tal city. Looking to São Paulo and Chicago, they envisioned an industrial city that would anchor
a railroad network tying together the state’s disparate regional economies. They hoped such a city
would attract white European immigrants to work in the coffee fields and factories, replacing the
mixed-race and black majority that currently labored there.
Mudancistas framed their state’s “backwardness” as a potentially deadly flaw in the uncertain
politics of the young republic. Mudancistas were a heterogenous group, with the state’s small
group of dedicated republicans and representatives from the economically ascendant coffee-
growing south being the most enthusiastic supporters. The issue of the capital dominated the
constitutional assembly tasked with drawing up a new state constitution beginning in February
1891. There, Afonso Pena, later president of Brazil (1906-1909), stressed the gravity of the situ-
ation, arguing that each state would have to “compete and defend its autonomy and indepen-
dence.”19 Ildefonso Alvim, an ally of Pena, cited the possibility of civil war: “an imminent storm
[coming] from the north to the south of the Republic with capacity for invading the center.”20
Joined by João Pinheiro da Silva and Augusto de Lima, these politicians argued that the new
capital was an essential part of Minas Gerais’s national political strategy.21
4 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

Figure 1.  Map of Minas Gerais in 1910 with neighboring states. Design by Katherine McDonald based
on Miguel Calmon Du Pin e Almeida, Carta da viação ferrea do Brasil, (São Paulo: Secção Geographica
Artistica da Compa. Lith. Hartmann-Reichenbach, 1910), Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

To Pena and his allies, Ouro Preto was a liability. In a government decree leaked to the
press in April 1891, the state’s governor Augusto de Lima expressly outlined the inadequacy
of Ouro Preto for modernizing Minas Gerais.22 Ouro Preto’s mountainous terrain posed bar-
riers to population growth and the expansion of large-scale industry.23 Though not directly
cited, de Lima would have been well aware of Ouro Preto’s strong association with Brazil’s
colonial past as well. Even the most vocal defender of Ouro Preto, Silviano Brandão,
acknowledged its shortcomings “as an ugly city,” but insisted that “the backwardness of
Minas comes [not] from its capital, nor is it an obstacle to the material and intellectual devel-
opment of the state.”24
In contrast to Ouro Preto’s limitations, both real and imagined, mineiro politicians hoped a
new city could serve as a rail hub for both existing lines and those yet to be built.25 Dependent on
exports, the state’s other regions had stronger relationships with neighboring states than with
each other. De Lima’s preferred site, Belo Horizonte, was close to the Estrada de Ferro Central
do Brasil (“Central Railroad of Brazil”) that ran from Rio de Janeiro through the north of Minas
Gerais. Immediately, this location would serve to connect the northern, southern, and central
regions of the state. Moreover, the city would be located at the convergence of proposed railroads
running from western Minas Gerais to the neighboring coastal state of Espírito Santo in the east,
thus avoiding port taxes in Rio de Janeiro (Figure 1).26
Boosters imagined a city that could channel capital that would otherwise leave the state
through Rio de Janeiro. Afonso Pena argued that “in young countries, like Brazil, everything to
promote the accumulation of capital, provide faculties to capitalists, that class indispensable to
the promotion of industry, railroads, and other similar improvements, should be the object of
attention of public power.” Lamenting the inability of Minas Gerais to attract a capitalist class,
he added, “Nobody denies that there is a great emigration of money and people for the federal
capital [Rio de Janeiro] and ultimately, for São Paulo.”27 Ultimately, Pena believed that compet-
ing with São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro required an equivalent metropolis in Minas Gerais. Critical
to this vision is who exactly mudancistas envisioned populating their new city.
Like their counterparts elsewhere in Brazil, mineiro elites advocated whitening the population
as an essential aspect of modernization. But mineiros assigned particular importance to planned
urbanization as part of a larger scheme to whiten their entire state. In the 1890s, the state govern-
ment launched an ambitious public spending campaign centered on three expenditures: the new
capital, railroads, and immigration subsidies.28 One delegate to the constitutional assembly,
Manoel Eustachio complained that immigrants arriving at the hospederias (immigrant process-
ing centers) of the Central Railroad “did not want, being ill informed, to direct themselves to
McDonald 5

Minas but rather [went] to São Paulo.” If the state extended a railroad to his region and paid
immigrants a subsidy, it might overcome the fact that “the salary in São Paulo was better.” He
then requested his city, Piumby, be considered as the future capital, to which another delegate
retorted, “[But] Piumby is at the end of the world.”29
The petition of Varzea do Marçal to host the capital was especially blunt. It blamed the lack
of progress in Minas Gerais squarely on its people, which could neither “provide for itself or
the progress of our homeland.” The “lower layers” of the mineiro populace, the petition con-
tinued, were “degenerated by mixing, among ethnic elements of bad quality.” For the petition-
ers, racial mixing, combined with “deficient and poor-quality nutrition” and “depletion from
climate,” placed a clear majority of the state’s population in an unredeemable state of misery
and helplessness.30
By contrast, the petitioners argued that São Paulo’s experience with European immigration
proved that progress could be achieved by “improving” the racial status of its people. The peti-
tion expressed belief in racist notions of racial whitening popular among Brazilian elites, namely
that introducing “white” immigrants could gradually whiten Brazil’s majority Afro-descendent
population. They stressed that one did not have to look beyond Brazil to see how much the
“immigration of a good and strong race is worth for the advancement and progress of a people.”
São Paulo, they wrote, “today one of the richest states in the Union, owes much of its progress to
the transfusion of foreign blood into the social economy of the descendants of the bandeirantes.”
“The future of this country is in immigration” they argued, “in the arrival of good and industrious
hands and of well-organized and creative minds.”31
A broad consensus emerged at the 1891 Constitutional Congress. The road to modernity ran
through a regional program of political, economic, and social modernization anchored by a new
capital city. In this transformation, economic aspects of modernization—industry, railroads, and
capital—were inseparable from its social dimensions, namely whitening the population through
immigration. Other Brazilian cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, undertook urban reforms during this
period drawing on similar ideas of modernity and race, including public health campaigns in the
1890s.32 The competition among states, however, seemingly precluded such gradual measures
for elites in Minas Gerais.
Shortly thereafter, a subsequent congress mandated the construction of the capital in Belo
Horizonte with a projected completion date of December 1897. Aarão Reis, an engineer and
urban planner from Rio de Janeiro, was appointed as head of the Construction Commission in
charge of building the city.33 An avowed positivist, Reis’s intellectual leanings complemented his
political backers’ desire for a distinctly conservative process of modernization. Reis believed that
urban design could transform spaces beyond the city itself, particularly through the new city’s
role as an industrial and railroad hub.34 Like many Brazilian abolitionists, Reis viewed slavery as
an impediment to modernity but lacked a clear vision for what should become of the formerly
enslaved.35

