From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of Jabaquara

Hispanic American Historical Review 86:2 doi 10.1215/00182168-2005-003 Copyright 2006 by Duke University Press

From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers:

The Quilombo of Jabaquara

and the Problem of Citizenship in

Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado

This article reexamines the historical trajectory of escaped slaves who, encour-aged by the abolitionist propaganda of the 1880s, established themselves in the runaway slave communities of Jabaquara and Pai Felipe, remaining in these quilombos through the decade that followed the abolition of slavery in Brazil on May 13, 1888. Both quilombos were located within the city limits of Santos, which served as the major port for coffee exports from São Paulo Province — especially after 1867, when completion of the province’s first railroad facilitated transport between the western coffee districts and the Atlantic. These quilom-bos drew support from, and even were organized by, free persons — mostly white intellectuals, lawyers, and coffee brokers who were active in Santos’s political and commercial life. However, the rapid growth of the black population (some authors claim, no doubt exaggerating, that Jabaquara received as many as ten thousand escaped slaves!) made it difficult for the white elite to maintain control over this group of uprooted people with a newly discovered political conscious-ness, a process that had a significant impact on the urbanization of Santos.1

Seeking to survive at any cost, the quilombolas joined the port city’s infor-mal sector, performing menial services in order to earn a precarious living. But

An earlier version of this article was presented to the Boston Area Latin American History Workshop in November, 2003. I wish to thank André Rosemberg for providing copies of unpublished documents from the Santos archives, James Woodard for his thoughtful critique during the workshop, the anonymous readers for their comments, John Monteiro for revising the translation, and the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (CNPq) for financial support. Special thanks go to Barbara Weinstein and Kathryn Litherland for a superb job in editing the manuscript.

1. Francisco Martins dos Santos, História de Santos (São Paulo: Revista dos Tribunais, 1937), 42.

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248 HAHR / May / Machado

the worst was yet to come in the period that followed the extinction of slavery. With abolition no longer a cause célèbre among Santos elite, ex-slaves became a mass of cheap labor that was used to help combat the labor movement that emerged among European-born dockworkers. The former quilombolas no longer were rebels in search of freedom but instead krumiros: strikebreakers recruited and organized by their old leaders to replace the militant dockwork-ers who organized the first strikes in Santos.2 While the quilombo remained intact almost to the end of the century, it was quietly dismantled in 1898 fol-lowing legal proceedings that restored the land to its original owner. From that point on, the quilombo and its rebel population began to be effaced from local memory.

During the 1880s and 1890s, Jabaquara’s history was tied both to the radi-calization of São Paulo’s abolitionist movement as well as to the urbanization and modernization of Santos. The quilombo’s founding and early development coincided with increasing intensity of slave flight and rebellion on the planta-tions in the west and northwest of São Paulo Province, along with the expansion of abolitionism as a political force. Although it was organized and managed by the abolitionist movement, runaways and other members of the popular sectors were important in its day-to-day activities. This poses difficult questions for his-torians, as the significance of the quilombo seems to lie somewhere between the agency of slaves who fled to Santos and who actively resisted attempts to curtail their freedom, and the manipulation of local bosses who used the quilombo as a source of political muscle and cheap labor. Was Jabaquara really a quilombo, or was it just a makeshift camp of runaways, controlled from a distance by aboli-tionists? Were the runaway slaves in Jabaquara really maroons, or were they just a reserve labor pool to be used as political pawns by the emerging republican elite of a rapidly urbanizing port city? Can we speak of partial autonomy or of the existence of a “quilombo breach” within such a hybrid social formation?

2. The term krumiro, meaning strikebreaker, became current among European labor activists in the late nineteenth century and spread rapidly to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Of obscure origins, the term refers to a Berber group of western Tunisia called the Kroumirs by the French, whose contraband activities served as a pretext for the establishment of a French protectorate over Tunisia in 1881. Drawing a parallel with the way capitalist entrepreneurs used outsiders to break strikes, early labor leaders employed the term to identify scabs who crossed strike lines and betrayed the interests of their fellow workers. See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York: Vintage, 1987), 80, showing how nineteenth-century Italian workers called strikebreakers crumiri, expressing a negative view toward the way these people from North Africa were being incorporated into the imperialist world.


From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers 249

I begin my study with a critique of the traditional literature on abolition in São Paulo and Santos, written in a nostalgic vein during the first decades of the twentieth century either by militant abolitionists or by contemporary sym-pathizers. I underscore the conservative perspective embodied in this histori-cal literature. My analysis contrasts the patronizing and authoritarian character of this political tendency, which I call “humanitarian-paternalistic,” with the political agency of slaves and the urban poor in constituting and maintaining the quilombo. Thus, the article seeks to address some controversial aspects of the political history of abolition, immigration, the rise of republicanism in the southeast, and the urbanization process in the region.

One of the most important issues has to do with the political destiny of African-Brazilians. A major political priority in the 1880s, Brazil’s ex-slaves were gradually marginalized from the political sphere and barred from the more dynamic segments of the wage-labor market in the years immediately following abolition. This process proved particularly dramatic in Santos, where the water-front labor force felt the effects of a full-scale immigration policy. Alliances forged within the humanitarian-paternalistic abolitionist cause began to lose their political viability, as the Paulista abolitionist elite favored abolition with-out other socioracial transformations and promoted European immigration. As a result, ex-slaves were cast aside and restricted to the fringes of the political scene and of the wage labor force. Confined to these spaces, ex-slaves were left with little more than nominal and abstract citizen’s rights, which began to be institutionalized following abolition and the beginning of the Republic.

I seek to document how fugitive slaves and quilombo residents — with a history of organized resistance in cooperation with the elite of Paulista soci-ety — lost their bargaining power and were forced to exit the main political stage. They were thereby blocked from occupying the political, social, and work spaces that corresponded with the republican ideal of citizenship that began to emerge following 1889. In their trajectory from rebels to strikebreakers, the for-mer runaways of Jabaquara got a bitter taste of the difficulties in pursuing their newfound rights as citizens at the same time that they faced the loss of political and social visibility and a growing discourse that promoted racial “whitening” through European immigration and through the gradual elimination of blacks and Indians. The postemancipation period in southeastern Brazil championed a new political vocabulary and new social relations guided by the ideological tenets of conservative modernization. However, these new elements were little more than a thin veneer in areas that remained governed by paternalistic and dependent relations that re-created many aspects of the universe of slavery and that continued to constrain the ex-slaves.



The issue was touched on in a recent newspaper article in the Tribuna de Santos commenting on the urban problems of the Bairro do Jabaquara and Morro do Jabaquara neighborhoods today: “Two of the most important neigh-borhoods in the history of Santos have a forgotten past. Facing problems with security [drug trafficking], the lack of public schools, heavy vehicle traffic, and complaints about the road system, the residents of Jabaquara and Jabaquara Hill cannot find anything that could remind them of the role that their area once played in city politics, especially during the abolitionist campaign, when this area became known as the ‘the Promised Land of the slaves.’ ”3 The várzea (flatlands) that once housed the quilombo is now a typically middle-class neigh-borhood near downtown, surrounded by the much poorer community occupy-ing the Morro do Jabaquara hillside. Compressed between the Santa Casa da Misericórdia hospital, Ulrico Mursa Stadium, and the main roadways leading to the port, Jabaquara and Morro do Jabaquara were spared from the “vertical-ization” process that covered much of Santos with tall concrete structures, due to the lack of sufficient space for apartment buildings. Its inhabitants feel privi-leged to live in houses, and today’s residents are more concerned with preserv-ing the middle-class neighborhood and securing resources to combat erosion than with remembering the winding paths and gardens of the past, when it was the “Promised Land” for escaped slaves. The complete absence of any trace of the quilombo or its inhabitants in the current landscape seems to reinforce this collective loss of memory.

