REVISTA DE FFLCH-USP

HISTÓRIA 1998

WHERE IS THE COFFEE? COFFEE AND

BRAZILIAN IDENTITY

Steven Topik
Department of History - University of California, Irvine

RESUMO: O Brasil e o café. O historiador costuma pensar na identificação de um com o outro. Mas na verdade, o café
ocupa um lugar muito pequeno e até negativo na identidade nacional brasileira. Este artigo mostra como nem a literatura
nem os estudos históricos tem priviligiado o café como formativo. Ou se enfatiza a herança colonial, a geografia, ou a
mistura de raças. O campo é visto como um lugar atrasado, quase feudal que impediu a formação da identidade nacional
em vez de formá-la. O café na época colonial não consta na lista de produtos importantes. No século 19, o café foi pai de
escravidão e dos latifúndios. Em nosso século, o papel mais importante do café é de negar-se através da urbanização e da
industrialização. Se Deus é brasileiro, Ele não toma café.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Brasil, Café, Identidade Nacional, História do Brasil.

ABSTRACT: Brazil and Coffee. Historians tend to identify both. But coffee occupies a small place, even a negative one,
in Brazilian national identity. This article shows that neither literature nor historical studies have focused their attention
on it. The focus is always on colonial heritage, geography or racial mixture. Rural areas are seen as backward with no
contributions to national identity, but rather hindering it. In colonial times coffee was unimportant. In the XIX century, it
engendered slavery and latifundia. In our own century, coffee's most important role was that of being denied by urbanization
and industry. If God is Brazilian, he does not drink coffee.

KEYWORDS: Brazil, Coffee, National Identity, Brazilian History.

Introduction

They have a lot of coffee down in Brazil. This arabica bean and Brazil. The coffee industry long
popular song referred to the popular association of the recognized that Brazil set world coffee prices. Rio
56 Steven Topik / Revista de História 139 (1998), 55-61

