Gilberto Freyre died on July 18, 1987, at the age of 87. His health had failed in recent years, reducing what had always been a remarkable productivity. Freyre’s life reflected many of the most significant cultural and intellectual trends of the century with which he was born. His genius lay in his ability to synthesize and transform Brazilian self-images so persuasively that he altered the entire world’s view of Brazil.
Freyre’s insights were deeply influenced by his contact with foreign cultures. That process began when he attended a secondary school run by U.S. Protestant missionaries in his native Recife. His father taught in the school, and Gilberto himself joined the Baptist church. The young Pernambucan then left for Baylor University in Texas, where he completed an undergraduate degree in 1920. The culture shock felt by a Brazilian in the fundamentalist segregated South must have been great. His North American education continued at Columbia University, where he studied with the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas was one of the first social scientists to attack the reigning “scientific” theories of race. He thereby furnished an important source of authority for Freyre’s instinctive suspicion of the dogma that had relegated Brazil, with its heavy African element, to supposedly inferior status.
Armed with an extensive personal knowledge of U.S. society, Freyre headed for other lands, traveling and studying in England and France. In 1923 he returned to Brazil and his native Northeast. For the remainder of his 64 years, Freyre was based in his beloved sobrado in the colonial city of Olinda, across the bay from Recife. From there he traveled far and wide, delivering lectures and disseminating his ideas.
In a country where modern universities did not exist, the ambitious young Freyre sought fame as a writer. He soon gained it with the publication of Casa grande e senzala, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1933. The ideas in this exuberant book had been adumbrated in Freyre’s earlier works, but gained classic expression in this book, which has remained in print in Brazil continuously since 1933. It appeared in Spanish in 1942, in English in 1946 (The Masters and the Slaves), and in French in 1953.
The Brazilian intellectual world was both ready and not ready for Casa grande e senzala. Brazilian intellectuals were unprepared to read a “serious” book with so many intimate details about their ancestors’ lives: loves, clothes, houses, friendships, food, and religion. Freyre showed that the elite’s evolution was irretrievably entwined with all of Brazil, especially the omnipresent slaves, but also the Indians, with their languages and culture. Freyre thus depicted a Portuguese colonizer who was very different from his English counterpart, so long thought superior by Brazilian (and U.S. and European) intellectuals.
Freyre argued that the Portuguese, product of a union between the Iberian and the Moor, lacked both the superior numbers and the rigid morality of the English. Thus, they inadvertently created a new race and a new culture—the product of biological and social mixing. So, argued Freyre, Brazil underwent a totally new form of colonization, which he later termed “Luso-tropical.” Freyre celebrated this mixture. Far from being ashamed of its “hybrid” origins, Brazilians ought to revel in a social and cultural epic unequaled in any other European-created New World colony. This is the essential message which lay at the heart of most of Freyre’s subsequent publications. It was clear that he had come a long way since his youthful commitment (now lapsed) to the Baptist faith.
The Brazilian critics of Casa grande e senzala were led by those who had implicitly or explicitly accepted the “scientific racism” still dominant in North America and Europe. They experienced a shock of recognition as they read Freyre’s description of how planters’ sons got their sexual initiation from the domestic slaves. They saw truth in the details, but were frightened by the conclusions.
Yet there was also a sense in which Brazilian readers were well prepared for Freyre’s message. Freyre was writing in the wake of a series of articulate intellectuals, such as Manoel Bomfim and Sílvio Romero, who had already rejected “scientific racism.” Alberto Torres had even denounced it as a dogma designed to demoralize Brazilians and thus facilitate foreign penetration of the country. Freyre knew these writers, whom he cited at length. The young Freyre who left Brazil to study in the United States and Europe had thus left with antiracist ideas germinating in his mind. The study and travel abroad furnished the international context into which he needed to set his portrait of Brazil.
Freyre carried forward the social and cultural portrait of Casa grande e senzala in two sequels. The first was Sobrados e mucambos in 1936 (The Mansions and the Shanties, 1963) covering the nineteenth century, and the second was Ordem e progresso in 1959 (Order and Progress, 1970) which centered on the transition from the monarchy to the new republic in the 1890s. Both volumes offer a wealth of information, especially on social and intellectual life, but neither had the impact of Casa grande e senzala. Indeed, scholars have underestimated these volumes, both for their provocative interpretations and for their leads into sources on their eras.
Freyre published 63 books and a vast number of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles. He was an influential figure in the struggle to increase financing and recognition of culture and education in Brazil. His efforts led to the creation of the Instituto Joaquim Nabuco de Pesquisas em Ciências Sociais in Recife, a key regional research center. He was a crucial figure in many other efforts to preserve Brazil’s history and culture.
Freyre prided himself on being a writer, not an academic. Any reader can see why. He would, for example, as happily cite a cookbook or a schoolyard ditty as a parliamentary speech. He was invariably irreverent and eclectic, even, for example, in his introductory sociology text (Sociologia), first published in 1945. He repeatedly refused to accept any regular academic appointment, either in Brazil or abroad, although he held countless visiting positions in the United States and Europe. Freyre wrote innumerable articles and books designed to explain Brazil to both Brazilians and foreigners. They made him the world’s most important window into Brazil. His interpretation of Brazilian slavery, for example, became a crucial point of reference in the comparative studies of slavery by Frank Tannenbaum, Stanley Elkins, and Marvin Harris. Although subsequent research on Brazilian slavery has sharply modified Freyre’s overly benevolent picture, his work still offers a wealth of insight.
As a public figure, Freyre used his influence in controversial directions. He opposed the Vargas dictatorship (1937-45), and was elected to the Constituent Assembly that wrote the Constitution of 1946. In the 1950s, he elaborated his “Luso-tropicology,” expanding his interpretation of the Portuguese colonization of Brazil into a grand theory that was quickly adopted by propagandists for the Salazar regime in Portugal as a rationale for the war to maintain Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. Freyre’s willingness to lend his prestige to that government provoked bitter attacks from anticolonialist Brazilian and Portuguese intellectuals.
That pattern was repeated when he enthusiastically supported the military coup of 1964 in Brazil. Yet none of this can detract from Freyre’s enormous contribution to the understanding of his country. With his death, Brazil and the world have lost one of Latin America’s truly preeminent pensadores.
