Political Mobilization, Party Ideology, and Lusophobia in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Pernambuco, 1822-1850

Conceptualizations of nineteenth-century Brazilian political organization have long emphasized informal structures, such as kinship and patronage networks, over formal political institutions. Political parties, for example, have often been perceived as façades for personalistic groups formed to capture the spoils of government, and devoid of ideological content and significant differentiation. Caio Prado Júnior, for example, asserted similarity in the Liberal and Conservative Parties’ class composition, interests, and political ideas, by affirming that governments had liberal and conservative labels, “without that variety of nomenclature having the slightest significance.”¹ However, such generalizations have hardly been tested at the provincial level,² and evidence from the northeastern province of Pernambuco suggests the need to reexamine such perspectives. Praieiros, the Pernambucan allies of the Liberal Party in Rio, made democratic and nationalistic appeals to the middle and lower classes through Lusophobia (virulent hatred of the Portuguese).³ As in many newly independent countries, the...