number 7 and then Santos number 4 were the stan- de Alencar had two novels set in coffeelands, O tronco
dards by which all other beans were measured. This do Ipê and Til, but coffee was just a setting, not an ac-
is not surprising since 80 percent of the enormous tive participant. Monteiro Lobato wrote Onde verde
expansion of world production in the nineteenth cen- and Julio Ribeiro A carne. Often, as in Graca Aranha’s
tury was contributed by Brazil. In the extraordinary Canaã the cafezais were not prosperous places. Even
year of 1906 the country provided fully 82 percent so, very few major works of fiction took place in the
of all the world’s harvest! In most other years in the cafézais and none treated the experience of coffee
beginning of the twentieth century the number was growing as formative for national identity3.
above 60 percent. Brazilian painting also largely ignored the arabica.
None of this comes as a surprise to anyone who Basilio de Magalhaes noted that the only major piece
knows something about coffee. But there is one as- of Brazilian painting that depicted coffee scenes was
pect of this enormous growth that is puzzling: despite Candido Portinari’s O café4.
coffee’s unprecedented growth, neither the crop nor Although studies of Brazilian economic and po-
the fazenda de café occupied a large place in the Bra- litical development emphasize the role of coffee, the
zilian national identity. There are few ceremonies, canons of Brazilian nationality almost entirely ignore
statues, holidays, or folklore characters associated it. Many stress Brazil’s colonial heritage, which had
with coffee. Literature and music have largely aban- little to do with coffee. Although Brazilian national-
doned the bean. Even historians, while recognizing ity is seen as an import, in that the indigenous popu-
coffee’s historic importance, have slighted it. In fact, lation is usually given little importance, that import
coffee is treated more as an embarrassment, a stage was not related to arabica seedlings5. Here we have
that had to be endured but needed to be passed through the works of Capistrano de Abreu, who noted that
as quickly as possible.
It is striking that the canonical literature treats Rio
Grande do Sul (Guimarães Rosa), Bahia cacao lands
of Jorge Amado, the Northeast of Garciliano Ramos Introduction to Literature in Brazil, translated by Gregory Rabassa
and the urban landscapes of Sao Paulo in Mario de (Nova Iorque,Columbia University, 1969) while discussing
Andrade but not the coffee fazenda1. Myriam Ellis regionalism of Rio Grande do Sul, Romanticism, Modernism and
pointing out that for the neo-naturalists “the land placed ahead of
observed: “The Valley of Paraiba is notably lacking in
everything else” (p. 231) yet does not mention coffee at all.
literary works either by authors of renown or writers 3
Graça Aranha, Canaã (Rio, F. Breguiet, 1959).
of the era of coffee’s growth and decline”2. Yes, Jose 4
Basilio de Magalhães, O Café na história, no folclore e nas be-
las artes (São Paulo, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1980), p. 159.
5
At a few historic moments the indigenous roots were given some
1
In fairness, Mario de Andrade did write about coffee in a little- importance: the Romantic movement of the 1870s, the Jacobins of
known piece: “Café” in 1942. Lamenting the Depression brought the 1890s, the Modernists of the 1920s, and the tropicalistas of the
on by the fall of coffee prices he says: “Café! Café! Eu exclamo 1960s. But these were stylized representations of the Tupy and other
a palavra sagrada (no deserto/ Café!...O seu fruto me trazia o ca- indigenous peoples. Unlike Bolivia, Mexico, and Peru where the
lor no coração/ Era o cheiro da minha paz, o gosto do meu riso/ E precolombian peoples have been linked intimately with cultural
agora ele me nega o pão.../Que farei agora que o café nao vale characteristics of the nation, in Brazil they have been invented. See
mais!" I would like to thank Piers Armstrong for this reference. Antonio Cândido, Formação da literatura brasileira (Belo Hori-
2
Myriam Ellis, O Café: Literatura e Historia (São Paulo: Edições zonte, Editora Itatiaia, 1975) especially volume 2 that links
Melhoramentos e USP, 1977), p. 11. Afrânio Coutinho, in An romanticism, nationalism and the image of the indigenous peoples.
 Steven Topik / Revista de História 139 (1998), 55-61 57

