Brodwyn Fischer, A Porverty of Rights.

Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de

Janeiro. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2008.

Objective:

The book studies the formation of poor people’s citizenship. It shows how these destitute
residents of Rio de Janeiro carved a place for themselves in the city, and used it to gain a foothold
in a rapidly changing legal terrain. It explains how their place both in the city and the city of laws
feel short of full entitlement, what ensured a poverty of rights that define their most recent urban
destitution. This intertwined process of urbanization and citizenship formation has been
considered one of the most striking contradictions of Brazilian democracy. This process runs
through the 1920s to the 1960s, when Brazil became a mostly urban country and citizenship
entailed social, economic and political rights. Cities became the ground of experimentation in
which political leaders, like Getulio Vargas, sought to transform Brazilian society by exchanging
social and economic rights for popular support. Being the capital, Rio de Janeiro was the core of
this dynamic. However, the promise of citizenship was limited an failed to meet the expectation
of mostly excluded rural people and urban poor: “people for whom neither economic prosperity
nor citizenship was fully attainable, who built their lives with a patchwork of scanty rights and
hard-won tolerance, and whose access to theoretically public benefits and guarantees was scarce
or nonexistent.” (p. 2)

Before the prominent historiography about working class, women, Afro-descendent, and
immigrants, Fischer states “neither race nor gender not working-class identities were generalized
and powerful enough to define the relationship between the urban poor and their surrounding
society” (p.3). Along with embracing a class, regional or racial identity, “they also understood
themselves in less specific and segmented terms, simply as poor people trying to get by in the
city” (p. 3). They were a heterogeneous group held together by the common experience of living
in poverty. This was not an obstacle, but what permitted to forge a common identity and
collective action.

Argument:

In studying how poor people’s common experience of the city helped to forge Brazilian
citizenship, the book takes as a point of departure the notion that poverty came as the result of
poor people’s relationship with legal rights and institutions, and vice versa. This is a weak legal
status is a primary component of poverty in Brazil. The problem in approaching to the legal
inequality in Brazil is the blurred lines of the exclusion (unlike the forma segregation encrypted
in the law in South Africa and US South). Brazilians laws are officially universal, and there is no
discrimination of the basis of race, ethnicity or place of birth. However, as she notes, the legal
inequality is not to be found in the letter, but in its application, and the assumptions that laid on it.
For example, in spite of the increasing Vargas-era benefits and guarantees of citizenship,
“Brazilian laws required bureaucratic agility, legal knowledge, and material resources that the
very poor simply did not possess. […] Vulnerability and weak access to legality, rather than any
more overt discrimination, were at the heart of Brazilian rights poverty.” (p. 6). All in all, poverty
of rights shaped the moderns experience of urban poverty in Brazil.

The people’s access to the Vargas-era welfare benefits depended on their ability to access labor
rights, as well as the access to education and housing. Establishing a home depended on building
codes, sanitary laws, and property rights, while personal freedom hinged on their capacity to
prove they were not criminals but respectable citizens. Therefore, in order to survive and to climb
up in the social ladder, urban poor struggled for basic legal recognition. This has not been the
focus of much historical attention. Their struggle has been tagged as evidence of populist
cooptation, incomplete modernization, or political apathy, while their daily negotiations don’t
qualify as revolutionary.

Even when they could not achieve full equality or citizenship, they found a place in the legal
system, something unusual before 1930. “By managing to claim some degree of urban
permanence, most families began to build a legal existence, establishing a critical foothold in the
city of laws”. (p. 7).

The ambiguous but accretive legacy of Getulio Vargas: “…his government did add legal
protections and guarantees to the arsenal of tools with which the very poor might fight for a
decent existence, making it sometimes possible for such people to negotiate their public lives on
the basis of rights rather than of patronage or charity.” (p. 8)

The book is divided in four parts, each of which explores the interactions between the urban poor
and the legal system during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The first part (chapter 1
and 2) refers to the evolution of the urban planning and regulatory law in Rio until the 1960,
highlighting the uneven distribution of public resources, and the social and political significance
of the ineffective bans on the sorts of living arrangements that allowed the very poor to remain in
the city. The second part (chapters 3 and 4), examines the labor and social welfare laws during
the Vargas era (1930-1954), exploring its limits, and in particular how documentary requirements
and bureaucratic hurdles complicated the access of urban poor to these benefits. The third part
(chapter 5 and 6) examines the conflictive relationship between the urban poor and the criminal
justice system of Rio from the 1920s to the 1960s, and “argues that Vargas-era reforms of
criminal law and practice often served to strip Rio’s poorest populations (p. 8) of significant civil
rights, thus eroding their already weak moral faith in justice so dispensed.” (p. 9). The fourth part
(chapters 7 and 8) turns to the exceptional case of rights struggle: housing, the only one able to
forge a full-fledged social movement. Although their shantytowns remained where they were,
some of them never received property land rights, perpetuating the ambiguity before the state,
what resembles the metaphor of ambiguity of poor people’s place in Brazil’s city of laws. Each
part runs parallel (and not chronologically) and each can be read as separated essay. This
responded to the legal tradition of Brazil where independent legal codes contain the regulation in
separated issues. All of them were autonomous from each other.
Sources: They come from a broad spectrum of documentary and testimonial sources: civil and
criminal courts cases, juridical writings, legal codes, ministerial records, legislative debates,
statistics, photographs, oral histories, samba lyrics, newspapers, early works about favelas and
urban poverty, records from presidents, prefects, governors, bureaucrats, etc. She does both
qualitative and quantitative analysis.

In regard of the theoretical focus, she says: “I have not devoted much space to overt theoretical
analysis. Debates about popular agency, race relations, the links between law and society, the
evolution of urban space, and the form and meaning of citizenship are all present here. But this
book seeks to contribute to them through the story it tells rather than through abstract theoretical
discussions.” (p. 11)

The actual character and practical meaning of rights during Vargas: “Charity, in short, was quite
literally a poor alternative to rights. Although many were surely grateful for what help the
charities provided, it was often scanty, moralistic, and dependent on strict adherence to the
charities’ idealized conception of poor people’s social role. In this sense, it fit neatly with the
Vargas government’s general conception of social and economic citizenship as a restricted and
meritocratic sphere; rights for the poor were really privileges, earned through model social
behavior and agile bureaucratic navigation.” (p. 142)

The power of documents when poor attended before criminal justice: “Poor Cariocas’ scarce
access to legal housing and legal work translated directly into a poverty of rights in the criminal
justice system. People whose poverty and lack of bureaucratic knowledge had already left them
more likely to be undocumented, illegally housed, and unstably employed also found themselves
much more likely to be arrested, abused, and convicted in criminal courts, events that in turn
deepened their material and legal poverty.” (p. 208)