Many years have passed since the little huts made of wood, straw, mud, and zinc sheets were torn down. Receiving material support from Santos merchants, these houses had been put up hastily, beginning around 1882, to accommodate the increasing numbers of runaways who had fled from the coffee plantations.4 The lands known as Jabaquara, located roughly between São Bento Hill, Saboó, Monte Serrate, Vila Matias, and the sea, began to be occupied as far back as the seventeenth century, but they were among the last to be struck by the urbanizing fever resulting from the modernization of the port facilities and the sanitation campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps because Jabaquara took longer to fall under the sway of the real-estate speculation that accompanied the first phase of construction of new port facilities by the Com-panhia das Docas between 1897 and 1909, and because so little is known about the early occupation of these lands, both traditional local historians and modern

3. A Tribuna de Santos, 6 Nov. 2000.4. José Maria dos Santos, Os republicanos paulistas e a abolição (São Paulo: Livraria

Martins, 1942), 182 – 83.



scholars have continued to describe Jabaquara as a remote location covered by virgin forest, which suggests that the fugitive slaves who lived there developed a quilombo community in the most traditional manner that this term evokes.

Abolitionism and Its Context

The romantic historiography that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, which sought to promote the humanitarian and liberal character of the militant abolitionist movement, painted a somewhat idyllic picture of the landscape of Jabaquara. However, an examination of legal proceedings over the boundaries of Jabaquara lands reveals a radically different setting. Although urban historians have used court records of land disputes to describe the con-flicts that emerged as Santos expanded into the rural hillsides around it, it is still not sufficiently clear what kind of situation the escaped slaves encountered when they were resettled by abolitionists. This area, along with other zones periph-eral to the rather limited urban center at the time (such as Vila Matias, which already in the 1880s was the subject of an intense property dispute), gave rise to several lawsuits that shed light on the situation runaways had to confront once they had settled in and around the port city.

Although Jabaquara has often been described as an independent territory apart from the city, where a slave needed only to set foot in order to become free, local historians of the abolition campaign have always asserted that the quilombo resulted from the active efforts of Santos abolitionists who endeav-ored to shelter the increasing number of runaway slaves seeking freedom in this “Promised Land.” Unlike other quilombos in the area — such as Pai Felipe’s community, which had been established by runaway slaves themselves and which in the 1880s was precariously situated on lands in Vila Matias — Jabaquara sup-posedly had been founded by young abolitionists on an uncultivated plot of land belonging to Benjamin Fontana, in order to shelter runaway slaves who, since the late 1870s, had been taking the road to freedom via Cubatão, at the foot of the coastal escarpment.

Jabaquara’s origins certainly reflected the young abolitionists’ wish to accommodate the growing tide of fugitives, including increasing numbers of women and children.5 Yet, this strategy was also intended, according to Fran-cisco Martins dos Santos, to keep the runaway slaves under strict control. To be sure, the Jabaquara refuge had been organized under the aegis of paternalism from the start, with the aim of maintaining social control over a population

5. Ibid., 182.



whose “natural instincts” made them dangerously predisposed to disregard the social norms of subordination and dependence, norms whose survival was at the very core of abolitionist concerns in São Paulo.6 Notwithstanding these con-servative origins, it is important to remember that Jabaquara’s establishment in 1882 reflected the radicalization of the Paulista abolitionist movement fol-lowing the demise of Luiz Gama and the subsequent rise of Antônio Bento as leader. Gama, a famous freedman and abolitionist, became noted as a maverick lawyer who defended slaves’ claims to freedom in São Paulo’s courts, basing his arguments on the purported illegality of slavery itself. Antônio Bento, although a conservative judge, spearheaded a more radical flavor of abolitionism and encouraged abolitionists to take more direct action in bringing slaves to free-dom. These developments were followed by the organization of the radical abo-litionist movement of the Caifazes, which decisively placed popular abolitionism at the forefront of the political scene.7 In this sense, the abolitionist movement proved far more complex than the one-sided version promoted by the militant abolitionists who triumphed as the political elite in the early republic.8

A civilizing discourse became most firmly established within the upper ech-elons of the abolitionist movement, comprised of renowned politicians, planters, and journalists such as the republican Bernardino de Campos and his brother Américo de Campos, along with younger members of the elite who promoted their political, academic, and professional careers through their commitment to this humanitarian cause. From this perspective, as Francisco M. dos Santos has observed, abolition represented a necessary step in curtailing “the strong contribution of retrograde blood in the formation of the nation’s future gen-erations.”9 However, this essentially conservative humanitarian-paternalistic

6. F. M. dos Santos, História de Santos, 12.7. The Caifazes were members of a secret society of radical abolitionists founded by

Judge Antônio Bento in São Paulo in 1882. Intellectuals, public servants, and other middle- sector urban groups participated, as well as lower-class members, including teamsters, and some ex-slaves. This group organized manifestly illegal actions, such as the mass flight of slaves from coffee plantations. Many of these runaways were sent to Jabaquara. Some of the Caifazes residing in Santos are known to have participated in the organization of the Jabaquara quilombo, whose leaders maintained ties with the Caifazes. The term refers to the biblical figure Caiaphas, the high priest who “had advised the Jews that it would be good if one man died for the people” (John 18:13 – 14). On the Caifazes, see Alice Aguiar de Barros Fontes, “A prática abolicionista em São Paulo: Os Caifazes, 1882 – 1888” (Master’s thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, 1976, 64).

8. Maria Helena P. T. Machado, O plano e o pânico: Os movimentos sociais na década da Abolição (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo: Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro / Universidade de São Paulo, 1994), 152 – 53.

9. F. M. dos Santos, História de Santos, 1.



orientation proved to be much less pronounced at the intermediate level of the movement, whose militants included, according to José Maria dos Santos, ide-alistic young republicans, incendiary orators, agitators, and poets such as Raul Pompéia, and at the decidedly popular base of the movement that brought together workers, artisans, coachmen, street peddlers, and others.10 Indeed, it was at the most popular level of the movement that one could identify a series of voices that set themselves apart from the dominant humanitarian-paternalistic chorus. Both in the Caifaz movement and in popular militancy on the streets, these abolitionists remained committed to action, experiencing the day-to-day problems raised by the constant arrival of runaway slaves, including the man-agement of the Jabaquara refuge.

Santos represented the final step of an abolitionist strategy that began with the patient efforts of Caifaz militants to convince plantation slaves to flee and to orient their escape toward the coast. The Caifazes established and maintained contacts and shelters along the way to provide safe routes and keep the fugitives beyond the reach of plantation owners, authorities, and slave catchers. Always led by someone from the movement, the escaped slaves traveled on cargo trains or by foot, counting on the collaboration of many along the way. In the last leg of the journey, the runaways descended the dangerous coastal escarpment of the Serra do Mar to Cubatão or Bertioga, and from there an easy stretch to the Santos refuge. Establishing safe escape routes to Santos seems to have been one of Antônio Bento’s chief goals. It was he who developed a systematic network of rest stops and shelters along the roads that connected southern Minas Gerais, eastern São Paulo, and the Paraíba Valley to Santos. Abolitionists relied on the collaboration of railroad workers, coachmen, mule drivers, rural smallholders, and even plantation owners and men and women of the urban elite from the city of São Paulo and some of the cities of the interior, who took in runaway slaves and hid them on their properties.11

Yet Santos had attracted runaway slaves even before the Caifazes began to organize mass flight from the plantations, which began in 1882 and intensified only after 1885. Furthermore, Antônio Bento’s preoccupation with the system-atic organization of a safer escape route actually responded to existing escape routes established by slaves themselves, who had begun to seek freedom in the port city on their own account already in the late 1870s, or perhaps earlier.12

10. J. M. dos Santos, Os republicanos paulistas, 181 – 82.11. Ibid., 178 – 79; and Evaristo de Morais, A campanha abolicionista, 1879 – 1888, 2nd ed.

(Brasilia: Universidade de Brasília, 1986), 217 – 19.12. Ronaldo Marcos dos Santos, Resistência e superação do escravismo na Província de

São Paulo, 1885 – 1888 (São Paulo: Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas, Universidade de São Paulo, 1980), 78.