Land Expropriation and Labor

Building Belo Horizonte began with the removal of native-born Brazilians and their attempted
substitution by the state with European immigrant laborers in service of creating sellable prop-
erty lots. Before beginning construction, chief engineer Reis had to clear a small agricultural
hamlet known as Curral del Rei. The CCNC engaged in a complex process of documenting lands
to be appropriated and demarcating the new system of property lots that would replace them.
Using financial and land incentives, Reis and the state succeeded in attracting at least some
European laborers to the build-site, though native-born Brazilians nonetheless would comprise a
substantial portion of the Commission’s workforce. In short, the early years of the CCNC
6 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

embodied the broader reorganization around market relations coupled with racial whitening that
Belo Horizonte’s political backers desired.
Indeed, land speculation was politically mandated as the organizing logic of Belo Horizonte,
asserting its exchange or market value over its use value. The 1893 state constitution approved
by the Constituent Congress organized the city around land speculation, calling for “the defini-
tive plan of the new city” to be planned around the “division of the land into lots.” The constitu-
tion also required the creation of a strict pricing system for lots, taking into account their proximity
to the city center and other circumstances.36 The state issued few other instructions to Reis as to
how the city should be constructed.
The area where Belo Horizonte was to be built belonged to the colonial town of Sabará. Known
as Curral del Rei, the small village boasted a bustling little city center and scattered farmsteads
with around 4,000 inhabitants. Despite the new city’s importance, Minas Gerais’s slumping econ-
omy left the state government with real budget constraints. In a letter to Reis, State Agriculture
Secretary David Campista insisted over Reis’s objections that landowners from Curral del Rei be
offered a lot in the new city for their expropriated property in lieu of payment. A property lot in the
future city, of course, cost the state little or nothing to offer.37 Even still, Reis spent 757,668 mil-
réis on expropriations, equivalent to $198,342 in 1892 U.S. dollars, a huge sum.38
Though exact numbers are difficult to ascertain, the inhabitants of Curral del Rei were likely
majority black and mixed race.39 The CCNC did not hide their disdain for the people they were
to displace. The Commission’s secretary wrote that Curral del Rei had “no elegance at all” and
that it was a “monument to bad taste.”40 According to historian Abílio Barreto, Reis remarked to
a priest that “he did not want any of the old inhabitants [of Curral del Rei] within the urban or
suburban areas delineated for the new city.”41 Reis did express remorse at one point for the expul-
sions, writing that the rapid expulsions humiliated the dignity of people whose ties to the land
went back centuries. However, the stakes of the project for the positivist engineer seemingly
outweighed the indignity visited upon longtime residents.42
As 1894 wore on, the slow pace of the expropriations caused the state to cede extraordinary
power to Reis, making the CCNC an increasingly authoritarian entity within the build-site. First,
the state declared Belo Horizonte its own municipality and appointed Reis as its governor in
addition to his post as chief engineer.43 Then, Reis requested and received the expedition of a
decree from the state appropriating all the lands and buildings within the area of the new city on
May 12, 1894. Beginning the next week and lasting for a year, the Commission seized over four
hundred properties. The Commission meticulously documented seized properties with a sketch
of each, including any buildings and natural features, as well as an affidavit from the property
owner documenting sale (Figure 2).
Of the four hundred, the nine proprietors that decided to fight the expropriations in court did
so to the tune of 3,544 mil-réis in legal costs for the Commission, a significant sum.45 None of
them succeeded. Likewise, the CCNC at times used police to remove residents who resisted
expulsion. One letter from two Italian brothers to Reis protested that police had forcefully
expelled their family, exclaiming “With what right do you seize our goods [and] savagely violate
our home?”46 With state courts unsympathetic, landowners and tenants had no other option than
to relocate outside the projected city center.
The city that Reis designed to replace Curral del Rei radically reorganized space in the valley.
Reis’s final 1895 plan emulated Pierre L’Enfant’s design for Washington, D.C., featuring a lattice
of avenues intersecting in plazas with government buildings overlaying a rectangular street
grid.47 Reflecting the modernizing and national ambition of the city, the east-west streets were
named for indigenous tribes and north-south streets for other Brazilian states. The city was
divided into three sections—urban, suburban, and rural—with each performing a designated
function. Delineated by an encircling avenue (Avenida do Contorno), the urban zone (zona
urbana) would host the government officials, technicians, industrialists, and capitalists Belo
McDonald 7

Figure 2.  Left: House that belonged to the heirs of Francisco José da Silva Reis, c. 1894-1897. Right:
Survey of land and house of the heirs of Francisco José da Silva Reis, c. 1894-1895.
Source: Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital: CCfot1896 011, Museu Histórico Abílio Barreto and Secretaria
Municipal de Administração: AI.01.06.00-389(194), Arquivo Público da Cidade de Belo Horizonte, respectively.44

Horizonte’s political backers hoped would lead the state’s modernization. The urban center was
also to be entirely electrified, a rarity in 1890s Brazil, with modern sanitary systems and other
amenities such as a stately park and a grand railroad station. Here, Reis begrudgingly had to offer
lots to former property holders in Curral del Rei. The suburban zone would host larger industrial
enterprises and farms; the rural zone would produce food and raw materials for the city’s indus-
tries. However, only the urban and, to a much lesser degree, the suburban zone received signifi-
cant CCNC attention during the city’s construction (Figure 3).
Underpinning the formal design from the city’s beginning was a system of sellable property
lots. In total, the urban center was comprised of over 7,000 lots.49 Blocks in the urban center
originally contained between seven and twenty-four property lots; suburban lots were more var-
ied to support different kinds of enterprises. Blocks and suburban lots were further divided into
sections: fourteen and eight in the urban and suburban zones, respectively.50
Simultaneously, the Commission worked closely with the state to bring European laborers to
build and populate the capital, especially Italians. In January 1893, the state government, “desir-
ing the foundation of an agricultural colony on the Barreiro farm for the benefit of the new capi-
tal,” authorized Reis to subdivide lots for the alluded to purpose.51 Barreiro would offer land at
cheap prices to any immigrant willing to come; the Commission even subsidized travel for recent
immigrants from their ports of arrival in Brazil.52 Fewer Italians were interested in farming than
the Commission hoped, however, as Barreiro failed within two years. By 1895, the Commission
had dispatched another agent to Rio de Janeiro togather workers from among the foreign immi-
grants.” The Commission requested that its commercial firm in Rio “make available to [its agent]
whatever assistance necessary . . . for the transportation of the gathered immigrants to the General
Carneiro [the train station in Belo Horizonte].53
The Commission workforce did include a substantial number of Italians, though native-born
Brazilians, including non-white persons, likely comprised a large portion at least. Exact informa-
tion on the CCNC’s workforce is limited, especially since laborers were typically hired through
private contractors and not directly by the Commission. Citing reports in the local newspaper in
Sabará, O Contemporaneo, historian Jeffry Adelman estimates that by 1897 the Commission
8 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

Figure 3.  General plan of the Cidade de Minas, 1895.

Source: Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital: CC Dt 06 007, Museu Histórico Abílio Barreto.48

workforce consisted of around 7,000 laborers, a majority of whom were from Europe, mostly of
Italian origin.54 A survey of surviving CCNC pay records through 1897, however, does not neces-
sarily support a predominantly European immigrant workforce.55 O Contemporaneo was a
republican newspaper ideologically affiliated with the state’s modernizing elite and frequently
lavished favorable coverage on the CCNC.56 Whatever the case, the CCNC workforce was com-
prised of both European immigrants and native-born Brazilians.
Though land expropriations and immigrant subsidies, the CCNC at least partially substituted
modernizers’ preferred population—namely, “white” European immigrants—for the mixed-race
population of Curral del Rei in the urban core, all while enacting a profound spatial transforma-
tion on the valley. According to the local parish priest Father Francisco Martins Dias, “A majority
of the inhabitants (of Curral del Rei) remained in [Belo Horizonte]. Only six or seven families
left; all the rest established themselves in the suburban area of the new city.”57 CCNC support of
racial whitening in Belo Horizonte, however, did not override the mission to create a functioning
real estate market in the urban core. European immigrant and native-born Brazilian laborers alike
would be relegated to the shantytowns that sprung up amid Reis’s modern utopia.