Brazil’s formative history was created by the parrot, The absence of coffee as a colonial heritage is not
dyewood, the African slave and sugar. Gilberto Freyre surprising. Before the last three decades of the colo-
pointed to the importance of sugar and the engenho nial period very little coffee was exported from Bra-
de açúcar in the creation of Brazilian culture: the zil. Caio Prado Junior barely deigns to discuss it in
patriarchal “homen cordial” and racially mixed Bra- The Colonial Background of Brazil because of its
zilian. The importance of the rural patriarchal clan and relative unimportance in the colonial period8.
seignorial society were the themes of Oliveira Vianna Another type of interior, the sertao of the North-
and Nestor Duarte. Joaquim Nabuco pointed to the east, called to Euclides da Cunha and Garciliano
same institutions, but blamed primarily slavery rather Ramos as the truly Brazilian in the nineteenth and
than latifundia. Criticizing the dominant view of the twentieth centuries. Again, turning their backs on Eu-
coffee elite he scoffed “when [Senator] Sr. Silveira rope and living close to the indigenous seeds of the land
Martins told the Senate that ‘Brazil is coffee and cof- formed a new sort of person, a true American, though
fee is the Negro’—not wishing of course to say one whose animal virtues did not supersede his lack
slave—he defined Brazil as a plantation, a commer- of civilization. This interior was not always seen hap-
cial etnerprise dominated by a small minority of pily, but it was seen as formative. Monteiro Lobato’s
vested intersts, in short, today’s slaveholding Brazil” caboclo Jeca Tatu, for instance, was responsible for
6
. Brazilian backwardness as much as its exceptionality.
For other seminal Brazilian thinkers, the interior Another great nationalist, Olavo Bilac, also disdained
forged the Brazilian identity for other seminal Bra- the people of the interior9. These thinkers echoed the
zilian thinkers, but they looked at the frontier rather Argentine writer and president, Domingo Sarmiento,
than the coffee plantation. Viana Moog, distressed by who counterpoised civilization and barbarism. We
the tradition of the “hollow frontier” compared the
Paulista bandeirante trail-blazer with the United
States settler much to the detriment of the former.
Other Paulistas such as Alfredo Ellis and Sergio
Buarque de Holanda lauded the bandeirante as the panhia Editora Nacional, 1937) and O Bandeirismo paulista e o
original true Brazilian whose initiative, individuality, recuo do merediano (São Paulo, Companhia Editora Nacional,
1938); Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Visao do paraiso (SP: Com-
continental imagination, and unique identity were
panhia Editora Nacional, 1964). Buarque de Holanda reveals his
formed on long treks into the continent’s heartland7.
ambivalence for coffee in his introduction to Thomas Davatz,
Memórias de um colono no Brasil (1850) (São Paulo, Editora
Itatiaia and USP, 1980) in which he notes “Era uma lavoura não
somente extensiva como dissipadora—antes mineração do que
6
Joaquim Nabuco, O abolicionismo,( London, Kingdon,1883), agricultura (p. 16-17) and “O bandeirismo do ouro e o bandeirismo
p. 167; Gilberto Freyre, Casa grande e senzala (Rio: Schmidt, do café pertencem ambos a uma só familia (p. 33).”
8
1938); Nestor Duarte, A ordem privada e a organização politica Caio Prado, Junior The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil
nacional (São Paulo, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1939); Oli- translated by Suzette Macedo (Berkeley: University of California
veira Vianna, Evolução do povo brasileiro (São Paulo, Compa- Press, 1967), p.154.
9
nhia Editora Nacional, 1938). Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões (Rio, Laemmert, 1902);
7
Clodomir Vianna Moog, Bandeirantes e pioneiros; paralelo en- Garciliano Ramos, Vidas secas; Monteiro Lobato, Idéias de Jeca
tre duas culturas (Rio, Editora Globo, 1954); Alfredo Ellis, A Tatu (São Paulo, Revista do Brasil, 1920); Olavo Bilac, A Defesa
evolução da economia paulista e suas causas (São Paulo, Com- Nacional; discursos (Rio, Liga de Defesa Nacional, 1917).
58 Steven Topik / Revista de História 139 (1998), 55-61