One likely explanation is the growing fame of Santos as a liberal and abolitionist city. But the trend also reflects the characteristics of the coastal region, which had long been surrounded by quilombos, like the one in Cubatão.13

Moreover, as a port city, Santos was accustomed to the constant traffic of people from very different regions and national origins, which ultimately diluted the rigid character of slave society that persisted in other parts of the province and opened breaches within which the escaped slaves could settle.14 Furthermore, while the city’s fame as a free haven began to attract a grow-ing number of runaways, it should be noted that only some of them settled in Jabaquara, within the sphere of influence closest to the humanitarian abolition-ists. The traditional historiography hailed Jabaquara as the largest and most elaborate quilombo of its day. When we analyze its structure, using clues from the numerous legal battles over these lands, we see something else entirely. Such an analysis also makes population estimates for Jabaquara, such as Francisco dos Santos’s figure of ten thousand slaves, seem quite exaggerated.15 This, however, does not contradict the fact that Santos served as a magnet for successive waves of escaped slaves. This becomes evident when one follows the entire process that moved slaves toward the coast, beginning with the flight of individuals on through the mass flights of the 1880s.

A portrait of the abolitionist movement in Santos in the 1880s is incomplete if we only emphasize the participation of the political elite or of activists and sympathizers committed to a humanitarian-paternalistic perspective. Indeed, the philanthropic tea parties of women in the Santos elite, the commercial subscriptions to purchase manumission papers for slaves, and the concern for maintaining the groups of recently arrived slaves under strict control constitute important aspects of an active, though conservative, political movement. How-ever, within the urban environment of Santos, these conservative figures, with their paternalistic ideas, thrived alongside a variety of popular activists who were much less committed to the issue of social control. Linked to the popular abolitionist movement in the city of São Paulo whose plebeian activists have been rendered anonymous or deprived of surnames in the historical record — as in the case of Chico Dourador or Antônio Paciência — the Santos movement

13. Francisco Martins dos Santos, História de Santos, 2nd ed. (São Vicente: Caudex, 1968), 237n38, provides a historical summary of the Cubatão quilombos and assumes that the last leader there must have been Pai Felipe. This issue still needs to be studied in more detail.

14. Fontes, “A prática abolicionista,” 92 – 122; Machado, O plano e o pânico, chap. 4, “Cometas, Caifazes e o movimento abolicionista,” 143 – 74.

15. F. M. dos Santos, História de Santos, 42.



took on a markedly popular character as well.16 The Portuguese immigrant Santos Garrafão, who along with his black companion owned a popular eatery in the city, as well as the mulatto sailor Eugênio Wansuit, were often mentioned as collaborators of Quintino de Lacerda as heads of the quilombo. Moreover, it is important to remember that the abolitionist movement provided the initial political education for future leaders of both the conservative Republic and the nascent organized labor movement.17 The ties between militant abolitionism and the socialist workers’ movement in Santos were not merely fortuitous. In analyzing the tradition of political struggle in the so-called Brazilian Barcelona, Maria Lúcia Gitahy found abolitionist militants involved in the first Socialist Center of Santos, founded in 1895, as well as in strikes that broke out on the waterfront, including the aforementioned sailor Wansuit, arrested in the strike against the Companhia das Docas in 1912.18

The quilombo of Jabaquara is closely associated with Quintino de Lacerda, a freedman whose life trajectory, political positions, and role as leader of the runaways sheltered at Jabaquara mirror the contradictory and ambivalent char-acter permeating São Paulo’s abolitionist movement. A former slave belonging to the Lacerda & Brothers company, whose owners were historical republi-cans, Quintino has been described in much of the bibliography on abolition as a “good black man,” since “his congeniality, personal dignity, and courage afforded him sufficient prestige to command the respect and labor of those hun-dreds of souls, who understandably were filled with hatred, painful ambitions, and desires of all sorts.”19 Quintino remained very close to his white sponsors and mentors, including Bernardino de Campos and Silva Jardim, and after the founding of the Republic, he demonstrated unwavering political allegiance to them. However, his strongest ties were to Benjamin Fontana: he became his tenant on Jabaquara lands, as well as his employee, his spokesman, and a front-man for his operations. Thus, Quintino constituted the main link between the political elite and the underemployed mass of freedmen, whose presence could

16. See Machado, O plano e o pânico, 143 – 76; and Antônio Manuel Bueno de Andrada, “Depoimento de uma testemunha,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo 36 (1939).

17. Machado, O plano e o pânico, 159 – 60.18. Maria Lúcia Gitahy, “O Porto de Santos, 1888 – 1908,” in Libertários no Brasil:

Memória, lutas e cultura, ed. Antônio Arnoni Prado (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), 75 – 76, and by the same author, Ventos do mar: Trabalhadores do porto, movimento operário e cultura urbana em Santos, 1889 – 1914 (São Paulo and Santos: Universidade Estadual Paulista / Prefeitura Municipal de Santos, 1992), 33 – 40.

19. Morais, A campanha abolicionista, 218.



pose a threat to public order in Santos.20 He fulfilled this role by containing and disciplining his subordinates in an exceptionally efficient manner, keeping them on the outskirts of the city, as far as possible from the central district, where they might have made the more sensitive city dwellers uncomfortable.

In this process, Quintino developed two faces, the first displaying humility and subordination vis-à-vis whites, consistent with the role that the humanitar-ian elite assigned to ex-slaves in the emerging postemancipation society these leaders struggled to design. A second face, which he displayed to the runaways, stood in radical contrast to the first — a staunchly authoritarian character who unabashedly manipulated symbols of power borrowed from a cultural reper-toire with African and salvationist overtones. Other leaders of this sort could be found, for example, in Campinas in 1882, where freedman Felipe Santiago organized a violent slave rebellion around his magical and religious powers, imposing a literally uncontested authority over his followers.21 Unlike Santiago, though, Quintino’s authority was not in opposition to the whites but, quite to the contrary, remained subordinate to them. Thus, the power that Quintino had over his people was constantly contaminated by messages of subservience, which surreptitiously suggested that the ex-slaves were to accept the subsidiary role that the paternalistic abolitionist project believed was fitting for blacks. It was by conforming to this role that Quintino de Lacerda worked his way up the social ladder and built an exceptional political career.

As leader of Jabaquara, Quintino became a popular and widely respected figure in Santos during the 1880s. Until his death in 1898, he lived within Jabaquara, in a large house surrounded by a courtyard, where he kept a general store. The inventory of his estate confirms that the store must have provided important income for Major Quintino, as it was stocked with all kinds of goods. In her biographical sketch of Quintino, Ana Lúcia Duarte Lanna writes that this courtyard was where “the festivities of the old quilombo area were held. Quintino’s birthday celebrations were important moments of fraternization. The whole hillside population and many city inhabitants stopped by the front of his house to congratulate him and kiss his hands.”22 Furthermore, according to this author, the relationship between Quintino and his subordinates was marked by fear and admiration: those whom he protected — that is, the former runaway

20. On Quintino’s political activities, see Morais, A campanha abolicionista, 218; and Ana Lúcia Duarte Lanna, Uma cidade na transição: Santos: 1870 – 1930 (São Paulo and Santos: Hucitec / Prefeitura Municipal de Santos, 1996), 192 – 203.

21. Machado, O plano e o pânico, 91 – 42.22. Lanna, Uma cidade na transição, 197 – 98.



slaves precariously settled in Jabaquara in the postabolition years — treated him with the deference that only the very powerful commanded.

