Nations and Nationalism 12 (2), 2006, 303320.

r ASEN 2006

National and regional identities in Brazil: Rio Grande do Sul and its peculiarities
RUBEN GEORGE OLIVEN
Department of Anthropology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

ABSTRACT. From the 1930s, Brazil experienced a growing national centralisation and the construction of Brasilidade (Brazilianness). The military regime (196485) deepened centralisation and emphasised national identity, little space being left for regional identities. With the political opening and the redemocratisation of Brazil, starting at the end of the 1970s, the stress was on differences in a period in which Brazil had already achieved a high degree of integration. Identities were re-created, among them that of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, where a strong revival of gaucho culture took place. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by a growing development of activities and disputes linked to the gaucho tradition. In spite of the fact that Rio Grande do Sul is predominantly urban and industrialised, this process reached out to the states rural past and the equestrian gure of the gaucho.

Centralisation and state-building in Brazil: 18221985 Regional difference frequently emerges as a major theme in the construction of national identity. While regional populations may not aspire to statehood, they often seek recognition of their specicities and the peculiar way they belong to the nation. Intellectuals are hard put to it to portray their favoured region as distinct from the nation while at the same time stressing its position as an integral part of the whole (Bourdieu 1980; Mariategui 1971; Oliven 1996). Like nationalism, regionalism has many facets, articulating the positions of very different groups and encompassing the claims and interests of elites and the masses. One of the fundamental points of reference to understand regionalism is the process of national unication that accompanies the formation of the state and which, besides centralising power, has been shown to be historically contrary to the maintenance of cultural and regional diversity (Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Guiberneau 1996; Smith 1991). The relationship between nation and regions is complex and takes various forms according to different historical contexts. In some large countries, when the state is not strong enough to assert its power over the whole nation, it may allow a certain amount of freedom to the regions. When the nation becomes

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more centralised and the state is stronger it will frequently tend to diminish the strength of regions. Once the integration of the nation has been achieved there is once again room for a greater degree of diversity, allowing different groups and regions to express their identities and differences. This article traces just such a process in Brazil. Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of the federation, provides a case study of the dialectical construction of national and regional identities in Brazil and their inherent tensions. I will argue that from the 1930s, Brazil underwent a strong process of nation-building that stressed integration and unity. When regionalism was not actively suppressed it was cast in a nationalistic role, confronting external enemies on behalf of the central state. Only in the late 1970s, with the process of political opening that occurred at the end of the military regime (196485), did a greater space for the assertion of regional identities open up. Rio Grande do Sul, because of its location and peculiar history, is a case that highlights the dilemmas facing the construction of regional identities within large territories. Unlike Spanish America, which split into different countries upon independence, Brazil managed to retain its territorial integrity when it became independent from Portugal in 1822. During the Empire (182289), division of the country into provinces meant little since power was centralised. In this period numerous regional revolts occurred, some with secessionist aspirations. In 1889 the military proclaimed a federal republic, which was at rst very decentralised, granting power to regional oligarchies and establishing a pact between the central power and the newly federated states that had replaced the imperial provinces. Contemporary intellectuals feared a breaking up of the nation since the federal state was not able to effectively articulate, still less reconcile, the interests of all the regions. Important transformations took place during the Old Republic (18891930) and acquired greater momentum from the 1930s onward. These changes were driven by the adoption of a form of import substituting industrialisation based on non-durable consumer goods, the growth of cities that became centres for regional markets, the deep crisis of coffee (Brazils main export product in the 1930s), the failure of a political system based on alliances among the regional oligarchies, and the appearance of social and military revolts that began in the 1920s and culminated with the 1930 Revolution that founded what became known as the New Republic (193064). These processes, incipient during the rst decades of the twentieth century and clearly evident following the world crisis of 1929, fundamentally affected the country. Following the Revolution of 1930, which brought to power Getulio Vargas, a politician from Rio Grande do Sul, the apparatus of a more centralised state was created and power moved more and more from the regions to the national arena. From the economic point of view, for example, the central government abolished interstate taxes, creating a national customs union for the rst time, and began to intervene more in the economy, helping to channel surpluses from the agrarian sectors toward a new process of industrialisation while maintaining the privileges of the rural oligarchies in a

