Few studies have examined the impact of modernization on the ruling elites in the small towns and cities of Brazil’s northeast. None have explored the topic using as sophisticated a research method as Ronald Chilcote’s. Combining printed sources with survey data and impressions gathered from research trips beginning in the late 1960s and continuing to the early 1980s, Chilcote analyzes the “ruling classes” in two neighboring cities, Juazeiro, Bahia, and Petrolina, Pernambuco. Though he provides a historical sketch on the power elites in these communities that goes back to the nineteenth century, his focus is on the post-1945 years, when these communities came into contact with new political and economic forces and ideas.
Based on intelligent and reasonably consistent methods, he determined and reportedly interviewed almost all of the power brokers in Petrolina and Juazeiro. He found that their values were generally more sympathetic to “patriarchy and paternalism than to competitive capitalism” (p. 214). They tended to be active in the organizational life of the communities but recognized that real power was in the hands of the federal and state governments. They thus were interested and involved in state and federal politics.
Chilcote argues that coronelismo managed to survive despite the extension of state power that characterized the first Vargas government (1930-45). During the populist republic (1945-64), however, power fragmented in Juazeiro. In Petrolina, the situation was different; one family gained control over politics and the economy by the mid-1950s and established a new coronelismo in which it allied with “bourgeois elements” as an active participant in the new commercial and industrial ventures in the area. This family consolidated its power during the military government, but by the early 1980s its rule was being challenged.
Chilcote has produced a fine study of the persistence of tradition and the adaptations effected by change in two communities in the interior of Brazil. His epistemology, however, at times raises questions. His use of “ruling classes” seems overly broad since most of the members were from the middle class and several considered themselves poor. Moreover, on occasion his conclusions are more clear than his arguments are compelling. For example, he suggests that capitalism and development made more inroads into Petrolina than Juazeiro because in the former power was “concentrated in a single family” while in Juazeiro it was diffuse and dependent (p. 290). But his argument largely ignores other, potentially more persuasive, lines of investigation, such as an exploration of influences shaping individual power brokers in each of these communities that may have resulted in a differing receptivity to capitalistic forms and opportunities.
Despite these objections, Chilcote has produced a study impressive in its questions and methodology, one that should be read by Brazilianists and by those interested in the adaptation to modernism by traditional communities.