Unlike most other popular abolitionist leaders, Quintino’s career was not eclipsed by the Golden Law abolishing slavery, as his role in regimenting the blacks of Jabaquara remained important under the Republican order that was established the year after abolition. Named inspector of the Jabaquara district, Quintino later received the title of major in recognition of his role in defend-ing the city during the 1893 promonarchist Revolt of the Armada. His career reached its apex in 1895, when Quintino was elected member of the first Munic-ipal Council of Santos in the Republican era, earning an exceedingly hostile reception from his white colleagues. Once again, his political allegiances, espe-cially to then-president of São Paulo Bernardino de Campos, served him well, as he was sworn into office under the intervention of state forces. It should be noted that all the positions of authority he occupied served to consolidate his leadership over the former runaways in the years that followed abolition, the same years in which the development of port facilities and the rise of the all-powerful Companhia das Docas accompanied the emergence of an organized labor movement in Santos.23 It should also be recalled that Quintino had mobi-lized an army of quilombolas to defend the city in 1893, an action that was to be repeated every time Major Quintino was called upon by his mentors to provide political services.

The trajectories followed by Quintino and Jabaquara contrast with those of Pai Felipe and the quilombo that he commanded. According to Francisco Martins dos Santos, Pai Felipe’s quilombo was much older than Jabaquara and was founded independently by slaves. These runaways initially took shelter in Cubatão and later, with the arrival of the abolitionists in the 1880s, moved to Vila Matias — at that time a rural neighborhood contiguous with Jabaquara — which was becoming a popular destination for the poorest people of Santos.24 Carlos Victorino’s nostalgic account of Santos during the last quarter of the nineteenth century reports that on Saturday nights the young abolitionists would pay visits to the quilombo to drink quentão (a hot beverage made from cane brandy and spices) and to watch the samba dances. Then “on Sundays, Pai Felipe would open his quilombo to the youths and men known as abolitionists, treating them with the utmost courtesy and telling them amazing things about the planta-tions, things that would make your hair stand on end!” Pai Felipe would enter-

23. On this topic, see ibid., 193. 24. F. M. dos Santos, História de Santos, 2nd ed., 237n38; and Fontes, “A prática

abolicionista,” 70.



tain the visitors with stories, while “his people danced samba in the courtyard to the sound of drums, tambourines, and rattles, and to this rhythm the still-young mulatas and the robust creole men would swing their bodies, move their hips, and point their feet to make a slow circle until they found their partners, bumping into one another on purpose in a belly-to-belly umbigada dance.” Then “suddenly the drums would stop; the dancing also ceased and, with Pai Felipe’s permission, the quentão was distributed.”25

Even though he maintained a cordial relationship with the whites, Pai Felipe led “his people” in an independent manner, avoiding all interference from the abolitionists, which explains why direct evidence regarding the internal func-tioning of his quilombo is virtually nonexistent. The few commentaries that do exist belong to a semantic universe in which all blacks, ex-slaves, and runaways remain captive to reified narrative structures whose objective is to portray any trace of Afro-Brazilian social and political organization in terms of a folklorized version of the “authoritarian-paternalistic” character of African leaders. This discursive strategy, which is so evident in the nostalgic literature cited above, has been adopted by many historians in subsequent generations, using these essentially ideological constructs as if they were documentary sources. Indeed, Victorino’s description of Pai Felipe, often repeated by later historians who rely on this single source in their accounts of the quilombo, clearly alludes to the authoritarian character of Pai Felipe, “an old black man, with razor-sharp intu-ition,” who commanded “his people prudently.”26 Such descriptions employ the same imagery already used to describe the leadership qualities of Quintino de Lacerda. Governing “his people” with an iron fist, Pai Felipe immediately strikes us as having the kind of traditional relationship grounded in the indisputable power of the chief, perhaps evocative of African royalty. In his history of samba in São Paulo, J. Muniz Jr. refers to Pai Felipe as the Rei Batuqueiro, a sort of “Drummer King.”27 Francisco Martins dos Santos asserts that Pai Felipe was an enslaved African king who, despite the proximity of the abolitionists, remained the chief of his own quilombo, beyond the reach of Quintino.28 According to local historians who wrote about abolition, royal power, authoritarianism, and

25. Carlos Victorino, Reminiscências, 1875 – 1898 (São Paulo: Tipografia Modelo, 1904), 64 – 65.

26. This passage is found in Lanna, Uma cidade na transição, 186.27. J. Muniz Júnior, Do Batuque à Escola de Samba (São Paulo: Símbolo, 1976), 100.

It should be noted that current samba schools and other carnival-oriented expressions of a static image of black culture (present especially in the mass media and in the tourist industry) use the French court of Louis XIV as a performative reference.

28. F. M. dos Santos, História de Santos, 2nd ed., 237n38.



the wisdom of elders were all qualities common to the slave leaders who were in command of “their people.” But while the romantic and traditionalist tone of these accounts may captivate the minds of dreamers with their utopian or folkloric images, such descriptions camouflage these authors’ judgments as to the slaves’ incapacity to organize themselves under the ideals of democracy and citizenship. The qualities emphasized here are very different from those found in the leadership that, just a few years later, began to develop in Santos itself and which produced one of the most militant labor movements in Brazil. This labor movement was grounded in the port workers’ potential for political and social consciousness. It remains difficult, however, to distinguish the actual experi-ence of the quilombolas from what the humanitarian-paternalistic abolitionists wanted to see and wanted us to believe.

Jabaquara and Its Lands

Occupying lands in Vila Matias that were the object of intense property dis-putes in the 1880s (which culminated in the assassination of Matias da Costa), Pai Felipe’s quilombo disappeared from Santos’s collective memory without a trace, except in the name of its leader, who is remembered as the founding father of samba in Santos. Jabaquara’s fate was not strikingly different, as the quilombo had been formed on lands divided among several owners over the course of cen-turies and which during the decades surrounding abolition became involved in intense disputes due to rapid urban expansion and development. However, the legal proceedings of the Jabaquara land disputes shed light on the peculiar char-acteristics of this quilombo. In 1886, for example, Benjamin Fontana sought a court injunction against one of his neighbors, Walter Wright, to prevent this Englishman from taking control over part of the Jabaquara lands. According to Fontana, Wright had unlawfully invaded his lands, which were Fontana’s by vir-tue of his legal occupation of the land and which were in part leased to Quintino da Lacerda, who in turn sublet some of the land to a number of small tenants.

It is suggestive that Fontana, in this dispute and at least three others he was involved in, always fought to guarantee his rights over the strategic areas of Jabaquara. In all of them he counted on the testimony of Quintino — who, presenting himself as a long-term tenant on these lands, asserted the antiq-uity of his patron’s ownership. It is even more illuminating to consider that, although he had made obvious efforts to protect his landholdings, Fontana in each instance received unfavorable verdicts, suggesting that conditions were not very favorable for the existence of a quilombo on the property. Furthermore, the testimony in this case suggests lifestyles and social relations quite distant



from what one would expect to find in a quilombo. This becomes even more evident when one considers that, by the end of the 1880s, this area would be of interest to the future construction entrepreneurs of the port of Santos, Gaffré and Guinle. Indeed, since 1882, when the concession obtained by the govern-ment of São Paulo Province for the construction of port facilities had expired, several investment groups organized an effort to take over the new concession. When the concession was open for bidding in 1886, six proposals were brought forward. The winning investment group, led by Cândido Gaffré and Eduardo Guinle, later became the sole owners. They founded the Companhia das Docas of Santos and signed their contract in 1888. It was after this year that work began on the port facilities that would profoundly transform the city of Santos.29

The most suggestive testimonies concerning the living conditions of Jabaquara’s impoverished residents are found in an extensive lawsuit pitting Gaffré and Guinle against Benjamin Fontana and his wife. Gaffré and Guinle sought to block Fontana’s project of putting up popular housing on Jabaquara land, claiming that the property legally belonged to them. The case was opened in 1899, a year after Quintino’s death. The passing of this leader had already led to the disintegration of the Jabaquara refuge. Nonetheless, the court records afford us a window into Jabaquara’s history as an area of mixed occupancy, where both quilombolas and immigrants lived.

