The Underdevelopment of Recife's Mocambos: Racial Silence and Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century Brazil

This paper will return to a central topic in Brazilian Studies: the de-racialization of Brazilian public discourse over the course of the mid-20thcentury.  Though few scholars now believe that there was ever such thing as a “racial democracy” in Brazil, there is general consensus that overt discussion of racial inequalities decreased precipitously in the decades after 1930.  Yet our understanding of why this happened, and what it meant for the formulation of public policy, is often limited by somewhat generic arguments about the “hegemony” of a state-supported discourse of racial democracy and its dampening impact on race-based politics.  This paper aims to trace the emergence of racial silence in a much more specific context: a wave of highly influential debates about urban social policy in the face of mass rural-urban migration and shantytown proliferation, carried out in the Northeastern city of Recife in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  My paper will suggest that the muffling of race talk had multiple motivations, some intellectual, some political, and some explicitly (if often misguidedly) anti-racist.  It will argue, further, that the resulting policies had a profound impact on Recife’s racial dynamics, despite the fact that they were carefully crafted to sidestep racialized debate.