Very interesting and important history that I'm just learning about conducted by Texas State University History Department professor, Dr. Anadelia Romo, titled “Eugenics in Brazil.” (completed 2015). I'm understanding that this is part of a larger initiative titled, The Eugenics Archives Project. For those wanting to teach about the history of eugenics, this online database and teaching tool developed by scholars, including Dr. Romo should prove helpful.
Do check out Dr. Romo's vita and publications.
-Angela Valenzuela
The origins of this diversity came from significant disagreement about the nature of race and the many different sources of inspiration for the movement. Thinkers were shaped by far-ranging influences including international scientific currents, as well as the dilemmas of modernization and nation building common to Latin America at the time. Perhaps most importantly, eugenics in Brazil was marked by national concerns, most notably anxieties about Brazil’s long history of racial inter-mixing. Eugenic thought in Brazil therefore filtered and sifted through a variety of competing, often conflicting, ideologies to create a wide-ranging set of ideas that all used the language of eugenics. What linked these ideologies, and what marked Brazil’s eugenic movement as distinctive, were early connections with public health reformers, the failure of “negative” eugenic policies such as sterilization to achieve mainstream dominance, and the overall focus on social, rather than genetic, reforms as the solution to Brazil’s problems.
Brazil’s eugenics movement stands apart as the earliest within Latin America. Like other movements in the region, however, it gained much of its character from its close association with a dynamic public health movement. In fact, the timing of the two movements within Brazil largely coincided, both emerging with energy in the decades of the 1910s and 1920s. Brazil had recently abolished slavery (1888) and established its first republic (1889). Given this recent political and social upheaval, the early decades of the century were dominated by elite concerns about how to create a strong, modern nation despite a population that they regarded as racially problematic, with large contingents of mestiço (mixed) inhabitants alongside indigenous and black populations. Despite the pessimistic views of racial mixing held by political elites, turn-of-the-century intellectuals such as Sílvio Romero and Euclides da Cunha took a largely redemptive view of the issue. Moreover, many medical authorities in the public health movement expanded on this more optimistic interpretation. Brazilian doctors returning from expeditions to the poverty-stricken interior of the country in the early 1910s became convinced that the nation’s problems were rooted in disease and poverty rather than genetic defect or race. These medical reformers endorsed views of neo-Lamarckian genetics, which saw a formative role for the environment and believed in the inheritability of acquired traits. This perspective, along with the general optimism of the public health movement about the potential of Brazil’s population, may have helped to moderate the early years of Brazilian eugenics. While Brazil held the distinction of the establishing the first eugenics organization in Latin America in early 1918 (the São Paulo Eugenics Society, formed by Renato Kehl), its goals at this early juncture focused primarily on propaganda and influencing contemporary marriage laws; adherents remained largely uninterested in negative forms of eugenics that sought to restrict fertility.
While this first organization disbanded in 1919, eugenic ideas and eugenic language continued to be influential amongst those concerned with the fields of education, sanitation, and hygiene, particularly in the discipline of mental hygiene, or preventative psychiatry. By the late 1920s, however, this broad and disparate movement shifted its focus, and some sectors more frequently turned to discussion of negative eugenic measures, such as immigration restrictions and sterilization. Members of this sector, most notably the famous eugenicist and doctor Renato Kehl, moved away from their earlier positions and instead embraced more hardline approaches. Proposals for race-based immigration restrictions gained traction, and though they never passed into law, by 1934 a softer policy of national quotas was passed. In addition, a biological and mental pre-nuptial exam was introduced in the early 1930s. In contrast, proposals for sterilization came under intense criticism, both from Catholics and from those who believed social reform and support for mothers to be a more appropriate route for change. Though this sector of hardliners never came to dominate the eugenics movement as a whole (as the debates of the eugenics congress of 1929 revealed), it nonetheless revealed a significant presence that cannot be reduced to the voice of Kehl alone.
Brazil’s 1929 National Eugenics Congress, its first and last, was remarkable for the range of disagreement about basic premises of eugenics. Some of this rift can be attributed to the rising popularity of Mendelian genetics, which envisioned a much stricter role for heredity than neo-Lamarckians allowed for, but there was nuance even within these approaches. By the time of the 1929 Congress there was no one central orthodoxy to be found, and many of the participating eugenicists spoke prominently in defense of the mestiço. Though the mestiço had been seen in positive terms by early thinkers such as Sílvio Romero, this assessment depended on a view of racial mixing that anticipated a gradual whitening of the population—a premise that still revealed whiteness as an ideal and the end goal. Many at the Congress now questioned ideals of whitening, notably the anthropologist Edgar Roquette-Pinto; he and others instead saw the path for Brazil’s advancement in educational and social reforms. Though these thinkers were far from free from racialism, they nonetheless advocated a route for structural reforms that ventured beyond the biological and proved ultimately dominant in the national climate of the 1930s.
Eugenic thought lingered on in the 1930s, and influenced discussions of immigration reform, as well as provided new impetus for physical education. It lost much of its influence, however, as the decade wore on. The rise of Getúlio Vargas (1930-45) to power through a coup in 1930 created a more centralized state, new social legislation and added repression under the semi-fascist state of the Estado Novo (New State, 1937-45). For eugenicists there was much to appreciate, particularly the regime’s policies of fostering nationalism, identifying potential criminals by physical type, and perfecting bodies through physical education. Yet the regime also embraced rhetoric that privileged racial mixing, and celebrated popular culture with Afro-Brazilian roots. Sociologist Gilberto Freyre encapsulated this new racial thinking in his book Casa-grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves) in 1933. His vision of a uniquely harmonious Brazil built on mestiçagem, or racial mixing, became the new dominant understanding of the nation’s past as well as its future. Though this vision ignored stark racial inequalities, and continued to frame race as central to the nation’s path, the myths that he helped to create proved sufficiently useful and seductive to persist (though not without serious challenge) into the present day.
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