Benjamin Fontana and his neighbors were involved in still other court pro-ceedings. The sale and resale of lots meant that land began to fall into the hands of the big companies that operated in the city, who had become interested in this area to develop housing for workers, a process already underway in neigh-boring areas such as Vila Matias and Macuco. Jabaquara also provided the large Santos entrepreneurs (especially the Companhia das Docas) with space for other projects, including a quarry that began its operations in the 1890s. In the 1870s, shortly after buying his portion of Jabaquara lands, Fontana had established a ceramics works as his first enterprise, an undertaking based on the exploita-tion of cheap labor. He later applied this same strategy to other undertakings, including a quarry. The ceramics factory was located on the land that was leased to Quintino de Lacerda around 1885 or 1886.30 Of course, all of these activities served to reinforce Fontana’s claim on the lands in dispute. Although an analysis

29. Hélio Lobo, Docas de Santos: Suas origens, lutas e realizações (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Jornal do Comércio, 1936), 11 – 18.

30. This is what witness Vicente Liga asserted; “Ação de Embargo de Obra Nova,” Gaffré and Guinle vs. Benjamim Fontana and wife, 1899, fol. 55v, Arquivo Geral do Fórum da Comarca de Santos (hereafter AGFCS).



of the different land disputes in Jabaquara in the 1890s shows that this was an area occupied by a diverse population, including native-born and foreign resi-dents, who declared under oath that they had lived there for many years, that certainly was not the population that had sustained Fontana’s undertakings, at least not during the period in which Jabaquara was sheltering runaway slaves.

Indeed, in the 1899 lawsuit, Fontana’s defense witnesses included Vicente Liga, an Italian who had resided in Jabaquara for 16 years, the German Ber-nardo Hank, resident in Jabaquara for 13 years, and the Spaniard Cazimiro Garcia, a Jabaquara resident for 5 years. Each claimed to have worked for Fon-tana as foremen and managers.31 However, the unskilled workers employed in Fontana’s construction projects, quarries, clay mines, ceramics factory, and on the provision grounds — the industries that guaranteed Fontana’s control over the property — must have been composed of the runaway slaves who had sought shelter in Quintino’s quilombo. And even if some form of wage was involved, the amount certainly would have reflected the dependent condition of these workers.

A portrait of Jabaquara’s settlement pattern appears in a description accom-panying the final lease contract, signed in 1893.32 It reveals a patchwork quilt of small enterprises, rural properties with garden plots, and rental properties occupied by a wide variety of people, including the remaining ex-slaves. In this contract, Fontana appears on one side as the owner of an undivided portion of Jabaquara land and as someone interested not only in guaranteeing his land-holdings but also in expanding them as much as possible, using the “quilom-bolas of Jabaquara” like chess pieces in calculated moves to his advantage. The other party was the ex-slave Quintino, who had made a name for himself and later became both a major and a councilman, bolstering his credentials by strik-ing various agreements with different owners of Jabaquara lands, although remaining loyal especially to Fontana, in order to preserve his control over the Jabaquara ex-slaves. Indeed, an analysis of these legal proceedings reveals that, in spite of his loyalty to Fontana, Quintino had made several formal and informal agreements with other owners or claimants of these lands, seeking to guarantee lands for himself and for his quilombola subordinates. A statement by the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the 1899 lawsuit illustrates Quintino’s ambiguous role. When one of the witnesses reasserted the legitimacy of Fontana’s ownership based on Quintino’s lease, the lawyer ceased questioning him because there

31. “Ação de Embargo de Obra Nova,” 1899, fols. 55 – 81v, AGFCS.32. Copy of the lease contract established between Benjamim Fontana and Quintino

de Lacerda, 2 Jan. 1893, attached to the 1899 records; “Ação de Embargo de Obra Nova.”



was “no chance of him telling the truth, which is clear from the way the wit-ness has only come to court to affirm that which is favorable to the defendants, when it is certain that what he has just testified is not truthful. Instead, the lawyer retorted, “the defendants are not the owners of Jabaquara land, nor did they ever give the order to build the houses on the flatlands; these were made by the runaway slaves who took shelter there with the consent of Quintino de Lacerda, who, in order to do this, had received authorization from the real land owners.”33

The Quilombo as a Historical Experience

Does it make sense to speak of a quilombo in this kind of a situation? This question certainly is pertinent from a historical perspective, but it must also be approached within a current political context marked by changes in the very concept of quilombo. Article 68 in the 1988 federal constitution states that “the descendants of the quilombo communities who are occupying their land shall receive definitive title to their properties, and the state must issue them their respective land titles.” This lends an unexpected social significance to histori-cal discussions of quilombos that transcends the somewhat narrow academic debates to which it had always been confined. Whether as a strategic political issue to black activists, as part of the Landless Workers’ Movement’s platform, or as a strategic part of the broader effort to recognize and legitimize the historical role of “traditional communities” that emerged on the margins of (though not independent from) the mainstream economy, the fruitful discussions inspired by the so-called quilombo clause have rendered the notion of the quilombo itself increasingly flexible. Today, after more than a decade of political struggle, the different authorities involved with this issue have sought to avoid overly specific or idealized conceptualizations by defining the quilombo as a community hold-ing “traditional knowledge,” whose survival was linked to the group’s ability to resist and whose cultural and territorial heritage should be preserved. Some of the communities who are claiming or who already have been guaranteed title to their collective property through the quilombo clause were not originally run-away slave communities (the more traditional definition of quilombo), and we are thus forced to rethink the historical conceptualization of the term.34

33. “Ação de Embargo de Obra Nova,” fols. 50v – 51.34. For the legal texts currently regulating the quilombo clause, see the Palmares

Foundation Web site (http://www.palmares.gov.br). To get a good sense of the issues involved in the process of granting titles to community or quilombo members, see http://www.socioambiental.org/website/parabolicas/edicoes/edicao55/quil1.htm.



To complicate this scenario even further, the original consensus around the quilombo clause, which appeared to refer specifically to rural communi-ties, currently is facing challenges from residents of “urban quilombos,” as illus-trated by the Silva family of Porto Alegre, whose case is being defended by the Unified Black Movement. Living today in one of the Porto Alegre’s most expensive neighborhoods, the Silvas appear to be the only family remaining from a movement, first developing around 1884, to settle freedmen on the hill-sides surrounding the then rural neighborhood of Figueira, where the city’s elite maintained residential chácaras (small farms) and which is now an affluent city neighborhood. Referred to at the time as an “African Colony,” the freed-men settlers were gradually pushed out as the area urbanized, leaving the Silva family as the last representatives of a semirural lifestyle that has for the most part disappeared from a neighborhood that now boasts a local country club.35

Is the Silva family history all that different from that described by Dona Maria, who was interviewed in 1972 and who proved to be the oldest resident on the hillside of Jabaquara? Indeed, Dona Maria’s little house — which by the 1970s was wedged between apartment buildings and other urban struc-

Jan Hoffman French’s article, “Dancing for Land: Law-Making and Cultural Performance in Northeastern Brazil,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) 25, no. 1 (May 2002): 19 – 36, reflects upon the theoretical and practical challenges that concern communities as well as others, including anthropologists, historians, political agencies, NGOs, and other parties involved in the political fight for the acquisition of legal titles of rural community lands through the quilombo clause. As to titled communities and their origins, the current case in Ivaporunduva, in the Ribeira Valley in São Paulo, is especially interesting. The Association of Ivaporunduva Inhabitants, appealing for international funding, insists that “[t]he Quilombolas were established in the remote valley as long as four hundred years ago by escaped Black slaves, and are now fighting for title to their traditional lands in order to avoid encroachment by outside interests. In Ivaporunduva there is a Church, currently undergoing restoration, which was built by escaped slaves in 1630”; http://www.greengrants.org/ngo/quilombos/quilombos.html. Yet a study of this same community by Renato S. Queiroz, Caipiras negros no Vale do Ribeira: Um estudo de antropologia econômica (São Paulo: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidades de São Paulo, 1983), shows that this community, at the time considered a typical community of “black caipiras,” in fact originated from a land donation for a chapel along with the manumission of slaves at the end of the eighteenth century, in a declining mining zone, which gradually came under the control of the freedmen.