The Construction Commission of the New Capital

As Belo Horizonte was under construction, war raged in the backlands of the northeastern state
of Bahia. Republican troops waged a scorched earth campaign for four years (1893-1897) against
the millenarian community led by the messianic monarchist Antônio Conselheiro at Canudos.
Immortalized in Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands, 1902), Euclides da Cunha’s account of
the war balanced a critique of the massacre of Conselheiro’s mixed-race followers with a
Eurocentric vision that equated them with a past soon to be swept aside by Brazil’s embrace of
modernity.58 Republican elites hailed Canudos as the triumph of modernity over traditionalism,
of their new republic over monarchism.
With Canudos, modernizing elites sought to evoke and then crush Brazil’s past. With Belo
Horizonte, they intended to construct its future. Together, the two events point to one of the prin-
cipal contradictions of Brazil’s turn-of-the-century embrace of a Eurocentric modernity. To real-
ize their imagined future, elites needed to use elements of the present society to both create and
destroy its past, a project at once discursive and material. Assumedly, those elements, really the
soldiers and laborers, would then conveniently disappear. While works such as Os sertões
McDonald 9

Figure 4.  Left: “Antiga ‘Favella’ de 1897” (Old Favela of 1897), 1897. Right: Houses for public functionaries,
Raimundo Alves Pinto, 1896. 205 houses were constructed for government bureaucrats by 1898.
Source: Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital: CCFot1896 010, Museu Histórico Abílio Barreto and Secretaria de
Agricultura – Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital: SA2 004 005, Arquivo Público Mineiro, respectively.

created an imagined rural, mixed-race past, the war’s violence sought to ensure that Conselheiro’s
followers would not derail Brazil’s modern future. Rather than war, Belo Horizonte’s perfor-
mance of modernity centered on land development. Even as expropriations erased provincial,
rural Minas Gerais from the map, a sophisticated image campaign sought to depict Curral del Rei
as past and Belo Horizonte as the future. Of course, this campaign was in large part marketing to
sell lots in the new city. Neither republican elites in Rio de Janeiro or Minas Gerais, however,
planned for what should become of the mixed-race soldiers or laborers tasked with making
modernity a reality. Rather than disappear, they remained. As a result, in 1897, Morro da Favela
in Rio de Janeiro and Alto da Favela in Belo Horizonte emerged as Brazil’s first favelas.
Commission policies directly produced the first informal shantytowns on the outskirts of Belo
Horizonte’s center and within unoccupied parts of the urban core. Indeed, a key strategy of the
CCNC and subsequent mayoral administrations was to deny legal land title to workers occupying
portions of the urban core and repeatedly subject them to removal. In an 1895 memo to his divi-
sion chiefs, Reis wrote, “We cannot permit anymore that simple journeymen occupy roofed
houses which [must be made] available to more senior staff.” He mandated that his engineers
“persuade those in such conditions to [remove] themselves to thatched ranches in the areas that
you gentlemen determine.” Reis then authorized “giving to each journeyman, two discounted
days [from Commission fines] for the construction of said shacks.”59 As the memo indicates,
CCNC officials, a small elite of at most 150 individuals, moved into expropriated buildings or
had housing built for them (Figure 4).60
The first mention of the word “favela” in Belo Horizonte emerged as a stand-in for the past as
part of a discursive project to portray the birth of a modern Brazil. Alto da Favela formed in 1895
on the north bank of the Arrudas River in a neglected corner of the urban core beyond the railroad
tracks that supplied the build-site with materials.61 The CCNC’s Photography Office first refer-
enced the settlement’s name in a photo titled “Antiga Favella de 1897,” though it is unclear how
the term came to be used.62 The photo juxtaposes the favela with the railroad tracks in the fore-
ground, the past with the future, the supposedly impermeant with the ostensibly permanent.
Strikingly, the image title describes the favela as “old,” even though it had existed for at most two
years.
The CCNC also consolidated other workers in undesirable regions of the urban core called
Leitão (“Suckling Pig”) and Barro Preto (“Black Mud”). Complying with Reis’s order, the chief
of the 5th Division designated an area for his workers between two streams, the Leitão and the
Acaba-Mundo (“End of the World”). Records from 1897 show the CCNC issuing licenses for
10 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

workers to cut down trees to construct shacks in Leitão, a practice that had likely occurred ear-
lier.63 In 1898, Adalberto Dias Ferraz da Luz, the former head of the CCNC’s municipal services
division and Belo Horizonte’s first mayor, removed workers squatting in scattered shacks to
Barro Preto. Moreover, in 1900, his successor Bernardo Pinto Monteiro reported “successfully
removing most of the urban zone’s [remaining] ex-construction laborers” to the neighborhood.
Title to that land, however, was not guaranteed nor were any urban services.64 Though in the
urban core, Barro Preto was located in the northwest corner, a low-lying area essentially left by
the Commission for completion after the city’s formal inauguration. These areas quickly gained
a reputation for rowdiness and disorder, including frequent shootings and stabbings, and for their
poor hygienic conditions.65 Marcus Pereira de Mello, a geologist visiting the city just after its
inauguration, offered this description:

The workers that built the city live within an unfavorable and marshy locale, in the valley of the
Arrudas river, where there is a foul smelling “black clay,” the occurrence of which gives its name to
the neighborhood [Barro Preto].66

Municipal policy continued the CCNC’s preoccupation with the urban core, conducting favela
and shantytown removals to shift the poor further from the center. Alto da Favela and Leitão
lasted until 1902 when mayor Bernardo Monteiro resolved to clear them out. Of the removals, he
wrote, “Around 600 cafuas (shacks) in Leitão and 300 in the place called Favella . . . were
removed with a population of around 2000 people to the 8th Suburban section,” today the neigh-
borhood of Santa Efigênia.67 Some workers acquired legal title in the suburban zone, but only
after 1910 when land speculators began offering credit.68 After 1920, city officials alternately
offered free lots to workers in the suburbs or attempted to establish designated areas for the work-
ing class (vila operárias). In any case, cheaper land in the suburban zone encouraged workers to
settle there, while favela removals shifted the poor to more distant areas of the city.69
Commission laborers thus formed Belo Horizonte’s first favelas, or informal shantytowns,
where residents did not possess formal title to their homes. However, this was not a contradiction
of Reis’ project but rather a necessary compromise: dependent on workers’ labor, the society in
the urban core begrudgingly and incompletely accommodated them, ceding to lower-class resi-
dents space in the periphery of the city and in unoccupied, undesirable parts of the core but
always without legal title. Other factors, such as poor and infrequent pay, put purchasing property
beyond the means of most workers, who were typically hired through contractors depending on
the job.70 By August 1894, food had become especially expensive since nearly all the commercial
establishments and farms in Curral del Rei had been bought out by the state.71 Meanwhile, that
same year, the future capital acquired a police force and rudimentary prison system overseen by
the CCNC.72
Substituting Reis as chief engineer in 1895, Francisco Bicalho took on the daunting task of
finishing the city prior to the scheduled inauguration in December 1897.73 Under Bicalho, the
CCNC refined the way it collected revenue through taxes and punitive fines, and through the
continued development of a police force. To speed the city’s construction, the state government
reorganized the Commission, creating a new division tasked with “municipal services.” Tellingly,
the division’s principal duties were to oversee lot sales and run the police force and judicial sys-
tem; this dual focus would continue when the division became the municipal government in
1898.74 The division’s chief, Adalberto Ferraz also took over collecting the fines routinely taken
out of workers’ paychecks. The standard payment form for “Workers and Journeymen” contained
a space for Commission to subtract fines for vagrancy or theft of building tools and materials.75
Records show that workers paid 2,264 mil-réis in fines in 1897 alone, equivalent to approxi-
mately 646 workdays at the standard 3.5 mil-réis rate paid to unskilled workers.76
McDonald 11

Figure 5.  Left: Largo da Matriz, Curral del Rei, c. 1894-1895. Right: Design for the General Carneiro
train station, Sabará, c. 1894-1895. Images of both were included in the Álbum de vistas.
Source: Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital: CCALB01 022, Museu Histórico Abílio Barreto and Comissão
Construtora da Nova Capital: CCALB01 030, Museu Histórico Abílio Barreto.

