Once a hotbed of the most deadly tropical diseases, Rio was sanitated by a native doctor at the cost of years of incessant labor that would have disheartened any ordinary man, until to-day it is as free from yellow fever and its kindred forms of sudden death as New York and has as low a death rate as any large city in the tropics. The doctor began his struggle in 1903, by act of congress, organizing a sanitary police charged with clearing away all stagnant water within the city limits, whether in streets, parks, gardens, rain-pipes, gutters, sewers, or—most astonishing of all in a Latin-American country—even inside private houses. This policy, together with the building of new docks and avenues in the congested lower city, and the tearing down of many infected old houses, virtually did away with the breeding-places of the deadly stegomyia mosquito. Deaths from yellow fever dropped from thousands to hundreds in one year, to tens in the next, and to none long before the end of the decade. To this day the sanitary police strictly enforce their regulations, though the man who framed them has gone to repeat his work in the states bordering on the Amazon, and no dwelling can be rented or reoccupied, be it a negro hovel or a palace, until the owner has an official certificate of disinfection.
Among the thirty million people imputed to the country, even in the fraction thereof credited to Rio, there is every possible combination of African and Caucasian blood, with but slight trace of the aboriginal Indian and only a sprinkling of other races. Brazil is indeed a true melting-pot, far more so than the United States, for it mixes not merely all the European nationalities entrusted to it, but crosses with perfect nonchalance the most diametrically opposite races. In theory at least, in most outward manifestations, the Brazilians are one great family, with virtual equality of opportunity, quite irrespective of color or previous condition of servitude. The haziness of the color-line in Brazil is little short of astounding to an American; one cannot but wonder at the lack of color prejudice. Negroes were held as slaves throughout the republic up to little more than thirty years ago; thousands if not millions of former slaves are still alive, and the tendency of humanity to look down upon those forced to do manual labor is certainly as strong in Brazil as anywhere on earth. In England, France, or Germany there is little color prejudice because the stigma of forced manual labor was never attached to any particular color of skin, and because the population has not come frequently enough in contact with the African race to feel the disrespect for it which is the basis of our own color-line. But neither of these motives are lacking in Brazil. Is color prejudice so slight there because the Spaniard and the Portuguese, mixed with the Moors, often by force, during their conquest of the Iberian peninsula, have lost the color feeling, at least for centuries? One has only to see a young Portuguese immigrant to Brazil openly fondling a black girl amid the ribald laughter of his companions quite as our own young rowdies dally with girls of their own class at summer picnics or ward-healers’ dances to understand the widespread mixture of races in South America. Though the actual importation of African slaves into Brazil ceased some eighty years ago, and immigration since then has been almost entirely from Europe, it has been chiefly from the more ignorant and backward countries of southern Europe, where the color-line is at most embryonic. The Portuguese man and the negro woman get along very well domestically in Brazil; even the Portuguese woman joins forces with a black man without feeling that she has in any way lowered herself or her race. The number of young half-breeds sprawling about the poorer houses of the immigrant sections or standing in the doorways of Portuguese shops in the serene nudity of bronze figures shows how general is this point of view.
There are other causes for this lack of racial friction in Brazil. Slavery seems to have been less harsh and cruel than in the United States. With but slight color prejudice or feeling even among the Portuguese who formed the great majority of the owning class, the relation of the Brazilian slave to his master was more in the nature of a hired servant. The slaves belonged to the same church, they observed the same feast days, there were cases where they even married into the master’s family. There was a species of local autonomy in the matter of slavery, slaves being held in any province where it was locally legal and profitable; nor must we lose sight of the fact that there was no statehood problem to agitate and increase the differences of opinion on the subject, no fear that each new territory admitted to the union would disturb the political balance of power in the federal capital. Thus when the question of abolition arose it did not divide the country into two sharply defined camps, with the resultant generations of enmity that it bred in our own land.
Not long after our Civil War the agitation for the freeing of the slaves began in Brazil. There, strangely enough, it came from the north, the more tropical section of the country, partly no doubt because the Amazonian regions, settled long after the sugar-growing lands of Pernambuco and Bahia where intensive labor was needed, found white immigration and their part-Indian population sufficient for their immediate needs. At length a bill was passed by congress and signed by the Princess Isabel making free any child thenceforth born of a slave, and paving the way to the law of 1888 abolishing slavery entirely. The latter was “premature” according to some Brazilians even of to-day, who point to the many ruined plantations within fifty miles of Rio as proof of their contention; it was undoubtedly one of the motives of the revolution which drove monarchy from the western hemisphere in the following year. But the fact that what cost us four years of savage warfare was accomplished in Brazil almost by common consent, without the shedding of a drop of blood, left the “color question” far less acute than in the United States. There is a saying in Brazil that slavery was buried under flowers, and as a result there is no hatred either between sections of the country or between the races that inhabit it; with no deep national or sectional wounds to heal a fraternal relationship quickly grew up, so that to-day blacks and whites celebrate Emancipation Day together in much the same spirit which we do our Fourth of July.