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modied way. At the social level, the state regulated the relationships between capital and work, creating a Ministry of Labour and enacting labour legislation. A Ministry of Education and Culture was also created, and this was to play a fundamental role in the development of national identity by creating a national educational system. By these means, regional cultures and the cultures of ethnic minorities, frequently regarded as exemplary in the regions of high immigration, were weakened. This process was accompanied and reinforced by the development of ideologies like that of Gilberto Freyre (1986) which praised mestizaje and entrenched the idea of Brazil as a racial democracy, displacing an earlier cultural pessimism preoccupied with the difculty of building a true culture in Brazil because of racial miscegenation. On these foundations, and in reaction to the global economic and political dislocation of the 1930s and 1940s, nationalism gained impetus and the federal state pushed forward the work of building the nation and centralising the state. This tendency was further accentuated with the implantation of dictatorship of the Estado Novo (New State, 193745), under which elected state governors were replaced by appointees and the strength of state militias reduced. At the cultural and ideological level, prohibition of the use of foreign languages in any public space (schools, clubs, religious centres, cemeteries), the introduction of Morality and Civics as a subject in all schools, and the creation of the Department of Press and Propaganda (which had as its mission, besides censorship, promotion of the work ethic) all helped to reinforce national identity. Perhaps the most powerful symbolic expression of this process was a clause in the constitution decreed by President Getulio Vargas in 1937, initiating the Estado Novo, which suppressed state ags by afrming that the use of the national ag, the national anthem, and the national coat of arms is obligatory throughout the country. There will be no other ags, anthems, nor coats of arms. The law will regulate the use of national symbols (Nova Constituicao 1937: 3). Less than a month after the implantation of the New State, Vargas ordered the Ceremony of the Burning of State Flags. In this ritual, which symbolised a greater unication of the country and a weakening of regional and state powers, twenty-one Brazilian ags were raised in the place of twentyone state ags which were burned on a large bonre in the middle of a plaza in Rio de Janeiro, the then federal capital, to the sound of the national anthem played by several bands and sung by thousands of schoolchildren under the direction of Heitor Villa Lobos, the celebrated Brazilian composer. After the burning of the ags, the Minister of Justice delivered the following address:
Brazilian ag, today you are the only one. You are being raised today throughout the national territory, the one and only, there being no place in the hearts of Brazilians for any other pennant, ag or symbol. Brazilians unite themselves around Brazil and decree with determination that henceforth they will not consent to divisiveness or discord, that Brazil is the one and only fatherland and that there is no place for any other ideology in Brazil, nor is there space and devotion for any ag other than this one, today being raised with the blessings of the Church, the salute of the sword, the

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veneration of the people, and the songs of the young. You are the only one because there is only one Brazil - re-creating around you once again the unity of Brazil, the unity of thought and action, the unity that can only reign when it is established through historical decisions coming out of public discord and enmity, a single moral and political order, a sovereign order brought about by strength and ideals, the order of a single ideology and of a single authority, the ideology and authority of Brazil (Correio da Manha 1937: 3).

If centralisation and public policy provided one aspect of the process of nation-building in the 1930s and 1940s a process summed up in the single word brasilidade (Brazilianness) intellectuals also had a central role to play. In the 1920s the Modernist movement had started in Sao Paulo. Modernists had as their goal the artistic and intellectual modernisation of Brazil and initially conceived of this process in ways reecting recent artistic tendencies in Europe. But modernist intellectuals soon decided that the only way Brazil could become authentically modern was by being national rst, and this entailed rediscovering popular tradition in a process similar to that which other nations had undergone as they constructed their national identities (Burke 1978; Dundes 1985; Handler 1988; Herzfeld 1986; Thiesse 1999). One of the contributions of the Modernist movement consists in having posed not only the question of cultural-artistic modernisation in an underdeveloped society, but also the problem of national identity. In this sense the attack against the cult of the past was replaced by an emphasis on the elaboration of a national culture bringing about a rediscovery of Brazil by Brazilians. However, this rediscovery did not emphasise regional identity, a concept Brazilian modernists rejected, since they believed that it was primarily through national identity that one would attain the universal identity that was their ideal. In the 1930s some Modernist intellectuals were summoned by the new regime to help construct brasilidade, occupying important posts mainly in the elds of education and culture. They promoted national school curricula, national heritage, carnival and other means of constructing a Brazilian national culture. Finally the process of centralisation that had brought about such a weakening of regional and state powers was accentuated in every way under the military regime (196485). The military promoted further integration of the national market through extensive investment in infrastructure, developing networks of roads, telecommunications and mass communication. In this process the mass media had a central role to play. The revival of regionalism in Rio Grande do Sul after 1985 As Brazil became more centralised, ever more stress was placed on constructing a single national identity. There was little room for the assertion of regional identities. The stress was not on differences but on homogenisation. Only with the political opening of Brazil that started at the end of the 1970s and brought the military regime to an end did it become possible for new

