Excluding the Included: Citizenship, National Identity Discourse and Racialized Welfare Stratification in Brazil by Matthew Lymburner A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Sociology and Anthropology Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario August 2010 © 2010, Matthew Lymburner Library and Archives Bibliothgque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'gdition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 OttawaONK1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-71684-7 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-71684-7 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lntemet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. •+• Canada Abstract This thesis examines the formation of Brazil's welfare state through the lens of 'race'. Chapter 1 explains the persistence of white supremacy during a period of intense social upheaval by examining how elite attitudes regarding 'race' from the late 19 century to World War II became infused into the discourse of the nation, and ultimately became part of national culture. It concludes by linking the relationship between national identity discourse and state power to the operation of citizenship. Chapter 2 demonstrates how national identity discourse and racial ideology translate into citizenship and welfare rights through the experience of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous peoples. Chapter 3 is concerned with the exclusion of 'race' from dominant accounts of the Brazilian welfare state, exemplified by the developmentalist variant, and the significance of this exclusion. The conclusion notes the challenges in eliminating white supremacy entrenched through racial democracy, despite some limited shifts since re-democratization. Acknowledgements Theses are collective works at all stages of the project, and this is no different. While I owe far too much to too many people to do them all justice in this short page, a few warrant special consideration. Alejandra Bronfman, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Rianne Mahon and Wallace Clement are all owed great thanks for providing feedback on related, though considerably different, earlier papers. Their comments kept my passion piqued while helping me hone the project into its present form. I would also like to acknowledge the countless discussions I've had with friends and colleagues over the last four years that, in one way or another, impacted my thought process in formulating, reformulating and transforming this project. Great thanks is owed to my supervisor, Daiva Stasiulis, who got me organized and focused when I especially needed it, and also asked difficult questions when they had to be asked. Considerable input from my internal committee member, Wallace Clement, was also a great help for me in situating the project within larger disciplinary paradigms. Cristina Rojas, the external examiner who I've now had the pleasure of working with in multiple capacities, asked pointed questions in a constructive and encouraging way. The entire committee was engaged and dedicated - two traits that make all the difference. I owe thanks to my entire family for all of their continued support. Special mention is due to the outgoing members, and the incoming ones on both sides of my family, the former who have contributed so much to who I am, and the latter who will undoubtedly contribute to who I'll become. Knowing I can count on them in difficult times is a heartwarming relief. Finally, my partner Yumi is owed the biggest thanks for her unwavering love and support. While we both have struggled recently, it was a great pleasure to do it together, and I look forward to more as we start the next stage of our life journey together. To all, and to all those that I've missed here - thank you. in Table of Contents Introduction 1 Cutting Across Regimes: The Political Context of Brazil's History 5 The Developmentalist State 8 Categories of Analysis 10 Complexities within Complex Categories 15 Thesis Outline 18 Chapter 1: The Persistence of White Supremacy: Racial Ideology and Brasilidade, 1870- 1945 21 Between Culture and 'Race': the Roots of Brasilidade in Context 24 Simmering in Society: Racism from Colony to Empire 28 Grappling with European Racial Views: The Rise of Scientific Racism 33 The Reverse Prism: Whitening to Racial Democracy 39 Traversing Discursive Fields: Racial Ideology and State Machinery 46 Discourse and Citizenship in a Racial Democracy 52 Chapter 2: Citizenship and Welfare Stratification in a Racial Democracy: 1870-1950 55 Citizenship as National Identity, Rights, and Welfare 56 Brazilian Citizenship: Janus-Faced Rights 59 Deflective Democracy: Erasing 'Race' from Citizenship and Welfare 70 The Birth of the Brazilian Welfare State under Vargas 78 Discourse over Rights, Law over Practice: Racial Democracy and Segmented Citizenship 83 Chapter 3: The Historical Foundations of the Brazilian Welfare State: Rereading Traditional Accounts 86 What Kind of Stratification? Welfare States and Identity Categories 88 The BDWS: Locating the Source of the Contradiction 91 Towards Decommodification: Why Exclude 'Race'? 97 'Developing' the BDWS 101 Conclusion: New Paths, New Promises, Persistent Realities 103 Appendix 1: Schematic of Substantive Citizenship in Brazil, 1870-1950 110 References 111 IV Introduction: In the last three decades, the literature on the welfare state has grown in both breadth and complexity. The inclusion of new analytic foci to a body of work that had traditionally emphasized expenditure levels, administrative features, and policy history has broadened contemporary understanding of the processes of welfare state formation and its operation. If the 1970s and 1980s initiated this trajectory with the labor politics boom introduced through Power Resources Theory (see O'Connor and Olsen 1998) and the 1980s and 1990s responded with the gender boom driven by feminist theory (see Orloff and Pallier 2009), then the last fifteen years has witnessed the growth in the interest of 'race' as a key stratifying element embedded in the logic of certain welfare states. Yet this latter growth has hardly been ubiquitous or integrated into existing approaches to the study of the welfare state in a seamless fashion. Rather, it has been taken up unevenly, with the bulk of the attention initially geared toward Great Britain and the United States. Part of the reason for this has been the emphasis on historical factors contributing to the salience of 'race' in these countries. Both the United States and Britain were major actors in the slave trade, with the United States receiving a large percentage of slaves, and Britain's imperial dominance throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led many in their colonial holdings to eventually migrate to the metropole in the twentieth century. Yet what of other countries of the Americas, whose predominantly white elite struggled to manage the systems of inequality engendered first by colonialism and slavery, then by nation-building and capitalism? 1 2 Brazil was, in fact, the largest recipient of slaves during the slave trade1, and European settlers encountered a sizeable, if dispersed, indigenous population before disease and exploitation decimated their numbers2 (Egerton et al. 2007: 203). Brazil, however, has largely been excluded from the above expansion of the welfare studies literature, along with most other Latin American states, due to a different set of historical circumstances. As a perennially 'less-developed' country, Brazil has been relegated to a circle of welfare studies that has magnified the developmental aspects of the state and economy as overriding features of state-society relations. Consequently, less attention has gone towards applying the analytic developments of recent generations to studies of the Brazilian welfare state. This is not to say that no work has been conducted on gender, 'race', and class in relation to different aspects