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A Fovevl oJ BigIls CilizensIip and InequaIil in TvenlielICenluv Bio

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A Fovevl oJ BigIls CilizensIip and InequaIil in TvenlielICenluv Bio de Janeivo I
Bvodvn FiscIev
Beviev I FaIIo Ficcalo
TIe Anevican HislovicaI Beviev, VoI. 115, No. 2 |ApviI 2010), pp. 591-592
FuIIisIed I The University of Chicago Press on IeIaIJ oJ lIe American Historical Association
SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.115.2.591 .
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(19891999), although most informed students of these
years have long known that Mart nez de Hoz was not
neoliberal because of any dismantling of Argentinas
state capitalism or the privatization of publicly owned
companiesof which there were virtually nonebut
because of his radical deregulation of the banking sys-
tem, a process which Veigel cogently analyzes and
rightly argues was the main factor contributing to Ar-
gentinas massive foreign debt. Subsequent chapters
compellingly dissect in detail the dilemma of the re-
stored democratic governments of the 1980s and 1990s,
unable to nd a successful economic model which
would both restore competitiveness to the economy and
tame ination, culminating with the default on the for-
eign debt and implosion of the economy in late 2001
during the government of Fernando de la Rua.
Throughout these and other chapters, the real strength
of the book is Veigels weaving together of the pres-
sures and constraints of the international economy with
the national context.
The book ends on a somewhat confusing note. After
having largely left capitalist groups out of his story, or
at least only tangentially presenteven the powerful
holding companies, or grupos economicos in the Argen-
tine political vernacular, who dominated the economy
in the 1980s and 1990she abruptly resurrects the
shopworn and highly normative characterization of the
Argentine crony capitalists, a predatory business
class that exploits the states weakness for its own ag-
grandizement at the cost of the national economys well
being, not to mention that of other groups and social
classes. Given the relative autonomy he grants to policy
makers throughout his narrative, this is a puzzling as-
sertion. To be credible, his contention that the absence
of clear rules of the game and protection of property
rights explains the countrys crony capitalist business
culture and therefore its paralysis needed to gure
more prominently in the previous chapters, rather than
being tacked on as almost an afterthought in the books
nal pages. The assertion itself is highly questionable.
As recent developments in the world economy have
demonstrated, the existence of both rules of the game
and protected property rights do not prevent cronyism.
Such a characterization obfuscates as much as it ex-
plains about the history of capitalism and capitalists in
the modern world. This aw aside, the books limita-
tions are more disciplinary than those of the author and
certainly do not diminish its value for students of Ar-
gentina or those simply interested in Argentinas re-
markable decline from Latin Americas premier nation
to chronic basket case. Though it does not provide all
the answers, it is valuable reading for understanding the
countrys ongoing crisis.
JAMES P. BRENNAN
University of California,
Riverside
BRODWYN FISCHER. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and
Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2008. Pp. xx, 464.
$65.00.
Brodwyn Fischers book will occupy a signicant place
at the intersection of studies of modern urban design,
patronage, and citizenship in Latin America. The basic
thesis is that a lack of legal rights dened the struggles
of the inhabitants of twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro
as they settled, worked, and appropriated the capital of
Brazil. Denial of rightsto stable occupation of the
land, to recognized family relations, to the status of
worker, to due process of lawwas, in Fischers view,
more important than race, class, or gender in dening
the historical identity of the majority of the inhabitants
of the cidade maravilhosa. Characterizing heteroge-
neous populations simply as the urban poor is unsat-
isfactory but, as the author recognizes, inevitable. Yet
poverty is not to be understood exclusively in material
terms, but also as a limited citizenship.
The evidence, covering the 19201970 period in over-
lapping chronological layers, is divided in sections de-
ned by autonomous juridical realms. Although codi-
cation provides the structure, descriptions show how
legal practice molded the law. In the rst part, elite ur-
ban design fueled the impulse to raze or displace lower-
class housing, creating irresolvable tensions in the con-
text of demographic growth and loading perceptions of
social difference with a difcult mix of racism, real es-
tate speculation, and hygiene. The second part of the
book examines labor rights granted under Getulio Var-
gas and enhances our understanding of the social and
cultural foundations of Latin American populism. In a
few words, it took a lot of work to become a worker: the
state created a thick labyrinth of paperwork, from birth
certicates all the way up to employment cards, which
left many without a claim to the guarantees inscribed in
Brazilian laws. Bureaucracy was not a transparent in-
strument of policy but the policy itself, by creating the
exclusions that made populism conceivable and afford-
able for Varguismo. The third part of the book examines
the effects of these exclusions on peoples access to jus-
tice. Fischer explains judicial procedures and outcomes
based on an extensive sample of cases and a study of
judicial practices and ideologies. She nds that race was
not the single or most important source of bias (p.
185); instead, increasingly frequent socially discrimi-
natory judgments about personal character (p. 178)
limited access to civil rights in this key realmof cariocas
interaction with the state. The fourth part of the book
returns to the disputes around illegal settlements.
Favelas were the locus of popular identities, capitalist
greed, and partisan disputes, bringing in a complex cast
of characters linked by a perverse dependence (p.
252) on the rents and resources of illegality. Literal and
gurative battles show favelados always demanding so-
cial and individual rights, often with durable success
and even favorable legislation passed in 1956.