Visual representation and repressive mechanisms worked in tandem to attract what chief engi-
neer Francisco Bicalho called, “the people that by their social status and fortune . . . should be
frankly harnessed to be the nucleus of the final population.”77 Reis and Bicalho’s effort to prevent
laborers from occupying key areas of the city center extended beyond its unequal housing system
and police force. The CCNC’s efforts at marketing, lot sales, and documentation had three mutu-
ally reinforcing goals: first, they wished to sell properties in the urban core to the “desirable”
inhabitants; second, to market the city as ushering in a new era; and third, to document the experi-
ence so that academics and urban planners might utilize the Construction Commission and his
designs as a model for future planned cities. In fact, Reis envisioned Belo Horizonte as only the
first of many similarly transformative planned cities.
Images were a key part of CCNC efforts to show modernity emerging in real time, by contrast-
ing the provincial past of Curral del Rei with the future being brought about by Belo Horizonte.
This represented a key aspect of similar urban projects of the period, including the Haussmann-
inspired reforms of downtown Rio de Janeiro undertaken from 1902 to 1906.78 In Belo Horizonte,
the expensive and prolific Photography Office produced images of Curral del Rei, the build-site,
building schematics, and maps to facilitate lot sales.79 Headed by Dr. Cicero Ferreira, the
Photographic Office also sold images to newspapers and individuals alike. Though sales of the
photos generated little revenue, Ferreira opined to Reis that the importance of the Photography
Office came not from the funds it generated but from its capacity to “demonstrate [that] we hap-
pily are not savages” and through providing “advertisements that facilitate the rapid population
of the new city (Figure 5).”80
Indeed, the “Album of Local Sights and Projected Works for the Edification of the New City”
(Álbum de vistas locaes e das obras projectadas para a edificação da nova cidade) or simply the
Álbum de vistas, functioned as a real estate advertisement for the city. It became the most widely
distributed Commission publication with over five thousand copies printed.81 Comprised of
twenty-five photos of the build-site, the Álbum de vistas depicted the full arc of Belo Horizonte’s
modern transformation, from landscapes of Curral del Rei to depictions of the future city, its
amenities, and the grand buildings taking shape.82 Coinciding with increased efforts to sell lots,
the Álbum de vistas pictured the city as a technological and modern marvel.83
Along with advertising efforts, the Commission tightly controlled who could acquire legal
land title in the urban core. Reis planned for the first 30,000 inhabitants in the urban and suburban
12 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

Figure 6.  “Plan of the Urban Part of the Cidade de Minas, designated for 30,000 inhabitants, Second
Sale of Lots.” João B. Carneiro, 1895.
Source: Secretaria de Agricultura: SA 014, Arquivo Público Mineiro.

zones.84 The plan reserved lots for four populations: former inhabitants of Curral del Rei, owners
of state-related property in Ouro Preto, state employees, and railroad technicians. By 1896, the
Commission had already issued two calls for lot purchases by putting advertisements in newspa-
pers and distributing maps to prospective buyers. To proceed with a purchase, prospective buyers
had to contact the Commission requesting a lot, terms for financing, and a time limit within
which they would build on the lot.85 The CCNC might then refuse a request or alter the terms,
particularly by shortening the period buyers received to pay the price of the land. Less qualified
applicants attempted to procure lots with promises of building quickly or with shorter payment
terms (Figure 6).86
As the map of the second public auction of lots in 1895 indicates, lot sales concentrated
in a small area of the city center near the park and railroad station. The first auction notice,
issued on 10 August 1895, had yielded disappointing results. Only 133 lots were sold in the
urban center, of which 37 sales went uncompleted due to lack of payment or other issues.87
Even when sales were slow, the Commission did not relax price requirements. Lot sales
continued to stall in 1896 despite the public calls and advertising efforts. As a result, the state
authorized the CCNC to sell lots directly to whomever they wished provided that they build
on the lot within a requisite amount of time and that the price of sale not be inferior to that of
the public auctions.88 In all of 1897, the year of the city’s inauguration, future-mayor Adalberto
Ferraz sold only 202 urban and 54 suburban lots, many of them to land speculators with no
intention of living there.89 Even residents from one of the four populations that were legally
owed lots in the capital sometimes failed to claim them.90 Sales did not pick up after 1897.
All the same, far from being an isolated exercise, Reis intended the Construction Commission
to provide a model for further projects of its kind in Brazil, which could be transformed region
by region via planned cities. From 1894 to 1895, he meticulously documented the Commission’s
work from its expropriations to its governance structure to lot sales in two “magazines” so that
academics and politicians could study the experience of building Belo Horizonte.91 Published in
August 1895, the second “Magazine of the Construction Commission” consists of six sections
spanning over 261 pages of exposition on Commission activities, including copious material on
the subdivision of land into property lots. Despite the high cost of printing them, Reis sought to
ensure that every public library and university in Brazil had a copy.92
McDonald 13

Embrace of land development and speculation as the organizing basis for urban planning cre-
ated structural inequalities in cities just as rural-to-urban migration began to transform Minas
Gerais and Brazil. Belo Horizonte never attracted the waves of European immigrants its founders
desired. Rather, the city became Brazil’s third largest metropolitan area by attracting rural and
mixed race migrants from small towns like Curral del Rei in the Minas Gerais countryside. But
the “architecture of capital” ensured that those migrants crowded into the city’s peripheral areas,
often with tenuous or no claim to the land title so essential for full membership in Belo Horizonte’s
modern society. Even though Belo Horizonte failed to sell lots, mineiro modernizers’ unified
project of reorganizing society around market relations underpinned by racist notions of moder-
nity played a key role in the birth of Brazil’s informal city.

Conclusion
The premise of modernist projects like Brasília that would shape Brazil’s twentieth century rested
on the idea that there existed a past that could be identified and removed to make way for the
future. Sixty years before Brasília, that idea was first put into action through two mirror projects:
building Belo Horizonte and destroying Canudos. Grounded in racist notions of modernity and
progress, Belo Horizonte and Canudos broke with Brazil’s colonial and imperial past and paved
the way for Brazil’s constant utopian reinventions along the twentieth century, including Brasília.
Yet, Belo Horizonte attempted to do so not through symbols and images alone, but in conjunction
with a broader reorganization of society around land development. Rather than simply falling
along race and class cleavages, this model was justified on racist assumptions about the unfitness
of black, mixed-race, and native-born Brazilians for achieving progress and modernity.
The construction of Belo Horizonte’s real estate market from scratch shows how urban infor-
mality emerged from the disjuncture between modernist aspirations and social realities in Brazil’s
first modern planned cities. From Belo Horizonte to Goiânia, Brasília, and Palmas, these cities
would remake Brazil’s interior regions just as the mid twentieth-century rural-to-urban migration
transformed Brazil into a majority urban nation. In Belo Horizonte, as in future modernist proj-
ects, elite-led modernization created a class of supposedly disposable citizens residing in precari-
ous informal settlements. The laborers who built Belo Horizonte and the soldiers at Canudos that
populated Brazil’s first favelas were unwelcome reminders of a past that elite Brazilians had little
intention of including in their modern future.