35. For more information on this matter, see http://www.portalafro.com.br/, “Manifesto em prol da garantia das terras do quilombo urbano — família Silva,” Feb. 27, 2003, photos and text by J. Nicolau Jr.



tures — was enduring testimony to a traditional lifeway that had tenaciously survived in the midst of intense urbanization. Dona Maria related how she had arrived in Jabaquara at age two, after a journey with her parents who, as run-away slaves, had sought refuge in Santos. The family settled along the hillside and began to provide for themselves through subsistence farming and petty jobs in the city, just like all the other quilombolas. Dona Maria had managed to resist the process of urbanization that had expelled practically all of her neigh-bors, and she sought to preserve the history of subsistence strategies. Finally, she found herself the last surviving member of the quilombo, as well as the only witness to a way of life that had disappeared.36 What would happen if one of her descendents, someone still living in Jabaquara, were to make a claim based on the quilombo clause today? Would this be any different from the case of the Silva family? After all, had Jabaquara really constituted a quilombo, and are we historians simply missing the point?

To resolve this question requires us to confront some of the theoretical and political problems raised by the current concept of quilombo as it has to be adjusted to the historical conditions faced by different communities, taking into account their adaptation and flexibility within social, political, and economic contexts that proved hostile to the survival of autonomous communities. This is especially true in São Paulo Province, where coffee expansion and urbaniza-tion raised land prices at an early date and made it difficult for independent or isolated communities to survive.37 To be consistent with other aspects of the historiography of slavery, we might consider the notion of a “quilombo breach” as a strategy for studying the history of many of these black communities.

36. The life history of D. Maria, descendent of the Jabaquara quilombo, appears in an article by Antônio Nunes, “Ela Viu o Morro Nascer,” http://www.novomilenio.inf.br/santos/h0101.htm.

37. In Brazil, recent studies have revised our understanding of quilombos. See, for example, the studies in João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, eds., Liberdade por um fio (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), especially Reis’s article, “Escravos e Coiteros no Quilombo do Oitizeiro. Bahia, 1806,” 332 – 72, which discusses the development of a quilombo on private lands belonging to manioc producers, who at the same time hired quilombolas to work on their farms. Eduardo Silva’s book, As camélias do Leblon e a abolição da escravatura (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), points in a different direction from the present article. In his study of the Leblon Quilombo, which was set up in Rio de Janeiro in the 1880s and which bears some resemblance to Jabaquara, Silva idealizes aspects of the abolitionist campaign and fails to adopt a critical stance vis-à-vis the idea of an abolitionist quilombo, reinforcing a traditional version of the history of this period.



Caught between powerful social forces, including an enlightened elite with a humanitarian-paternalistic ideology and abolitionists with personal ambi-tions and who saw nothing wrong in taking advantage of quilombola labor in exchange for their largesse (such as Fontana, who sought to take control of the hills of Jabaquara at the expense of the runaways), the Jabaquara quilombolas had little room to maneuver in carving out their own space. When they arrived in Santos, exhausted and wary of being enslaved again, the runaways had to adapt themselves to a city that failed to offer acceptable health care or hous-ing conditions, even to its regular inhabitants. Furthermore, as the number of runaways may have reached a few thousand over the course of the 1880s, the refugees had to adjust to increasingly precarious situations. It became more and more complicated to find shelter in Jabaquara, in Pai Felipe’s quilombo, or elsewhere in the region, and even more difficult to scrape together a living in competition with the growing number of foreign immigrants who settled in Santos during the same period. Nevertheless, it seems that the Jabaquara refu-gees managed to establish themselves as quilombolas and did so more or less at their own expense, although they could count on the sympathetic support of the city’s lower-class population. The following passage points out not only the increasingly dense occupation of Jabaquara lands but also the sudden emergence of semirural and “backward” lifeways in this port city that had already begun to dream of modernization:

With contributions by subscription from local businesses and the labor of those who continued to arrive, numerous huts and simple structures of every type were built out of wood, straw, mud bricks, and sheets of zinc. Paths were opened, a small retail store established, and, as if by magic, one of the most disjointed and picturesque of cities sprang up overnight, surrounded by provision grounds and perennially covered by a veil of bluish smoke from the coal-burning ovens. The ex-slaves had their own agriculture and industry, right next to the world’s most tolerant and agreeable consumer market.38

A subsistence economy based on small plots cultivated around family huts, family units that were either stable or reconstituted insofar as possible, an inde-pendent and permanent hearth, the mediating presence of commercial exchange: these characteristics have all been used to describe not only the autonomy of

38. J. M. dos Santos, Os republicanos paulistas, 182 – 83.



slaves within slavery but also the existence of black roceiros (subsistence farm-ers), quilombolas, or freedmen living beyond the bounds of slavery.39 Though it presented many obstacles, quilombolas’ desire to establish a particular way of life — very different from the one envisioned by the humanitarian and pater-nalistic abolitionists from Santos — was so deeply rooted that some quilombolas managed to survive the land disputes that afflicted the hillsides of Santos, and in 1893 they went to court claiming their right to remain on the plots they had carved out in the Jabaquara landscape in the years preceding abolition:

All roceiros by profession, for some time before the Law of May 13, six years more or less, they leased a parcel of land in Jabaquara, owned by Benjamin Fontana and his wife, they built houses to live in, they made other improvements, including many cultivated fields from which they draw their living. However, on the 6th or 7th of the current month of June, an individual named Luís José de Matos, along with Antônio Sodré, Pedro de Lanuzaria, and José Lourenço, with many employees, began to use the plaintiffs’ land, wishing to build, dig ditches, and damage the crops and other improvements, without the plaintiffs knowing what right they had to inflict such violence and damage.40

This scenario is not the outcome anticipated by the abolitionists, whose humanitarian and paternalistic ideology had led them to believe they could dis-cipline and mold the ex-slaves into reliable and subordinated proletarians, not “all roceiros by profession.” It was precisely this that struck prominent local and traditional historians of the abolitionist movement in São Paulo and Santos. Underscoring the ideology of Antônio Bento and of the Caifazes in general, José Maria dos Santos wrote in reference to Bento:

Always having a great number of escaped slaves at his disposal in the various way stations and hideouts that he had organized with his friends, [Bento] would offer to a certain planter in a certain place in the province slaves taken from another [planter], from more distant places or even from Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, provided that he consider them voluntary labor, paying them a wage of one cruzado [400 réis]. These work contracts, established within a system of fixed tasks and offered

39. See, for example, Robert W. Slenes, Na senzala, uma flor: Esperanças e recordações na formação da família escrava. Brasil, Sudeste, século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1999): and Machado, O plano e o pânico, chap. 1, “Senhores e escravos na formação do Sonho da Terra,” 21 – 66.

40. This document can be found in the Eviction Suit of Dona Cândida de Matos vs. Maria Rosa Siqueira and others, cited by Lanna, Uma cidade na transição, 212.



preferentially at the exact moment in which the ripe harvest faced the risk of being lost for lack of workers, always had a reliable foreman, recruited from the vigilant and intrepid legion of Caifazes, to oversee their perfect execution.41

Antônio Bento’s strategy — praised as much by historical abolitionists as by those who joined the movement at its eleventh hour — flagrantly indicated that after the slavery issue was settled, the old allies would meet again, only with the Caifaz becoming a foreman who would command the ex-slaves, who had now become cheap, subservient labor.42 However, the runaways in Santos and Jabaquara did not always bow to the wishes of this enlightened elite. Consistent with the tradition of a service-oriented port city, the Jabaquara quilombolas (along with other runaways) made a precarious living in the city’s service sector. Thus, for example, the refugees preferred to join the workforce as porters and stevedores in the warehouses and commission houses, tasks previously carried out by slaves-for-hire.