This mixed legacy of popular claims and ofcial with-
holding of rights forces the reader to maintain a critical
engagement with the idea that the absence of those
Caribbean and Latin America 591
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2010
Poverty of citizenship.
rights is what denes popular urban identities. The ev-
idence shows the multiple ways in which citizenship was
undermined, corroborating urban studies that posit il-
legality not as the exception but as the dening trait of
everyday life and state-civil society relations in modern
Latin America. Even if we agree that progressive con-
stitutional articles were frankly utopian (p. 116), the
book shows the advance of rightsto health, labor, jus-
tice, and housingduring the twentieth century. Al-
though cariocas saw the steep obstacles raised by the
system, they still petitioned, occupied lands, voted,
demonstrated, and went to court. In spite of imposed
social labels and bureaucratic hurdles, men and women
dened themselves as workers who contributed to their
families, communities, and country.
Fischer uses letters, court testimonies, samba lyrics,
and other sources to observe citizen engagement with
the state. She suspects the sincerity of some of their
words, suggesting that the claim of rights was a product
of expedience rather than belief, a tool just as efcient
as appeals for graceful favors or patriarchal protection.
But the textual evidence also conrms the integrative
power of populist language. Populist rhetoric did not
result in a negative denition of urban dwellers as non-
citizens, but worked as an effective path for a mean-
ingful engagement with authorities traditionally de-
tached from urban populations, and eventually
promoted a more positive self-perception of Brazilian
workers. In the last pages of the book, politics seems to
be counterposed to rights. Indeed, the morally ambig-
uous negotiations or violence that characterize mass
politics seem the opposite of the rationality of the law,
and clientelistic ofcial tolerance of illegality appears
to be the reverse of true recognition of rights. Yet the
book itself threads between the interpretive poles of
patronage versus republicanism that often divide the
historiography of modern Latin American politics: Rio
de Janeiro was not a territory of lawlessness and prag-
matic negotiations about power or subordination, nor
a laboratory of Western republican thinking about cit-
izenship and liberal rights. It is the object of a book
sensitive to the realities of life in the modern Latin
American city.
PABLO PICCATO
Columbia University
EUROPE: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
EFREM ZAMBON. Tradition and Innovation: Sicily be-
tween Hellenism and Rome. (Historia: Einzelschriften,
number 205.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 2008. Pp.
326. 62.00.
The political history of Sicily between 289 and 241 B.C.
was complex and chaotic. There were dozens of com-
peting independent states on the island: Syracuse strug-
gled against Carthage; various Greek cities struggled
against Syracuse; the Elymaean polities of western Sic-
ily struggled against Punic domination; second-rank cit-
ies such as Akragas (Agrigentum) and Messana rose to
sudden power and then lost it again. Authoritarian rul-
ers arose out of the necessity to provide local protection
against the general violence, styling themselves in the
Hellenistic way as kings; but they contested for power
within their own domains with both oligarchies and
democratic assemblies, and civil wars and political
purges were not uncommon. Just between 288 and 285
B.C. Hicetas, the leader of Syracuse, had to face (in se-
quence) a civil war, a major threat from Carthage, a
major threat posed to the Syracusans by their own re-
bellious mercenaries, the Italic Mamertines, and a ma-
jor threat from Phintias the king of Agrigentum (p. 63).
Reading about this in Efrem Zambons study, one is
reminded of the dismaying sequence of Asia Minor en-
emies that King Attalus I listed one after the other on
his Victory Monument of ca. 230 (OGIS 273279). Sic-
ily in the mid-third century was thus a classic case study
in the anarchy that characterized the ancient Mediter-
ranean from Spain to Syria in the ve centuries before
the rise of Rome. It was Roman power that in the end
imposed a rough and ready version of peace upon all
this violent disorder (in Roman interests, of course).
There are huge gaps in our knowledge of this anar-
chic, politically kaleidoscopic, and crucial period in Sic-
ily, a period that eventually saw Romes successful rst
venture in war and hegemony beyond the Italian pen-
insula. Polybius does not deal in any detail with con-
ditions in Sicily before the arrival of the Romans in 264
B.C., and our other surviving literary-historical sources
are fragmentary. Zambons book possesses two virtues.
First, he offers a complete conspectus in English of all
the known evidencenot merely literary sources but
also the latest archaeological discoveries, as well as
analysis of coinage. Second, his perspective is not that
of the great powers (Rome or Carthage) but is
grounded in the experience of the smaller polities. This
is refreshing, and here we can glimpse complex polit-
ical, ethnic, and cultural realities. Thus the Italic rulers
of Messana on the straits between Sicily and Italy, de-
scendants of the Mamertine mercenaries who had
seized this important city ca. 287, ruled over a multi-
cultural polity where the Italic term meddix for the two
annual chief magistrates was written in Greek; the war-
lord who became King Phintias of Agrigentum in the
280s founded a new major city in his mini-kingdom,
named after himself in imitation of Alexander the
Great (it was called Phintias, like the scores of Alex-
andrias founded by the Conqueror); Elymaean Segesta
in western Sicily hated the tax-collecting Carthaginians
and played upon (or invented outright) the myth of its
founding by Aeneas in order to gain Roman favor and
support. Zambon also emphasizes that the hegemony
Rome established in Sicily during the quarter-century
of war with Carthage between 264 and 241 sat more
lightly on the smaller Sicilian states than either Punic
or Syracusan rule had ever done. The Romans under-
stood that a light hand reaches farther, and the insti-
tutions of direct Roman rule in Sicily only developed
very slowly, in response to subsequent crises (such as
the Hannibalic War).
592 Reviews of Books
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2010