Acknowledgments
This essay benefitted from comments and feedback on early drafts presented at the Brazilian Studies
Association and New England Council of Latin American Studies meetings. The author would like to thank
Joel Wolfe, Thamyris Almeida, James Green, Daniel Rodriguez, Heidi Scott, Robert Self, and his doctoral
cohort at Brown University for their helpful comments and support.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Daniel L. McDonald https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2439-3374
14 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

Notes
  1. Brasília is the subject of a literature too extensive to list in its entirety here. See especially, Frederico
de Holanda, Brasília - cidade moderna, cidade eterna (Brasília: FAU UnB, 2010); Ana Lúcia de Abreu
Gomes, “Brasília: de espaço a lugar, de sertão a capital (1956-1960)” (PhD diss., Universidade de Brasília,
2008); Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, O capital da esperança: a experiência dos trabalhadores na construção
de Brasília (Brasília: Editora UnB, 2008); James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 103-46; Beatriz
Jaguaribe, “Ruínas modernistas,” Lugar Comum 9, no. 1 (1997): 99-115; James Holston, The Modernist
City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
  2. Beatriz Jaguaribe, “Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms,” in Alternative
Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 295-312. This
chapter is an English translation of Jaguaribe’s 1997 essay by the same name. See, Beatriz Jaguaribe,
“Ruínas modernistas.”
  3. Belo Horizonte was known as the Cidade de Minas in the District of Belo Horizonte (Bello Horisonte)
until 1901.” Belo Horizonte is used in the text for clarity. Some of the research materials included
in this paper have been digitized and can be accessed at: http://www.comissaoconstrutora.pbh.gov.
br/. This portal unites documents produced by the Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital held by the
Arquivo Público da Cidade de Belo Horizonte, the Arquivo Público Mineiro, and the Museu Histórico
Abílio Barreto.
  4. Most work on the foundation of Belo Horizonte focuses on the intellectual inspiration for Aarão Reis’s
formal urban design, the city as a means to reconcile competing economic factions within Minas Gerais,
or as a tool to jumpstart the state’s stagnant economy. See, Heliana Angotti Salgueiro “O pensamento
francês na fundação de Belo Horizonte: das representações às práticas” in Cidades capitais do século XIX,
ed. Heliana Angotti Salgueiro (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2001), 135-81. Beatriz de Almeida Magalhães and
Rodrigo Ferreira Andrade, Belo Horizonte: um espaço para a república (Belo Horizonte: Universidade
Federal de Minas Gerais, 1989); Newton Silva and Antônio Augusto d’Aguiar, eds., Belo Horizonte: a
cidade revelada (Belo Horizonte: Odebrecht, 1989). For Belo Horizonte as the product of an intra-elite
conflict between the declining metallurgical center of Minas Gerais and the ascendant coffee-producing
south, see, Maria Efigênia Resende, “Uma interpretação sobre a fundação de Belo Horizonte,” Revista
Brasileira de Estudos Políticos, no. 39 (1974): 129-61; Paul Singer, Desenvolvimento econômico e
evolução urbana (análise da evolução ecônomica de São Paulo, Blumenau, Pôrto Alegre, Belo Horizonte
e Recife) (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1974); Cláudia Maria Ribeiro Viscardi, “A capital
controversa,” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro, no. 2 (December 2007): 29-43.
  5. Though not strictly a Marxist analysis, this article owes a debt to David Harvey’s discussions of Marx
on the use and exchange values of land. The political backers and planners of Belo Horizonte ulti-
mately prioritized the land’s exchange value by going through great lengths to preserve its potential
value on the market. This was at odds with their stated aim of housing the workforce they imagined
Belo Horizonte would attract and contributed to the formation of informal settlements. However, Belo
Horizonte succeeded in neither aim despite backers embrace of speculative capitalism. The land never
appreciated as much as planners hoped and neither did the city attract and house the European—
and problematically, white—workforce that they coveted. In short, modernity remained a myth. See
especially, David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 15-24 and David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 5-23, 330-72. For the entanglement of citizenship rights, informality, and law
in twentieth-century Brazil, see Brodwyn M. Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality
in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). For an analysis of
informality in contexts across Latin America, see the edited collection Brodwyn M. Fischer, Bryan
McCann, and Javier Auyero, eds., Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin
America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
 6. See, Paige Glotzer, “Real Estate and the City: Considering the History of Capitalism and Urban
History,” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 2 (2016): 438-45.
  7. The alternate name for Alto da Favela, Alto da Estação (“Station”), comes from the settlement’s loca-
tion near the main train station serving the build-site. Originally written as “Alto da Favella,” the
modern spelling is used in the text except were directly quoted.
McDonald 15

 8. Annaes do Congresso Constituinte do estado de Minas Geraes, 1891 (Ouro Preto: Imprensa Official
do Estado de Minas Geraes, 1896), 435.
  9. A small, but active historiography in Portuguese examines Brazil’s lesser-known planned cities. Few if
any substantive works exist in English. Goiânia was founded by decree in 1933 and declared the new
capital of the state of Goiás in 1937, replacing the colonial city of Goiás (then, Vila Boa de Goyaz). The
new city became an important part of President Getúlio Vargas’s “March to the West” campaign declared
in 1938 to integrate Brazil’s vast interior into the nation. Palmas was founded in 1989 as the capital of
the new state of Tocantins created out of the northern third of Goiás in 1988. For Goiânia, see Márcia
Metran de Mello, Goiânia, cidade de pedras e de palavras (Goiânia: Editora UFG, 2006) and Tania
Daher, Goiânia, uma utopia européia no Brasil (Goiânia: Instituto Centro-Brasileiro de Cultura, 2003).
For Palmas, see Valéria Cristina Pereira da Silva, Palmas, a última capital projetada do século XX uma
cidade em busca do tempo (São Paulo, Brazil: Editora UNESP, 2010). Focused on Goiânia, Lúcia Maria
Moraes is among the first to suggest a common thread among Brazil’s planned cities, arguing that it
became state policy to segregate the poor and working class beginning with Goiânia and continuing in
Brasília and Palmas. See, Lúcia Maria Moraes, A Segregação Planejada: Goiânia, Brasília e Palmas,
2nd ed. (Goiânia: Editora da UCG, 2003). The best English-language account of Belo Horizonte’s twen-
tieth-century remains Marshall C. Eakin, Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte,
Brazil (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
10. Le Ven’s classic Marxist analysis was the first to suggest a connection between land speculation and
the formation of peripheries in Belo Horizonte. See, Michel Marie Le Ven, “As classes sociais e o
poder político na formação espacial de Belo Horizonte” (Master’s thesis, Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais, 1977).
11. In 1920, Belo Horizonte had 55,563 inhabitants. By 1940, several blocks in the city center remained
unoccupied even though the population had grown to 211,377 residents. See, Flavio Villaça, Espação
Intra-Urbano no Brasil (São Paulo: Studio Nobel/FAPESP/Lincoln Institute, 1988), 123-24.
12. Regional identifies in Brazil grounded in racist ideas of progress and modernity developed over the
late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, equating economic prowess with whiteness. See, Barbara
Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: Sao Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2015) and Stanley E. Blake, The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and
Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).
13. Robert Edgar Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972), 123. Black (583,048) and mestiço (1,112,255) persons taken together com-
prised approximately 53% of Minas Gerais’s total population of 3,184,099. By comparison, Ouro
Preto’s population was comprised of 22,682 whites (38.3%), 8,093 blacks (13.7%), 6666 indigenous
persons (11.3%), and 21,808 mestiços (36.8%). Directoria Geral de Estastística, Sexo, raça, e estado
civil, nacionalidade, filiação, culto, e analphabetismo da população recenseada em 31 de Dezembro
de 1890 (Rio de Janeiro: Oficina da Estatistica, 1898), 2, 62.
14. Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White; Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974), 37. Buttressed by the rise of eugenics in Latin America, this belief
was common among Latin American elites, including doctors, public health advocates, and urban
reformers. Brazilian elites largely accepted racist theories that Brazil’s black population was an imped-
iment to modernity. Gradually, they believed, miscegenation between white and black people would
make Brazil’s population gradually become whiter and thus, in their view, better suited to modernity.
See also, Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991), 88-90.
15. Thomas W. Merrick and Douglas H. Graham, Population and Economic Development in Brazil:
1800 to Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), Table V-2, 95. See also, Tarcísio
Rodrigues Botelho, Mariangela Porto Braga, e Cristiana Veigas de Andrade, “Imigração e família em
Minas Gerais no final do século XIX,” Revista Brasileira de História 27, no. 54 (2007): 155-76. The
percentage of immigrants going to Minas Gerais reached its peak in 1896 with 14% of the total. Most
went to the coffee fields in the south and west of the state.
16. Daryle Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001), 92-95. The removal of the state capital to Belo Horizonte spared Ouro Preto
the massive urban renovation projects it likely would have undergone had it remained the capital.
16 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