In popular intercourse the color of a man’s skin is of little more importance in Brazil than the color of his hair. Indeed, it is commonplace to hear people referring to their varying tints in much the same amused and friendly spirit in which our débutantes might speak of a sunburn, and there is no offense whatever in nicknames of color. The Brazilian, in fact, does not recognize a negro when he sees one. Ask him how many of the thirty millions are of that race and he will probably reply, “Oh, eight hundred thousand to a million.” From his point of view that is true. There is no all-inclusive word “negro” or “nigger” in the Brazilian language. To use the term negro or preto is merely to say “black,” and it may be that there are not more than a million full blacks in Brazil. But there are many millions with more or less African blood in their veins, for whom the native language has a score of designations all nicely graded according to the tint of the complexion. There is a difference between the full negro and the mulatto in Brazil which does not exist in the United States; like the Eurasian of India the latter considers himself more closely allied to the whites, and acts accordingly. Thus it is impossible to put the question to a Brazilian as it can be put to an American. After traveling in every state of Brazil, however, I have no hesitancy in asserting that two-thirds of the population would have to ride in “Jim Crow” cars in our southern states.
The question of the mixture of races is unusually interesting in Brazil, especially as many Brazilians seriously believe that their freedom of interbreeding is producing a new type of humanity, under the combined influences of climate, immigration, and the fusion of many stocks by no means all Caucasian, that can endure the heat of the tropics and at the same time retain some of the energy and initiative of the temperate zones. All sentiment or repugnance aside, it is possible that the catholic cross-breeding sanctioned by the Iberian creed may prove economically more profitable to tropical America than the Anglo-Saxon’s instinctive aversion to fusion with the colored races. Yet humanly, it seems to the outsider, the results are not so promising; it looks less as if Brazil were solving the color question than as if color were dissolving Brazil. The citizen produced by the intermixture of Portuguese with negroes is not visibly an improvement on the parent stocks. The mulattoes or quadroons are often brighter, quicker of intelligence, than either the ox-like Portuguese or the full-blooded Africans; but it is widely agreed, even in Brazil, that they have neither the moral nor physical stamina, that they take on most of the faults, and retain few of the virtues of their ancestors.
In Rio de Janeiro evidence of this general interbreeding confronts the visitor at every step, in all classes of society, far more so than in São Paulo and the other southern states, where the flowing tide of Italian and other European immigration has given Caucasian blood the ascendency. Even at his best the average Brazilian is not prepossessing in appearance; in Rio’s most élite gatherings a fine face is a rarity; in her street crowds even a passable one is sufficient motive for an exclamation. Every shade of color, of negroid type and features are indiscriminately mixed together, while poor and insignificant physique, bad teeth, and kindred signs of degeneracy are almost universal. There is something disagreeable about mingling with the throng in Brazil; surrounded on all sides by miscegenation, the visitor develops a subconscious fear that his own blood will inadvertently get a negro strain in it. But by the time he has been a month or two in the country, especially if this has been preceded by a year or more in the rest of South America, he scarcely notices the under-sizedness, the lack of robustness, the patent weakness of character in a Brazilian crowd. He needs an occasional shock of contrast to bring his sense of comparison back to normal. The insignificance of the prevailing type is quickly thrown into clear relief when a pair of burly clear-skinned Scandinavian seamen from one of the ships down at the docks come shouldering their way through a native crowd averaging a head shorter than they.
Yet the equality of mankind irrespective of color is probably in a way as good for the white man in Brazil as it is advantageous to the negro. It saves him from presuming on his own importance simply because he happens to be white, as not infrequently occurs in our own land. Perhaps it is because the Brazilian negro does not himself consciously draw the color-line, because he is instinctively courteous, gives one half the sidewalk like a cavalheiro, yet does not obsequiously shrink before a white man, that he arouses less dislike—or whatever it is—than the American negro; or it may simply be that one’s feelings change with one’s environment.
Yet at bottom there is a real color-line in Brazil, though the casual visitor may never discover it. Evidence of it must be pieced together out of hints that turn up from time to time. Azevedo’s novel “O Mulato,” the reader finds, hinges on the secret color prejudices of north Brazil. One runs across a paragraph tucked away in a back corner of a newspaper:
DISAGREEABLE INCIDENT