have few examples of the populist attitudes of turn- Marxists, such as Nelson Werneck Sodre, folded
of-the-century Russia and United States which ex- together all rural “feudal” regimes and compared
tolled the virtues of the rural peasant and yeoman them unfavorably to the “modern” urban factory. He
farmer in contrast to the corruption of landlords and refers to “a ofensiva latifundiaria e imperialista” when
urban populations. In Brazil, the rural, which certainly discussing planters. Coffee was just a continuation of
included the coffee fazenda, was backward; it needed the colonial tradition; indeed, it was a stalking horse
to be europeanized. for imperialist interests that sought to hinder the deve-
For this reason, none of the canons give much lopment of Brazilian independence through industria-
importance to coffee in the creation of the Brazilian lization11. In his 1946 book O que se deve ler para co-
identity. Even when scions of great Paulista fazendei- nhecer o Brasil, an annotated bibliography, he
ros families, such as Paulo Prado, wrote of the Tristeza mentions just one study of the consequences of cof-
Brasileira, the fazenda was absent. Instead, the colo- fee. Andre Gunder Frank, whose study of Brazil and
nial heritage and race were the main determinants. Chile initiated the dependency approach, argued that
Another relative, Caio Prado Junior, concentrated all agriculture had similar consequences in the periph-
much more on geography and sugar than on coffee. ery. Coffee, just as sugar before led to a capitalism
And when he discussed coffee, he cited its negative “which involved monopolization of land and other
effects such as slavery, monoculture and latifundia. forms of capital and of labor, commerce, finance,
When coffee became more benign after 1889 in the industry and technology.” Coffee led to “underdevel-
“bourgeois Republic” it was because the cities came opment”.12 Celso Furtado was kinder to coffee, which
to dominate the countryside. Coffee became more he saw as creating a “new managerial class” of Bra-
beneficial because it came under urban control. Sergio zilian businessmen, rather than foreigners as with
Buarque de Holanda made the same argument in a sugar. But it still created dependency.13
brief mention of coffee in Raízes do Brasil. Afonso The first total history of a coffee municipio,
Celso de Figueiredo, from a Mineiro coffee family did Vassouras by Stanley Stein, saw coffee not as heroic
not mention coffee in his chauvinistic tract Porque me
Ufano de meu Pais. Instead, he lyrically praised the
virgin forests, the very forests coffee planters felled
to make way for their cafezais. Alfredo Ellis, another
(São Paulo, Empresa Grafica Revista dos Tribunais, 1933); Afonso
child of a coffee fortune, championed Paulista
Celso de Assis Figueiredo, Porque me ufano de meu paiz—Right
exceptionalism, the locomotive that pulled twenty or Wrong, my country (Rio, Garnier, 1923). Paulo Prado, Retrato
empty boxcars. But he pointed to the Paulista’s tem- do Brasil, ensaio sobre a tristeza brasileira (São Paulo, P:L Duprat-
perate climate and white immigrant population as the Mayencal, 1928); Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Raizes do Brasil 3rd
roots of Paulista success rather than coffee entrepre- edition (Rio, Livraria Jose Olymlpio, 1956), pp. 253, 256-257.
11
neurship. Coffee’s success was a result of geographic Nelson Werneck Sodre, História da burguesia brasileira 3rd
determinism, not a cause10. ed. (Rio, Ed. Civilização Brasileira, 1976), p. 207.
12
Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in
Latin America; Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (NY,
Monthly Review Press, 1969), p. 243.
10 13
Alfredo Ellis, A Evolução da economia paulista e suas causas, Celso Furtado, The Economic growth of Brazil translated by
pp. 182, 215. Caio Prado Junior, História econômica do Brasil Ricardo W. de Aguiar and Eric Charles Drysdale (Berkeley,
(São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1945) and Evolução política do Brasil University of California Press, 1965), pp. 124, 173.
 Steven Topik / Revista de História 139 (1998), 55-61 59

