Need and Relational Power in Post-abolition Recife

Many studies of social welfare in Brazil focus on public, secular welfare systems that developed from the 1910s forward. This paper takes a different approach, aiming instead to analyze the private networks through which poor residents of Recife sought to meet their most basic needs in the decades following Brazilian abolition. To an even greater extent than Rio and São Paulo — cities that benefitted from Brazil’s Belle-Époque economic and migratory expansions and pioneered many of Brazil’s subsequent public welfare strategies — Recife was a city with scarce public resources and enormous unmet need for basic nutrition, medical care, and shelter. Public institutions were underfunded and deeply connected to Catholic and familial structures of power and assistance. And, perhaps most importantly, the bonds and networks that gave poor people access to the basic elements of urban survival were crucial to the ability of Recife’s “better classes” to defend their social status, perpetuate deeply unequal social and economic structures, and transform the meaning of liberalism during Brazil’s First Republic. An exploration of private welfare networks thus allows us important insight into the persistence of inequality and relational power in one of Brazil’s most important twentieth century cities.