Cleansing Honor with Blood: Masculinity, Violence, and Power in the Backlands of Northeast Brazil, 1845–1889

This book, based on Martha Santos’s 2004 University of Arizona doctoral dissertation, is a welcome contribution to the field of northeastern Brazilian rural history. Santos examines the ways in which the use of violence by men from this region is related to a changing socioeconomic structure rather than being an innate part of their character or culture. She moves away from a recent emphasis on the discourse surrounding the northeast and its people and focuses instead on land registries, postmortem inventories, and criminal records. Anyone who has done research in northeastern Brazilian archives will recognize the challenges she faced, as climate, bugs, and poverty conspire to destroy documents, but Santos makes us feel confident in her conclusions. She also peppers her text with her own fine translations of the colloquial Portuguese of popular poets, which certainly adds flavor and zest to the text.Santos does an excellent job of explaining the changing socioeconomic conditions in the semiarid backlands of Ceará. She convincingly delineates the rise of commercial agriculture to supplement and not replace cattle ranching and the surprising proliferation of small landholders by the middle of the nineteenth century. The rural poor at this time had a certain measure of autonomy and control over their lives. As opportunities in commercial agriculture increased, however, not least because of the demand for cotton, so did competition over land and water. Rural males found that they needed to protect their claims to land as well as to prove that they were honorable men who could provide for their families, and they became zealous in their efforts to do so.I wondered at first at the author’s decision to employ a rather traditional time frame, beginning in the 1840s when the imperial state began to coalesce and ending with the fall of the monarchy (although she never seeks to incorporate this event into her analysis). I am convinced that her starting point is a good one, since one of her contributions is to demonstrate how the police and the military who sought to rein in the overly autonomous poor ended up serving as agents of disorder. The soldiers and policemen, who were themselves free rural poor men, were willing to serve partisan and personal ends in ways that guaranteed a continuing lack of legitimacy for the state that employed them. If it was hard to tell the policemen from the bandits, it is not surprising that many men responded to the enhanced presence of the state with violence themselves.In any case, the brief moment of relative security could not last. The peak years came when civil war was raging in the United States. After it was over and production in the southern United States gradually returned to normal, the British preferred the higher quality North American cotton. Moreover, the fact that Brazil itself became involved in one of its few foreign wars in the 1860s helped disrupt agricultural production, not least of all because the forced recruitment practices during the Paraguayan War inspired young men to flee their land. In a period of downward mobility, particularly for young families, it was hard to maintain honor, not least of all because it became difficult to maintain the expected dominance over women. As women found themselves alone, whether employed as seamstresses, washerwomen, domestics, or farmers, they too found it necessary to defend their own growing autonomy, which was seen as a challenge to long-standing gender norms. Not surprisingly, they found themselves subjected to physical and frequently sexual assault as men tried to reestablish their authority. All of these conflicts were only heightened by the Great Drought of 1877 – 79. Many rural men found an outlet for their frustrations and fulfillment of their ideas of manhood in the life of the bandit.Santos’s book is thoroughly grounded in the scholarly dialogue of our own times. It provides a good model for graduate students (and many of us in the profession) of how to engage our colleagues’ work respectfully. Some may find Santos overly deferential to her elders, as many of us are at this stage, but this is not necessarily worse than being gratuitously pugnacious. Certainly, as her frequent references to other works on Latin American and Mediterranean history suggests, in many ways, the Ceará backlands case was far from unique. Santos’s findings on gender relations are similar to those of the other historians she cites; given this, perhaps she might want to ponder the causative connections between the distinctive context she so expertly portrays and the depressingly similar cultural norms.