or identity creating, but rather as a passing fancy. Only the Paulista school of the late 1960s and the
While adopting the analytical methods of the French 1970s saw coffee as something special and formative.
Annale school, he viewed coffee through the tradi- They stressed that in Sao Paulo free labor from Eu-
tional boom and bust cycle of Brazilian history. In rope was used in the cafezais. Hence the legacy of
Stein’s story coffee was just another temporary crop inequality was quite different than for sugar or gold.
like Brazilwood, sugar, gold, and rubber than experi- Moreover, land was so plentiful that when one focu-
enced momentary success in the international mar- sed on all Brazil rather than just a municipio as did
ket then collapsed when either other countries surpas- Stein, the story was one of development rather than
sed Brazilian production or when the earth wore out. decadence. Coffee, unlike any of the other export
Stein’s story ends with decline and decadence. The crops, led to industrialization. Cities and railroads
legacy was “a continuation of colonial patterns of sprang up in its wake. This was not the too familiar
large property, Negro slavery, patriarchicalism, and boom and bust cycle that left hollow frontiers behind
accentuated class divisions”14. This is very much the it. However, coffee was still not lauded as it is in
story that the great Fluminense nationalist, Alberto Colombia and Costa Rica. Partly, this was because the
Torres, told and anticipates dependency theory. Torres general view was that in Brazil even after the aboli-
faulted coffee for damaging the national character and tion of slavery a coffee oligarchy continued to rule in
leaving the country open to the influence of foreign an autocratic way17.
imperialism. Brad Burns noted that First Republic na- Also, coffee itself was not really the subject of
tionalists in general thought coffee growers “far too their studies. This is because when scholars began to
international in outlook” and, at the same time, too focus on coffee, they were really interested in indus-
regionalist15. Other students of the Paraiba Valley also trialization and the transition to wage labor, not cof-
blamed coffee for the backwardness of Rio state and fee. Although the originators of the trend, Emilia
Minas Gerais16. Viotti da Costa and Warren Dean, were historians,
most of their followers were economists whose re-
search restricted itself to the origins of industrializa-
tion. Cano, Silva, Cardoso de Mello, Mello all focused
14
Stanley Stein. Vassouras, a Brazilian Coffee County.( Cambridge on the effects in the cities. The study edited by
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 290.
15
Frederic Mauro, La preindustrialisation du Bresil, de-
E. Bradford Burns, Nationalism in Brazil, A Historical Survey
monstrates that this perspective was a national phe-
(NY, Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), p. 73; Alberto Torres, A Orga-
nização nacional (Rio, 1914).
nomenon as the collection of regional studies all ask
16 Joao Heraldo Lima, Café e industria em Minas Gerais, 1870- why their area did not industrialize like Sao Paulo18.
1920. Petrópolis, Editora Vozes, 1981. Eduardo Silva, Barões e
escravidão. Rio, Editora Nova Fronteira, 1984. Also see the
characterizations of the Paraiba Valley in José Roberto Amaral Lapa,
17
A economia caféeira. SP: Brasiliense, 1983 and Zelia Cardoso de See Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency
Mello, O metamorfose da riqueza. São Paulo, HUCITEC, 1985. In and Development in Latin America translated by Marjory
fairness, there certainly were Fluminense and Mineiro historians Mattingly Urquidi (Berkeley, University of California Press,
who credited coffee with building up their states, for example Afonso 1979), pp. 90-92.
18
Arinos de Melo Franco Desenvolvimento da civilização material Emília Viotti da Costa, Da senzala a colônia. São Paulo, DIFEL,
no Brasil (Rio, 1944) and Affonso de E. Taunay, Historia do café 1966. Frederic Mauro, ed. La preindustrialization du Brasil. Pa-
no Brasil (Rio, Departamento Nacional do café, 1939). ris, Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
60 Steven Topik / Revista de História 139 (1998), 55-61

Coffee did not form a provincial or national charac- Steven Topik that Paulista planters did not run the na-
ter so much as it fueled the leap from rural society tional government as they wished20. But these con-
to urban industrial society. Its greatest success was clusions are far from the sort of celebrations of cof-
negating the society and political structure that had fee as creating a democratic society as is sometimes
nurtured it. suggested in Costa Rica or bringing political peace
Coffee was also taken up by students of labor rela- as is argued in Colombia. Rather, they suggest that
tions, especially the transition to free labor. But close the coffee oligarchy was not quite as autocratic and
study of colono labor by da Costa, Dean, Holloway, strong as previously thought.
and Stolcke showed that the European immigrants were The transience of coffee probably explains much
generally not well treated. They had little success of the ambivalence to it. As a predatory crop that mo-
stamping their mark on the countryside, though they ved inland after twenty-five to thirty years, creating
did certainly change the face of the cities of Sao Paulo often a devastated hollow frontier in its wake, cof-
and to a lesser degree Rio de Janeiro19. fee was a passing phenomenon. Although Brazil was
More recently, several studies have pointed to the large enough that it has remained the world’s larg-
existence of small size farms in the coffee lands and est coffee exporter for over a century, coffee muni-
the creation of a more egalitarian society in the coun- cipios lost their coffee prosperity rather quickly. The
tryside in at least some areas. Nancy Naro, Hildete story of Vassouras was repeated over and over again
Pereira de Melo, and Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro in the Southeast. No area could identify for long with
find a thriving smallholder sector in Rio de Janeiro the arabica.
state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu- Given the emphasis in Brazilian history on the cre-
ries. Maurico Font and Renato M. Perissinotto obser- ation of urban culture, it is a bit surprising that almost
ve that even in Sao Paulo state, the great fazendeiros no attention has been given to café culture. The cof-
did not dominate politics. This is an extension to the feehouse was a key institution in the European coun-
provincial level of findings of Winston Fritsch and tries Brazilian elites so emulated: France, Germany
and to a lesser extent England. And we know that in
the Southeast, at least, Brazilians drank a lot of cof-
fee. (It seems that cacau was more popular in the

