In this imaginative study of the Prados of São Paulo, Darrell E. Levi has attempted, with impressive results, to break new ground in the literature on Brazil’s great families. Drawing extensively on previously unavailable private letters, diaries, and personal reminiscences and creatively interweaving them with more conventional published sources, his A Família Prado is a skillfull reconstruction of six generations of a nationally important family of the Empire (1822-1899). The arriviste Prados’ early solidarity as a corporate group rested on economic foundations carefully transferred from sugar to coffee plantations in the 1850s and 1860s under the capable management of their family patriarch and architect, the Baron of Iguape (Antonio da Silva Prado). Their parallel entrepreneurial successes, first in banking, then in railroads, immigration schemes and nascent industry, perpetuated their cohesion as a family throughout the century. Levi traces their economic rise and eventual fragmentation as a corporate group in the present century against a comprehensive backdrop of the carefully arranged marriages, influential personal connections, and complementary occupational specialization perpetuating their wealth and political voice into the final decades of the monarchy. As a “modernizing elite family, the Prados not only shaped the course of economic growth on the booming western coffee frontier but they also exercised a special influence on the cultural content of emerging salon society in the province’s burgeoning capital.
Relying on modernization theory in order to characterize the family’s role as “Europeanizers,” Levi is less successful in defining the Prado case as an alternative to Gilberto Freyre’s elite patriarchal family. Some readers will prefer to see Levi’s “modernizing elite family” as less distinct from Freyre’s archetype than he claims, and, unfortunately, in certain respects just as ambivalent. In evaluating Freyre’s model against the Prado case, Levi’s own perspective is not always clear. In his introduction he uncritically subscribes to an absoluteness for nineteenth-century patriarchal domination which even Freyre recognized as permitting both deviance and decay. However, Levi later points out the parallels between Prado organizational evolution and Freyre’s declining patriarchy in a post-1889 context (p. 132). Finally, by so heavily basing his conclusion that the Prados were a deviant case on female figures like Dona Viridiana or on the rebelliousness of pampered Prado offspring like Eduardo, Levi is, as he partly acknowledges, on shaky ground. Looking beyond his regrettable conversion into “matriarchs” of elite women who managed to gain some personal autonomy, a distortion Famíliar from Freyre’s Sobrados e Mucambos, the question remains as to why their independence is not more explicitly explained in terms of particular sets of identifiable family circumstances which historically probably always permitted wider deviation from patriarchal ideals than is commonly assumed.
Nevertheless, these objections are also related to limitations in the general literature on the Brazilian elite family which has yet to explore the validity of the patriarchal model so widely popularized by nineteenth-century jurists like Alencar Araripe. Meanwhile, readers will find A Família Prado insightful for its welcome integration of the broader themes of economic and social change with the history of one elite family. One would hope that this Portuguese translation of a first-rate doctoral dissertation would soon appear in English as an even more refined monograph in the modestly growing literature on Brazilian family history.