17. In 1789, Portuguese imperial forces squashed a conspiracy among mineiro elites to declare indepen-
dence and keep its mineral wealth in-state, an affair known as the Inconfidência Mineira.
18. The idea was not altogether novel, having been broached during the empire and under Portuguese colo-
nial rule. Abílio Barreto, Belo Horizonte: memória histórica e descritiva (Belo Horizonte: Fundação
João Pinheiro, 1995), v. II, 279-85. Members of the Inconfidência Mineira of 1789 had likewise pro-
posed moving the capital.
19. Annaes do Congresso Constituinte, 125.
20. Annaes do Congresso Constituinte, 196. This statement contains significant racial undertones as
Brazilian elites of the late nineteenth-century increasingly adopted racialized understandings of
regional identities, comparing the Northeast unfavorably with the supposedly more modern and whiter
São Paulo.
21. Cláudia Maria Ribeiro Viscardi, O teatro das oligarquias: uma revisão da “política do café com leite”
(Belo Horizonte: Editora C/Arte, 2001), 42-43. During the First Republic (1889-1930), elites in Minas
Gerais entered into an arrangement with their counterparts in São Paulo, the so-called política do café
com leite (“politics of coffee and milk”), in which the two states alternated the presidency. Building
Belo Horizonte was an important part of this broader strategy of exerting national influence.
22. State governors received the title of “president” during the First Republic (1889-1930), a reflection of
the high level of autonomy given to Brazilian states.
23. See João Pinhero, “Mensagem de 7 de abril de 1891,” articles 5 and 6, in Joaquim Nabuco Linhares,
Mudança da capital, “Ouro Prêto-Belo Horizonte” (Belo Horizonte: Conselho da Medalha da
Inconfidência, 1957), 102.
24. Annaes do Congresso Constituinte, 84.
25. John D. Wirth, Minas Gerais in the Brazilian Federation, 1889-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1977), 3-5.
26. See João Pinhero, “Mensagem de 7 de abril de 1891” articles 17 and 18, in Linhares, Mudança da
capital, 102.
27. Annaes do Congresso Constituinte, 446.
28. Wirth, Minas Gerais, 212-15. Of the 8,500 contos allotted for immigration from 1891 to 1894, over
half benefited cities in coffee-producing southern Minas Gerais, where most immigrants settled.
Immigration subsidies would become a regular budgetary item by 1900. See, “Balanço de tabelas de
1891-94” in Wirth, Minas Gerais, 213.
29. Annaes do Congresso Constituinte, 152. Eustacio also petitioned for the government to honor an 1889
contract to create an immigrant colony in southern Minas Gerais.
30. Ibid., 373.
31. Ibid. Bandeirantes were mixed-race runaway-slave catchers of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies that became lionized as symbols of São Paulo’s supposedly unique capacity for boldness and
entrepreneurship.
32. Amy Chazkel, Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 21. The Haussmann-inspired reorganization of Rio’s city
center under mayor Pereira Passos (1902-1906) is perhaps the best known of these efforts. See also,
Teresa A. Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-1930 (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
33. A precursor to the CCNC, the Comissão d’Estudo das Localidades indicadas para a nova Capital
(Commission for the Study of the Indicated Locales for the New Capital) studied five locations: Belo
Horizonte, Várzea de Marçal, Paraúna, Barbacena, and Juiz de Fora. Their report belied the engineers’
concern over finding a location with good hygienic conditions. Aarão Reis initially chose a different
site, Várzea do Marçal as the ideal place for the new capital. See, Luiz Fernandes de Assis, “A mudança
da capital: sessão extraordinária do Congresso Mineiro-Barbacena/1893,” Cadernos da Escola do
Legislativo 3, no. 6 (December 1997): 159.
34. Heliana Angotti Salgueiro, Engenheiro Aarão Reis: o progresso como missão (Belo Horizonte:
Sistema Estadual de Planejamento/Fundação João Pinheiro, 1997), 27-63, 168-69. Reis was born in
1853 in Belém in the northeastern state of Pará. He studied at the Escola Politécnica in Rio de Janeiro,
graduating in with degree in civil engineering in 1874. Like many of his colleagues, Reis was a posi-
tivist and eager reader of August Comte. See also, Todd A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation:
McDonald 17

Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906-1930 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004).
35. Aarão Reis, trans., A escravdão dos negros (reflexões) (Rio de Janeiro, 1883), xii. In his introduction
to his 1881 Portuguese translation of the Marquis de Condorcet’s Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres
(“Reflections on Black Slavery”), Reis framed the struggle for abolition as a necessary stage of the
evolution of society toward modernity.
36. Commissão Constructora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos: publicação periodica, descrip-
tiva e estatistica, feita, com autorisação do governo do estado, sob a autorisação do engenheiro chefe
Aarão Reis, vol. II (Rio de Janeiro: H. Lombaerts & C., 1895), 26. The 1893 state constitution in
Minas Gerais continued a trend in nineteenth-century Brazilian law of expanding the uses of land as a
financial asset. The 1850 Lei de Terras (Land Law), for example, codified numerous property rights,
including making it possible to use land as a guarantee for financing. See, Raquel Rolnik, A Cidade e
a lei: legislação, política urbana e territórios na cidade de São Paulo, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: FAPESP/
Studio Nobel, 1997), 25 apud Tito Flávio Rodrigues de Aguiar, “Vastos subúrbios da nova capital:
formação do espaço urbano na primeira periferia de Belo Horizonte” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal
de Minas Gerais, 2006), 152-53.
37. David Campista to Aarão Reis, July 8, 1894, Arquivo Público Mineiro, Belo Horizonte (hereafter,
APM), Secretaria da Agricultura, Comissões de Obras e Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital
(hereafter, SACC), box 4, packet 4. Campista and Reis debated how to best compensate landowners.
Campista’s letter proposed that they be compensated with the “real value” of their property plus a
subjective estimate of the difficulty involved in moving their family and/or ceasing business activities
in the local (it’s unclear if this extra cost was ever paid).
38. Commissão Constructora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos, vol. II, 11. Brazil’s basic
currency unit was the mil-réis, in use since 1846. One mil-réis, written as 1$000, was the equivalent
of one thousand réis. The average exchange rate in 1892 was 3.82 mil-réis per US$1 according to
Global Financial Data, http://www.globalfinancialdata.com, as cited in Chazkel, Laws of Chance, 284,
footnote 78. The total expenditures on expropriations in 1890, then, was approximately the value of
$5,473,080 in 2018 dollars.
39. Racial categorization was fluid and census techniques imprecise, complicating an exact breakdown
of the population in Curral del Rei. That said, the 1890 census indicates that nonwhite persons (57%)
outnumbered white inhabitants (43%) in the munipalicty of Sabará to which Curral del Rei belonged.
Nonwhite inhabitants included 1,207 or 17% preto (black), 1,355 or 19% caboclo (mixed indigenous
and white), and 2,391 or 33.6% mestiço (mixed black and white). White people were counted at 3,057
of the 7,109 inhabitants. Directoria Geral de Estastística, Sexo, raça, e estado civil, nacionalidade, fil-
iação, culto, e analphabetismo da população recenseada em 31 de dezembro de 1890 (Rio de Janeiro:
Oficina da Estatística, 1898), 68.
40. Commissão Constructora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos: publicação periodica, descrip-
tiva e estatistica, feita, com autorisação do Governo do Estado, sob a autorisação do engenheiro chefe
Aarão Reis, vol. I (Rio de Janeiro: H. Lombaerts & C., 1895), 13.
41. Barreto, Belo Horizonte, 71.
42. Ibid. Expropriations began on May 23, 1894.
43. The state government separated “the district of Bello Horisonte” from Sabará on June 5, 1894. See, “Decreto
n. 716,” June 5, 1894, Estado de Minas Geraes, APM, Obras Públicas, Obras Públicas Diversas, no. 609.
44. Survey of the land and house of Francisco José da Silva Reis, October 29, 1894, Arquivo Público
da Cidade de Belo Horizonte, Belo Horizonte (hereafter, APCBH), Secretária da Administração,
Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital (hereafter, AI-CCNC), Cartografia, packet 389, no. 194.
45. Commissão Constructora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos, vol. II, 12.
46. Brothers Verlangieri to Aarão Reis, September 23, 1894 apud Carlos Alberto Oliveira, “Na sombra da
construção da Nova Capital de Minas: o documento-indicador de um conflito” Tempo de Histórias no.
17 (2010), 117-25. Their appeal for protection from the Italian government may explain why this is
one of the few surviving letters of its kind. It is unclear whether they were longtime residents or more
likely, had arrived more recently to participate in constructing the new capital.
47. For a comparison of La Plata, Argentina, Belo Horizonte, and Washington, D.C., see de Aguiar, “Vastos
subúrbios,” 75-124.
18 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