Working on the docks, the ex-slaves certainly had the opportunity to par-ticipate in the cosmopolitan world of the port, coming into contact with people and ideas more worldly than those found on the coffee plantations, even when these had railroad stations, which also served to spread new worldviews.43 One can think, for example, of a figure like Russinho, a Galego sailor who, at the beginning of the 1880s went from plantation to plantation in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro fomenting slave insurrection and who, once discovered, was hunted down in the ports of Rio de Janeiro and Santos.44 Another example was the famous freedman Pio, who was killed in the Santo Amaro neighborhood of São Paulo in 1887 while leading a group of some 150 fugitives from the coffee plan-tations in Piracicaba, Salto, and other nearby areas in an effort to reach Santos, only to be halted by an army cavalry unit. Pio himself was a Caifaz and stevedore in the port of Santos.45 Certainly, the experience with the fight against slavery in Santos fueled a militant and combative tradition, which, in the 1890s, was carried on by the port’s budding labor movement, whose capacity to resist and organize led to Santos becoming known as the Brazilian Barcelona. The more

41. J. M. dos Santos, Os republicanos paulistas, 240. 42. Robert E. Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850 – 1888 (Berkeley:

Univ. of California Press, 1972), 255, calculates that in 1888, one-third of the plantations in São Paulo had slaves working for them that had escaped from other plantations.

43. See, for example, Machado, O plano e o pânico, 91 – 42.44. Ibid., 174 – 242. The adjective “Galego” can mean either Galician or, more

commonly, simply “blond” or “fair skinned.” 45. J. M. dos Santos, Os republicanos paulistas, 264 – 65.



militant faction of the abolitionist struggle served as a training ground for the political leaders who would become labor activists in subsequent decades. Never-theless, while many immigrants (especially Spanish and Portuguese) figured prominently in the ranks of the Santos labor movement, ex-slaves remained strikingly absent.46

Some of the ex-slaves who fled to Santos also worked as carroceiros (wagon drivers). Américo Martins dos Santos, an abolitionist, recalls that when he donated a large sum of money to his friend Quintino de Lacerda, Lacerda used it to buy a train of wagons, recruiting Jabaquara quilombolas to work with them.47 It should be noted that, like the porters and stevedores, the wagon drivers distinguished themselves early on as a particularly militant category of worker. And, as with the porters and stevedores, ex-slaves were notably absent among the strikers who stood shoulder to shoulder in the strikes of 1889 and 1905 demanding that their bosses comply with minimal working conditions.48 Runaway slave men and women engaged in a variety of other tasks in the urban or semiurban economy. Lanna notes that in the 1880s, male runaways worked as coffee packers, porters, or stevedores, as well as in civil construction, while women made a living as domestic servants, seamstresses, cooks, or prostitutes.49 Nor should we lose sight of the engagement of quilombolas in the enterprises founded by Fontana and run by Quintino, around the hillsides of Jabaquara. In 1891, the year of the first great port strike, Quintino and his crew of ex-slaves were to be found working in Jabaquara in the quarry; however, this activity took place on the property of the Companhia das Docas, providing material for the construction project on the waterfront.50

Thus, the ex-slaves found themselves living in the streets, struggling for their daily bread, and constantly mingling with other free workers and freed-men in a port that was undergoing an early process of labor organization.51 As they came into contact with well-traveled sailors, many of whom were certainly anarchists and socialists, the Santos runaways began to incorporate traditions of resistance that were quite different from those developed on the plantations and that had guided their risky mass escapes and the dangerous journeys to freedom

46. Gitahy, Ventos do mar, 33 – 40; and Machado, O plano e o pânico, 143 – 74.47. F. M. dos Santos, História de Santos, 230 – 31.48. On the early strikes in Santos, see Gitahy, Ventos do mar, 59 – 60.49. Lanna, Uma cidade na transição, 189.50. Ibid., 214. 51. According to Gitahy, Ventos do mar, 59, in 1877, the coffee porters had carried out

a strike seeking a wage increase, while in 1888 and 1889, the construction workers on the waterfront staged strikes along with the wagon conductors.



in Santos. Guardians of a history of slave resistance, the Santos quilombolas had participated in a tradition of demands, protests, insurrections, and escapes that ultimately led to the collapse of the entire slave system.52 In the 1880s, they continued their struggles in maintaining their freedom, actively protest-ing against the slaveowners, the slave hunters, and authorities who planned to storm Santos in order to repress the abolitionists, to hunt down escaped slaves, or even to invade Jabaquara to reenslave the quilombolas en masse. There were several episodes involving a confrontation between recalcitrant slave owners with their representatives in government and the urban masses in Santos, which included a significant black population. In 1886, São Paulo’s chief of police, Dr. Lopes dos Anjos, under orders from the minister of agriculture (himself a cof-fee planter), sent police into Santos to recapture the slaves who had taken refuge there. When the police attempted to load up the slaves, they found themselves surrounded and incapacitated by a mob. The policemen then drew their bayo-nets and began to lash out at the crowd, while the slaves, taking advantage of the confusion, fled by jumping into the ocean.53

The residents of Jabaquara, Pai Felipe’s quilombo, and other less acces-sible areas around Santos lay virtually outside of the law. Studies of criminality in Santos for this period indicate the total absence of any quilombolas in the police and court records.54 Jabaquara was founded in 1882 precisely to monitor this population, maintained under the paternalistic authority of Quintino de Lacerda. Yet, this was a precarious arrangement that placed an entire part of the city dangerously outside of the order and control established by the legal authorities.

From Quilombolas to Krumiros

The 1880s represented, at least in the coffee-producing Southeast, perhaps the first moment in Brazilian history when the old paternalistic and authoritar-ian arrangements broke down, without any clear power alternative to replace them. The key moment of the abolition movement — the signing of the Golden Law — signaled the beginning of a conservative reaction and the subsequent rise of a modern bourgeois order. The unusual conditions of the 1880s, involving

52. This interpretation of the abolitionist movement is further developed in my book O plano e o pânico.

53. Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 241.54. Both Lanna, Uma cidade na transição, as well as André Rosemberg, “Processos

sociais e justiça em Santos na década de 1880” (Master’s thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, 2003), 208, note the absence of Jabaquara inhabitants in criminal records.



the manifestly illegal and yet socially legitimated flight and harboring of run-away slaves, established a bond between the quilombo and the Paulista elite that would not be repeated. As for the ex-slaves, the signing of the Golden Law on the 13th of May meant that they were no longer a political priority. Strength-ened by the political conquests of abolitionism, the humanitarian-paternalistic elite of São Paulo quickly marched in the direction of a new order when the Republic brought them to power. There was no longer any space to speak of slaves, whether as barbarous peoples in need of civilization or as obstacles in the nation’s path. The elite now raced in the direction of the modernity they dreamed of, leaving behind anything that did not fit comfortably within the new order.

Those who were freed on the 13th of May disappeared from the public eye, replaced by new classes of people and of colors who seemed more conducive to Brazil’s project of conservative modernization. In Santos, the years following abolition witnessed massive immigration and, subsequently, the rise of one of the most combative labor movements in Brazil. Clinging precariously to the Santos hillsides, the ex-slave men and women struggled to maintain their tenu-ous foothold on their land and in the labor market. Competition with Euro-pean immigrants made life even more difficult, as most employers preferred European workers. These new arrivals found themselves even more helpless and disoriented than the freed slaves, and thus they were more tolerant of the grim work conditions found in the city. In short, beginning in 1888, the ex-slaves faced a difficult and solitary struggle for survival.

The residents of Jabaquara, former quilombolas once so avidly defended by the abolitionist intellectuals, were quickly cast aside after abolition. In order to retain their subsistence plots and their shacks, or to find work, they came to depend even more than before on the goodwill of Quintino, a man who still wielded some influence among the elite. For this reason, the years immediately following abolition found the Jabaquara quilombolas not only in the role of sub-altern, irregularly employed workers but also as foot soldiers in the factional political struggles that emerged in the city. Serving as henchmen for differ-ent bosses, they helped shut down and vandalize newspaper offices and, in the ultimate irony, acted as strikebreakers in the 1891 strike, the first significant work stoppage on the Santos waterfront. Indeed, the actions of Quintino and his quilombola followers were decisive in quelling this strike.

