Modernity, Patriarchy, and Public Order in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1889–1930

Starting in 1902, a massive government project transformed Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s federal capital, as part of a broader nation-building enterprise to modernize the country and civilize its citizens. As Rio became the model for a modern Brazil, public order figured prominently in the modernization projects that targeted not only the city's spaces but also its residents, particularly the racially mixed lower classes. Roughly a decade after the abolition of slavery, modernization signified not only transforming the city into a tropical Paris but reforming its police apparatus to implement public order and to educate the population as well as mediate the transition from slavery to free labor.

This presentation intervenes in the historiography on modernization and post-emancipation Brazil by focusing on the emergence of Rio de Janeiro's Police Chief as a social patriarch, as I argue, in a modernizing Brazil. Focusing on the reforms of the police under the Old Republic (1889-1930) and on correspondence between the city's Police Chief and resident associations and families regarding the deployment of the police, order in the private homes, and on Rio's streets, this paper argues that the multiple roles that the law enforcement official took on among the populace - and the residents' appeal to him - as state official, as father, and as guarantor of the law and public order illuminates how the modernization of the police in the early twentieth-century signals a profound transformation regarding social control in Brazil from private means of enforcing order and social hierarchies in a slave society to one supplanted by the hybrid figure of the police chief as a "social patriarch" in the post-emancipation period.