48. Text reads: “State of Minas Gerais, General Plan of the Cidade de Minas organized by geodesic, topo-
graphic and cadastral plans of Bello Horisonte by the Construction Commission of the New Capital
under the direction of civil engineer Aarão Reis and approved by Decree No. 80 of April 15, 1895.”
49. Registry Book for Sales of Urban and Suburban Lots, c.1895-1996, APCBH, AI-CCNC, Tombamento,
Diversos, no. 325. This source cites 3,369 lots in the urban core, though more undoubtedly were
demarcated later. Some discrepancy exists between sources over the total number of lots. Aguiar
counts approximately 7,245 in the urban center and another 9,748 in the suburbs. The rural area of
the city was not subdivided into lots, except where agricultural colonies were established. See also, de
Aguiar, “Vastos subúrbios,” 424-25.
50. Summary of Decree 803, January 11, 1894, APM, Secretária do Interior, Obras Públicas, Comissões de
Obras e Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital, no. 282.
51. Secretary of Agriculture to Aaron Reis, January 24, 1895, Museu Histórico Abílio Barreto, Belo
Horizonte (hereafter, MHAB), Comissão Construtora, Documentos Administrativos (hereafter,
CCDA), Ofícios, no. 29.
52. Ibid.
53. Francisco Bicalho to Commission Agent, November 14, 1895, APCBH, AI-CCNC, Correspondência,
Ofícios, packet 259.
54. O Contemporaneo also estimated that 2,500 European immigrants entered Belo Horizonte in the first
few months of 1987. If we take these estimates to be accurate, this suggests that a significant portion
of the foreign workforce arrived toward the end of the capital’s construction. See, Jeffry Adelman,
“Urban Planning and Reality in Republican Brazil: Belo Horizonte, 1890-1930” (PhD diss., Indiana
University, 1974), 70-71. The estimate of 7,000 is cited in O Contemporaneo, November 20, 1897,
p. 2.
55. Significant documentation certainly attests to the presence of Italians on the build-site, including a
beneficiary society (Sociedade Cooperativa e Mútuo Socorro, União Operários Italianos) already
operating before 1898. See, Petition for lot for the construction of the headquarters of the Cooperative
and Mutual Aid Society of the Union of Italian Workers, September 20, 1897, MHAB, CCDA, sub-
series 4, no. 11. However, pay records do no show a predominance of Italian or Spanish names, but
rather of Brazilian or Portuguese ones. Given that relatively few Portuguese immigrants were reported
to have come to Belo Horizonte, a significant portion of names in Portuguese were likely native-
born Brazilians. See, for example, Payment records August 1894, March 1895 and March/April 1898,
September 1, 1894-April 4, 1895, May 6, 1898, APCBH, AI-CCNC, Contabilização, Demonstrativos
Contábeis, packet 51.
56. Aarão Reis frequently corresponded with O Contemporano. When difficulties constructing a rail
connection to Belo Horizonte were delaying construction in January 1985, the paper affirmed that
“Minas [Gerais] owes much to most distinct Sr. Dr. Reis who, on the matter in question, is proving,
once again, his technical competence and uncommon tenancity.” See, O Contemporaneo, January 20,
1985, p. 1.
57. Francisco Martins Dias, Traços históricos e descriptivos de Bello Horizonte (Belo Horizonte:
Typographia de Bello Horizonte, 1897), 84 as quoted in de Aguiar, “Vastos subúrbios,” 151.
58. For Canudos, see Robert M. Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern
Brazil, 1893-1897 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
59. Memo from Aarão Reis to the 4th, 5th, and 6th Division Heads, January 10, 1895, MHAB, CCDA,
subseries 4, no. 5.
60. Commissão Constructora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos, vol. II, 30. Historian Abílio
Barreto estimates that the initial Commission administration numbered around 147 people between
March 1894 and May 1895.
61. Alto da Estação was located in the XIV Urban Section, today the neighborhood of Floresta.
62. Aarão Reis and Francisco Bicalho, as well as a majority of the engineering staff, studied at the Escola
Politécnica and resided in Rio de Janeiro. It is possible that Alto da Favela was so named because of
its similarity to the Morro da Favela created by soldiers returning to Rio de Janeiro from the war in
Canudos in 1897.
63. Licenses from 3rd Division, June 26, 1897, and November 14, 1897, APCBH, AI-CCNC, Diversos,
packet 13.
McDonald 19