1984. Wilson Cano, Raízes da concentração industrial em São

Paulo (São Paulo, DIFEL, 1977); João Manuel Cardoso de Mello,
O capitalismo tardio: contribuição à revisão crítica da formação
e do desenvolvimento da economia brasileira (São Paulo, Ed.
Brasiliense, 1982). Sergio Silva, Expansão cafeeira e origens da
indústria no Brasil (São Paulo, Editora Alfa-Omega, 1981). Castro, Ao sul da história (São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1987); Hildete
19
Warren Dean, Rio Claro (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1976) Pereira de Melo, “O café e a economia fluminense: 1889-1920”
Thomas Holloway, Immigrants on the Land (Chapel Hill, University in História econômica da Primeira República ed. by Sergio S.
of North Carolina Press, 1980); Verena Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Silva and Tamás Szmrecsányi (São Paulo, Editora Hucitec and
Workers and Wives (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988). FAPESP, 1996), pp. 215-234; Steven Topik, The Political Economy
20
Renato M. Perissinotto, Classes dominantes e hegemonia na of the Brazilian State, 1889-1930 (Austin, University of Texas
República Velha (Campinas, Editora da UNICAMP, 1994); Nancy Press, 1987); Winston Fritish, Winston Fritsch, External
Naro, “Customary Rightholders and Legal Claimants,” The Constraints on Economic Policy (Pittsburgh, University of
Americas XLVIII (April 1992):485-517; Hebe Maria Mattos de Pittsburgh Press, 1988).
 Steven Topik / Revista de História 139 (1998), 55-61 61

Northeast and mate in the South.) The New York Times Conclusion
reported in 1894 that:
They had a lot of coffee in Brazil and it filled the
“The whole country is perpetually in a state of semi-intoxi-
pockets of the coffee barons, but it did not capture the
cation on coffee—men, women and children alike...At all hours
imagination of Brazilians. In the colonial period coffee
of day and night, in season and out, everybody literally guzzles
it. The effect is plainly apparent in trembling hands, twitching
was a late-comer. It had little to do with creating patri-
eyelids, mummy-hued skins, and a chronic state of nervous exci- archal clans, latifundia, and racial mixture. In the nine-
tability worse than that produced by whisky.”21 teenth century coffee was blamed for rural “barons”,
oligarchy, and rural backwardness. In the twentieth cen-
Yet there are no serious studies of coffeehouse so- tury capital earned through selling coffee abroad brought
ciability. We know that coffeehouses along the Rua do the “modernization” sought by many urban intellectu-
Ouvidor in Rio were a center of Bohemian life, but they als. But they concentrated on the urban consequences
have been little studied.22 Only the botequim is given or on nostalgia of past regional societies. Coffee suc-
much attention, and there alcohol, not coffee, reigned23. ceeded in extinguishing itself from the national identity.

21
New York Times, 17 July, 1894:6.2.
22
Jeffrey Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and
Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (NY, Cambridge
University Press, 1987), pp. 165,189,190.
23
Sidney Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim: o cotidiano dos traba-
lhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Epoque (São Paulo, Brasiliense,
1986) and June Hahner, Poverty and Politics. The Urban Poor in Brazil,
1870-1920 (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1986).