Boris Fausto of the University of São Paulo offers an impressive contribution to the urban social history of Brazil’s major city at the precise juncture of its transformation into an industrial metropolis. The study is based on painstaking examination of local newspapers and criminal records stored in the State Justice Tribunal. It was written during a period when the author was supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the S.S.R.C., and the Woodrow Wilson Center. This dimension of international scholarship is reflected in the fact that Fausto’s bibliography integrates primary sources with secondary works published not only in Brazil but in Europe and North America. This practice, which seems an obvious scholarly obligation, has lately in some cases been slighted, producing, consequently, a certain body of scholarly literature lacking either rigorous archival research or recognition of scholarly production elsewhere.
What Fausto provides is a model study of criminality in the broadest sense, using descriptive and statistical data to illuminate the ways in which society defined (and dealt with) crime. His analysis grapples with major issues: deviant antisocial behavior; questions of race, sex, and class; the changing process of social control. Major chapters are devoted to topics that to date have been all but ignored by historians of urban Brazil: homicide; stealing and robbery; sexual crimes; the functioning of the judicial system.
The study focuses on the ways in which the elites classified acceptable and unacceptable behavior both legally (through the Penal Code) and in social interpretation. São Paulo’s criminal justice system remained intact until 1925, when changes diversified the formerly homogeneous process by which crimes were judged.
For the period between 1880 and 1924, certain patterns emerge. Nonwhites were more likely to be found guilty and sentenced to prison than whites. Yet of the murder cases for the period under study, an overwhelming number (32 of 57) involved whites killing other whites, with no Blacks and only two mulattos convicted of killing whites. Foreigners and immigrants were often involved in crimes, especially Italians, Portuguese, and Arabs. Women, irrespective of race, tended to receive lighter penalties for the same crimes. Minors accused of crimes, however, were dealt with harshly, most frequently in cases of stealing and robbery, less so in cases of sexual aggression. Almost all the accused criminals brought to trial were poor (although Fausto rejects the notion of any “culture of poverty” except in the most distant, sublimated manner). He concludes by warning against answers that are too closed, arguing for the need to research the topic carefully, slowly, and in a spirit of questioning. By setting modest goals and affirming the principles of empirical scholarship in the best meaning of the term, Fausto probably will not satisfy those seeking broad, overarching theoretical interpretations of race and class conflict in Brazilian history. Rather, he provides a detailed cross-section of urban life, which, taken with other studies, will help us piece together the social fabric of the past. Not only does Fausto’s study stand on its own, but it nicely complements research by José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy, Antônio Paixão, Samuel Adamo, Mark D. Szuchman, and Lyman Johnson.