64. Adelman, “Urban Planning and Reality,” 42, 106-7. In 1907, Barro Preto was estimated to be com-
prised of around 280 shacks and improvised homes.
65. Silva and d’Aguiar, Belo Horizonte, 59.
66. Adelman, “Urban Planning and Reality,” 42, 103-7.
67. Bernardo Pinto Monteiro, Relatório ao Conselho Deliberativo − 12 de setembro de 1899 a 31 de
agosto de 1902 (Belo Horizonte: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de Minas Gerais, 1902), 43. In 1898,
Ferraz had designated the VI section of the suburbs to be subdivided into lots and sold at a cheap price
to residents of Alto da Favela and Leitão at low prices, though it is unclear if this in fact occurred. See,
Berenice Martins Guimarães, “Cafuas, barracos e barracões: Belo Horizonte, cidade planejada” (PhD
diss., Instituto Universitário de Pesquisa do Rio de Janeiro, 1991), 91-92. Exact locations and informa-
tion on early workers’ neighborhoods are imprecise and fragmentary. As of 1902, the “workers’ area”
(área operária) was comprised of 43 blocks of approximately 651 lots (4 blocks were reserved for
other purposes within the area). See also, de Aguiar, “Vastos subúrbios,” 165.
68. Adelman, “Urban Planning and Reality,” 81-86, 184-5. In 1987-1988, a recession and slowing pace of
construction caused many laborers to leave Belo Horizonte. Adelman estimates of the 6,000 foreigners
in the city by 1900, more than 60% left by 1906.
69. For the spatial evolution of Belo Horizonte’s suburbs in the early twentieth century, see Aguiar, “Vastos
subúbios,” 304-93. After 1898, the state government of Minas Gerais took steps to further liberate land
speculation in the city. In 1909, Decree n. 2.486 established new, strict standards for giving of free lots
to workers in the city. See also, Guimarães, “Cafuas, barrações, e barracos,” 108-110.
70. Secretary of the Chief Engineer to the Chief of the Sixth Division, July 4, 1895, MHAB, CCDA, Ofícios,
no. 98. Sample comprised of 14 surviving pay records from October 1897. See, Payment Receipts
for Commission Employees, August 1, 1894, to May 6, 1898, APCBH, AI-CCNC, Contabilização,
Demonstrativos Contábeis, no. 51. Unskilled laborers received 3.5 mil-réis per day. In contrast, an
engineer 1st class earned a minimum of 8 mil-réis, a section head received 10 mil-réis, a division head
12 mil-réis, and the chief engineer himself 15 mil-réis.
71. Petition from the Undersigned to the Chief Engineer of the Construction Commission, August 5, 1894,
APM, SACC, box 4, packet 4. A petition to Aarão Reis containing 97 signatures, likely from techni-
cians and other skilled laborers that had official standing within the CCNC, complained of food prices.
72. Captain Antonio Lopes de Oliveira arrived in April 1894 to install the city’s first police battalion.
Aarão Reis to David Campista, April 18, 1894, APM, SACC, box 4, packet 9. See also, Contracts for
the Illumination, Supply, and Feeding of the Imprisoned Poor in the Prisons of Ouro Preto and Bello
Horisonte 1895-1911, APM, Chefia de Polícia, Contratos, no. 297. Records indicate that the police
force was very active, regularly conducting operations requiring multiple officers. See, Report on
Police Operations, August 1897, APM, Chefia de Polícia, Operações Policias, box 9, packet 13-23.
73. Reis returned to Rio de Janeiro for health reasons and to assume responsibility for the renovation of
what would become the Palácio do Catete (Catete Palace), home of Brazil’s president. A desire by
Chrispim Jacques Bias Fortes, newly elected as governor, to use the CCNC for political patronage
purposes may also have hastened Reis’s departure. See, Adelman, “Urban Planning and Reality in
Republican Brazil,” 67-68. Bicalho was born in São João del Rei, Minas Gerais in 1847. Like Reis, he
studied at the Escola Politécnica in Rio de Janeiro, graduating in 1871.
74. See, Barreto, Belo Horizonte, 79, footnote 41. Ferraz was a lawyer by training, one of the few nonen-
gineers in the Commission hierarchy. He had served as both chief of police of Minas Gerais and as the
judicial consultant to Aarão Reis from 1892 to 1894. As part of the reorganization, the state eliminated
the vertical division/section structure in favor of ten equivalent divisions. In order, the new divisions
included Central Administration, Accounting, Municipal Services, Calculations, Railways, Pavement,
Demarcation, and Bridges, Buildings, Water, Sanitation, and Housing for Public Functionaries.
75. Though the fine category is left blank, one of the few surviving pay slips reads thus: “To the worker of
the name João Gonçalves this day released from service from the 1st division, was given this receipt
declaring that he worked 3.5 days, for a salary of 3$500, having received a total of 12$250, of which
[blank] shall be discounted due to [blank] days’ worth of fines plus [blank] due to unreturned tools;
such that he will receive 12$250 in liquid cash.” Payment receipt from the Accounting Division to
João Gonçalves for work for the 1st Division, October 27, 1897, APCBH, AI-CCNC, Contabilização,
Comprovantes de Despesas, no. 93.
20 Journal of Urban History 00(0)

76. Annual Report of Costs and Services Executed by the Commission in 1897, 1898, MHAB, CCDA,
subseries 19, no. 2. This would be equal to approximately $592.77 in 1892 U.S. dollars. See, Global
Financial Data, http://www.globalfinancialdata.com, as cited in Chazkel, Laws of Chance, 284, foot-
note 78.
77. Barreto, Belo Horizonte, 411. Bicalho said this to defend the direct sale of property lots in the urban
core to wealthy individuals outside of public auction in August 1896 after slow sales.
78. The Passos reforms (1902-1910), so-called after the then-mayor of Rio de Janeiro Francisco Pereira
Passos, likewise removed reminders of Brazil’s slavocratic and colonial past in favor of European,
especially Parisian, inspired architecture and urban design. Notably, Passos forced former residents of
Rio’s notorious cortiços (“tenements”) out of the city center to neighborhoods on the city’s periphery.
Employed by the municipal government, photographer Augusta Malta depicted the reforms through
thousands of photographs. See, Amanda Danelli Costa, “Cidade, reformas urbanas e modernidade:
o Rio de Janeiro em diálogo com João do Rio e Augusto Malta” (PhD diss., Pontífica Universidade
Católica do Rio de Janeiro, 2011).
79. Commissão Constructora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos, vol. II, 37. From January
to April 1985, the unit received 4,136 mil-réis in salaries and monthly payments of 404 mil-réis for
supplies and equipment. Over that time, the unit produced a staggering 1,584 prints. The prints were
valued at 4,542 mil-réis. For works on the Gabinete Fotográfico, see, Rogério Pereira Arruda, Álbum
de Bello Horizonte—signo da construção simbólica de uma cidade no início do século XX (Belo
Horizonte: UFMG/FAFICH, 2000) and Anna Karina Castanheira, “Pioneiros da fotografia em Belo
Horizonte: O gabinete fotográfico da Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital (1894-1897),” Vária
História, no. 30 (2003): 37-67.
80. Ibid., 36-37. Ferreira’s unit sold 468 individual prints by 1895.
81. Contract for Ehrhard Brand for the Organization of a Photographic Album, April 29, 1895, APCBH,
AI-CCNC, Assuntos Administrativos, Contratos, no. 032. Reis contracted Ehrhard Brand, a private
photographer, to produce the Álbum de vistas with assistance from the Photography Office.
82. Aarão Reis, org, Álbum de vista locaes e das obras projectadas para a edificação da nova cidade,
1895.
83. Ibid., 59.
84. Commissão Constructora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos, vol. II, 11, 19.
85. Table of Persons Applying for Lot Purchases in the New Capital, August 20, 1895, MHAB, CCDA,
sub-series 21, no. 1.
86. An associate from the Rio commercial firm Fonseca & Cia acquired a lot for 5$150 (5 mil-réis) per
m2 payable over four years. By comparison, one Carlos Eduardo de Monte Verde “resident of Bello
Horisonte” requested the same rate for the land but offered “to obligate himself to make it [the pay-
ment] within the term of a year.” See, José Baptista Barreira Vianna (associate of the firm Fonseca e
Cia) to Construction Commission, December 7, 1895, APCBH, AI-CCNC, Correspondência, Cartas,
no. 215; Carlos Eduardo de Monte Verde to Construction Commission, December 10, 1895, APCBH,
AI-CCNC, Correspondência, Cartas, no. 215.
87. Report of Lots Sold in Call of August 10, 1895, September 11, 1895, MHAB, CCDA, subseries 7, no.
1. The average price for an urban lot was approximately 314 mil-réis or 546 réis per m2; suburban lots
averaged 412 mil-réis or 94 réis per m2, owing to their larger area. In total, the lots sold would hypo-
thetically bring in revenue of 40,234 mil-réis provided buyers met their contracts.
88. President of Minas Gerais to Construction Commission, August 8, 1896, APM, SACC, box 1, packet 14.
89. Annual Report of Costs and Services Executed by the Commission. Ferraz even issued a require-
ment that public functionaries claim the lots owed to them by law within 30 days or lose any right to
them. There are varied estimates among historians over how many lots were sold in 1986-1987 due to
conflicting reports from Construction Commission documents, though the number was assuredly low
and disappointing. Adelman records only 210 lots sold in both years, out of the 2150 offered at public
auction. See, Adelman, “Urban Planning and Reality,” 71.
90. Francisco Bicalho to Francisco Sá, March 8, 1897, APM, SACC, box 4, packet 6. The editorial is
recorded as having come from Ferraz’s Third Division.
91. Commissão Construtora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos, vol. II, 8. Reis asked Bias
Fortes for this right in his exposition presented on May 23, 1895. Bicalho published Reis’s magazine
McDonald 21

shortly thereafter and continued his predecessor’s information gathering practices without publishing
further editions.
92. Commissão Constructora da Nova Capital, Revista geral dos trabalhos, vol. II, back cover.

Author Biography
Daniel L. McDonald is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Brown University. As a historian
of modern Latin America, his research interests center on the history of cities, citizenship, and welfare in
nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazil.