The Urban Citizen at the Theater: Defining Social Belonging in Early 20th-Century Brazil

At the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and migrants poured into the city of São Paulo, Brazil, dramatically altering its society, economy, and built environment. The paper examines how Paulistanos navigated this sea change in search of what historians now call urban citizenship. To disentangle the relation between urban space and social inclusion and exclusion, I examine São Paulo’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century equivalent of today’s social media: theaters and, specifically, what I call associational theaters. These were auditoriums regularly used by a wide range of working and middle-class associations for a wide range of activities, among them dramatic and musical performances, poetry recitations, family dances, raffles, beauty pageants, and banquets. The paper demonstrates that, while fundraising was the immediate aim of most soirees, their outcome was more expansive. In the context of the inchoate metropolis, every soiree was an opportunity for organizers to link through programming and sociability a shared affiliation—an occupation, a nationality, a political idea, a race—to a way of urban life. The proliferation of associational theaters at the start of the twentieth century thus made theatergoing a viable means for claiming and defining urban citizenship. Beyond a politicized “counterpublic” to the Habermasian public sphere, associational theaters were sites in which common Paulistanos modeled and debated the behaviors, appearances, and ideas deemed necessary for occupying a rapidly changing city. With European legitimate theatergoing as the model of most associations, the outcome was the normalization of racialized, classed, and gendered notions of the ideal urban citizen.