We can see an example of this new role in the record of José Felipe dos San-tos, a black man who had lived in Jabaquara for three years. Santos was arrested in 1889 for assaulting João Francisco de Paula e Silva. He explained to the police that he had received an order, relayed by Quintino, to take revenge on Paula e



Silva for offending Américo Martins dos Santos.55 Two years later, the attack on the Tribuna do Povo’s printing press “smelled of Quintino,” according to one of the witnesses summoned in the inquest.56 In 1893, during the Armada Revolt, Quintino took to the streets with his black subordinates to defend the city, fol-lowing the orders of Bernardino de Campos.57 But it was the intervention of Quintino and his men in the 1891 strike that merits a more careful analysis.

According to one historian, the 1891 strike was decisive in the course of the Santos labor movement, not only because it represented the first general strike by dockworkers but also because its defeat was a major setback to the waterfront labor movement. This was the first strike to paralyze an entire sector in the state of São Paulo, and it affected some four thousand workers — not only porters and stevedores but also railroad men, slaughterhouse workers, gravediggers, Companhia das Docas employees, quarrymen, and others. It halted operations in the customs office, commerce, banks, and the railroad warehouses. The strike broke out when the porters — responsible for hoisting goods from land to ship — walked off the job, then spread to the other categories on the waterfront, such as the stevedores, even affecting the Companhia das Docas employees, who at that time included mainly workers involved in the construction of new port facilities.58 The massive 1891 portworkers’ movement was related to the successful porters’ strike of 1889. The earlier, more limited, strike owed its suc-cess to a labor shortage resulting from heightened mortality due to an epidemic and the growing labor demands for port construction; combined with these factors, employers felt the pinch of the strike and gave in to worker demands for higher wages. Although we know very little about this movement, the 1889 strike did not appear to involve interracial conflict, a situation that did arise in the 1891 strike.59

On May 17, 1891, the Correio Paulistano reported that four hundred work-ers, armed with sticks and clubs, had set out from the Santos port the previ-ous morning and marched through the streets, forcing recalcitrant workers to join the strike movement. By that afternoon, according to the same newspaper, the number of demonstrators had increased to six hundred. Fearing riots, both the commercial district and the customs office closed their doors, and strikers occupied the docks.60 In the days that followed, the strike shut down the port

55. Police investigation of Felipe José dos Santos, 1889, AGFCS.56. Lanna, Uma cidade na transição, 197n64.57. Ibid., 193.58. Gitahy, Ventos do mar, 79.59. Ibid., 78 – 79.60. Correio Paulistano, 17 May 1891, Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo (hereafter AESP).



and all activities linked to it. Santos authorities raised the alarm, and the federal government responded with three cruisers to repress the movement. The sailors were used to replace the striking porters and stevedores.61

On May 20, at the peak of the strike, the Correio Paulistano reported that Quintino de Lacerda (at the time head foreman of the Jabaquara quarry and whose quarry workers, incidentally, had joined the strike) had promised the São Paulo chief of police, who was in Santos to observe the unfolding of events, that he would mobilize 80 – 100 men the next day to load the sacks of coffee heaped near the ships and in the warehouses. Some 100 soldiers were to back up the strikebreakers.62 As Gitahy has emphasized, at this point in history the Com-panhia das Docas had only just begun the process that was to make it the most powerful institution in the city: “the Octopus,” as it would come to be known in later years. The company adopted a series of strategies with the intention of monopolizing all waterfront activities — including the construction of port facilities, control over warehouses, the loading of ships, and the collecting of fees — at a time when coffee brokers and small warehouse owners struggled to survive. Therefore, the labor conflict on the docks masked a battle between cof-fee exporters and the Companhia das Docas. Control over the burgeoning labor movement provided, among other things, a reason for a showdown between the “Octopus” and the other waterfront merchants and businessmen who were fast losing ground.

The Companhia das Docas also furthered its expansion by seeking control over strategic areas of land, including part of Jabaquara. These lands provided raw materials (rocks, sand, and gravel) for port construction and also provided a raw labor force, especially in these early years before the massive arrival of European immigrants.63

The Jabaquara quarry workers labored under conditions even worse than those faced by port construction workers. They received depressed and irregu-lar wages (often paid in the form of vouchers) and ran up debts in the company store.64 Although Quintino constantly asserted his loyalty to Benjamin Fon-tana, the 1899 Gaffré and Guinle lawsuit against Fontana over the Jabaquara lands indicates that Quintino had obtained the authorization not only from the earlier owner, Jacob Emmerick, but also from the Docas entrepreneurs Gaffré

61. Correio Paulistano, 20 May 1891, AESP.62. Correio Paulistano, 21 May 1891, AESP.63. Gitahy, Ventos do mar, 79 – 82.64. Ibid., 81.



and Guinle, who had purchased and allegedly were the legal titleholders of the Jabaquara plot in 1891. Moreover, as Hélio Lobo has noted, Quintino remained loyal and faithful to politician and statesman Bernardino de Campos, one of the principal defenders of the port’s concession to Gaffré and Guinle — a loyalty demonstrated in Quintino’s participation in the defense of the city against the Armada Revolt in 1893.65 Quintino depended on the goodwill of Gaffré and Guinle to remain on the Jabaquara lands and to secure his position as manag-ing foreman of the quarry. Owing favors to his political allies, Quintino (and by extension his quilombolas) did not have much of a choice in the matter of the strike. Caught up in a web of paternalistic and clientelistic relations and no longer enjoying the favor and attention of the abolitionist elite, the Jabaquara rebels had very few options other than to become strikebreakers.

In the days that followed, the citizens of Santos witnessed the “choice” made by Quintino and the Jabaquara quilombolas. Clearly manifesting its satisfaction, the Correio Paulistano reported that Quintino had “organized levies of men of color,” providing “a number of workers capable of guaranteeing relatively good shipment figures, so much that, in spite of everything, nearly ten thousand sacks of coffee were shipped yesterday.” Quintino’s crews of strikebreaking porters were “the most complete of the diverse branches of coffee exportation,” and in this recruitment effort the paper praised his “great service” in bringing together “the greatest possible number of men.”66

In the long run, the defeat of the 1891 strike had painful consequences. Not only did it lower dockworker wages but it also increased the power of the Companhia das Docas, which emerged from the strike as the only institution capable of putting an end to the chaos that had reigned in the port. As Gitahy has noted, from that moment on, the “Octopus” took charge of a growing por-tion of the porter crews. This signaled a process of vertical expansion that, in the years to come, increasingly subjected the port workers to its control. In addition, the Companhia das Docas managed to triple its capital through a fed-eral loan and began to dispatch agents to northeastern states to recruit labor for work on the waterfront. In the final analysis, the strike experience had demon-strated to the bosses how important it was to maintain a reserve of powerless workers.67 In terms of wages and labor relations, the 1891 strike appears to have had important consequences. The next general strike did not take place until

65. Lobo, Docas de Santos, 30.66. Correio Paulistano, São Paulo, 22 May 1891, AESP.67. Gitahy, Ventos do Mar, 81.



1897, when the workers demanded the same daily wage that had been granted in the 1889 strike. This further suggests that the 1891 defeat had substantially reduced wages.68

Although there were many interpretations of the strike, the one presented by the bosses captured the sympathy of the local population. The bosses pre-sented the strike as a struggle between native-born and immigrant workers, with the foreign workers and strikers standing accused of fueling “racial preju-dice.”69 These tensions persisted for a few decades, during which the Santos labor movement rose to prominence while the Jabaquara rebels disappeared from the political scene. Occupying the most stagnant economic spaces, where they slipped through the restraints of proletarianization and the gaps in moder-nity, the quilombolas of Jabaquara moved to the margins of the stage, as though they had been written out of the script for Brazilian modernization. Neverthe-less, in 1972, when Dona Maria of Jabaquara cultivated her garden plot and extracted water from her well, surrounded by skyscrapers signaling the height of the Brazilian economic “miracle,” wasn’t she also a rebel?

68. Ibid., 82.69. Ibid., 81.


Documents

From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of Jabaquara