Recife

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Recife

Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco, is Brazil's seventh-largest city, with a population of 1.5 million (2007). Although its regional economic primacy was challenged in the late twentieth century by Fortaleza and to a lesser degree by the growing cities of its own agreste hinterland, Recife remains the economic, cultural, and political center of the vast Northeast region between the São Francisco and Parnaíba rivers. In the sixteenth century Recife was the country's largest city and the commercial center of the most important sugar region in the world. Its strategic location at the confluence of the Capibaribe and Beberibe rivers on the sugar coast drew attacks by the French in 1561 and by English pirates in 1578, and between 1630 and 1654 occupation by the Dutch, under whom it took the name of Mauritzstad after its governor, Count Johann Mauritz of Nassau. Although Recife's sugar hinterland lost primacy to Bahia after the Dutch invasion, Recife's commercial and foreign-oriented classes gradually overshadowed the traditional planter aristocracy at nearby Olinda, a transition marked by the War of the Mascates (1710–1711) and finally sealed by the city's emergence as provincial capital in 1823, after Brazilian independence.

Its regional pride, peripheral position, and sustained contact with foreign ideas made Recife the center of several nineteenth-century regionalist revolts, notably in 1817, 1824 (Confederation of the Equator), 1831 (Setembrizada), 1832 (Abrilada), and 1848–1849 (Praieira), a resistance to centralized authority that emerged again briefly in 1911 and 1930. Recife's intellectual leadership continues to be exerted throughout the Northeast and beyond by the Recife Law School, the newspaper Diário de Pernambuco, the philosophical and literary Germanism of the "Recife School," and the Federal University of Pernambuco. Dominating a network of smaller towns and subregions throughout the area, Recife reached a population of 100,000 by 1872, and grew steadily by absorbing migrants and rural laborers from the remote backlands and by centralization of the sugar industry. A decaying colonial city in the late nineteenth century, Recife's surges of modernization during the twentieth century gave it a more European look than most Brazilian cities but did not resolve the economic misery, poor health, and illiteracy that characterize the majority of its inhabitants. The social contrasts and tensions underlying the revolts that have punctuated the city's history continue to typify Recife today.

Home to the first Afro-Brazilian Congress (1934), broad programs of urban reform in the Vargas period, and the rise of union activism following the military dictatorship, Recife reflected tensions over citizenship and progress in the twentieth century. These sociopolitical transformations, despite a history of patronage and unequal social relations, exemplify broader Brazilian trends of conservative modernization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750 (1962) and The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (1957), provide reliable and readable accounts of colonial Recife and environs. Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties (1986), and Vamireh Chacon, A Capibaribe e o Recife: Historia social e sentimental de um rio (1989), describe the color and variety of the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For an introduction to Recife as an intellectual center, see João Cruz Costa, A History of Ideas in Brazil (1989). Martha Knisely Huggins, From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and Social Control in the Third World (1985), details the relationship between the disintegrating plantation economy and the class structure of Recife, while Robert M. Levine, Pernambuco in the Brazilian Federation (1978), integrates the political history of Recife with the history of the Northeast region and Brazil as a whole. The politics of rural mobilizations from the mid-twentieth century through the start of the twenty-first are analyzed in Angus Wright and Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (2003), and in Anthony W. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961–1988 (1997). Joel Outtes, O Recife: Gênese do urbanismo, 1927–1943 (1997), explores citizenship, urbanity, and modernization in twentieth-century Recife. For contemporary issues of industrial labor and unionism, see Maurício Rands Barros, Labour Relations and the New Unionism in Contemporary Brazil (1999).