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social actors to surface and new identities to be constructed. In spite of or perhaps because of the progressive centralisation that Brazil had undergone, opposing tendencies were now manifested through demands for effective federalism, administrative decentralisation, diversion of resources to states and municipalities through tax reform, and the afrmation of diversity. In such circumstances it was not surprising that regional identities should have experienced a revival, nor that renewed diversity within a highly integrated country should have adopted a quite novel political posture. Adherents of regional identities no longer denied the existence of a national identity and what is called Brazilian culture, but claimed instead that the only way of being national in a country as large as Brazil was to be regional as well (Oliven 2000a). Such a vast country, lodged within an increasingly globalised economy, requires a kind of cultural subsidiarity. Prominent among the regions equipped to satisfy this need is Rio Grande do Sul, and it is not to be wondered at that there has lately been a strong recovery of its gaucho culture. Brazil borders no less than ten countries. Most of these frontiers lie in the inaccessible and sparsely populated Amazon region far from the major concentrations of Brazilian population on the Atlantic coastline. One among these is therefore supremely emblematic of Brazil as a nation, and that is the southern border with Argentina and Uruguay. Established in colonial times to demarcate Spanish and Portuguese zones, this was the focus of several wars and treaties, extending into the era of independence, to the point where it became symbolic of a broader cultural division between the Lusophone and Hispanic parts of the continent. Notwithstanding profound processes of centralisation, nation-building and acculturation, Brazil has remained a country of large cultural and socioeconomic differences, both in fact and in the persistence of popular stereotypes of different regions. The North is generally recognised as being predominantly poor and black or mestizo; the South as richer and whiter. Indeed Rio Grande do Sul, Brazils southernmost state, is home to only 6.25 per cent of the countrys population, yet it is responsible for twelve per cent of all exports and ten per cent of GNP. The state has strong agriculture and cattle ranching as well as highly diversied industrial development. It boasts the best national health indexes (lowest rate of infant mortality, highest life expectancy) and the highest level of literacy in the country. About eighty per cent of its approximately ten million inhabitants live in urban centres. Having shared in the patterns of migration experienced by neighbouring Argentina and Uruguay, the state has a strong European presence, evident in both its demographics and the self-image of the population. In census interviews almost ninety per cent of the inhabitants of Rio Grande do Sul declare themselves white as compared to fty-ve per cent for Brazil as a whole (see IBGE 2000). Of the numerous military conicts in this southern marchland, one played a very special role in forging regional identity and endures in the popular memory. This was the Farroupilha Revolution, which began in 1835 and

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lasted for almost ten years, pinning down more than half of the federal army. Its origins lay in dissatisfaction of local landowners with the excessive political and economic centralisation imposed by the Brazilian Empire and their belief that the province was being economically exploited by the rest of Brazil (Leitman 1979). The revolutionaries succeeded in proclaiming an independent republic in 1836, and only after assuring amnesty for themselves did they nally sign a peace treaty with the imperial government and abandon independence. But the republic proclaimed by the revolutionaries remains powerfully symbolic even today in Rio Grande do Sul. The inhabitants of Rio Grande do Sul consider themselves Brazilian by choice, but they like to emphasise their individuality with regard to the rest of country. In the social construction of their identity, they use elements that refer to a glorious past, one dominated by the gure of the gaucho, a word that initially meant a vagabond and cattle thief but later came to refer to the mounted ranch hand or soldier, but always and above all, the gure of the horseman. Today, the word designates any citizen of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. This central facet of regional identity stands in need of careful differentiation from the gaucho myth of neighbouring Argentina, and explanation of its adoption within a state that is no longer principally dependent on pastoral activity. Outside of Brazil, the related Spanish word gaucho1 is most closely associated with Argentina. There the horseman is an important national icon, whether depicted as a symbol of backwardness gradually yielding to more modern and settled immigrants or as a romanticised gure holding out against the materialism of those newcomers (Slatta 1985; Delaney 1996; Miller 1999). But while the Spanish word gaucho designates a national icon in Argentina, its Brazilian cognate, gaucho, refers to a regional type, closely associated with one particular state. While in Argentina the debate among intellectuals pivots on the question of whether the gaucho plays a positive or a negative role in the construction of national identity (to be included or excluded), the gaucho of Rio Grande do Sul is a common point of reference for intellectuals in the construction of regional identity. In Brazil, the debate does not revolve around whether to include or exclude this gure, but rather by whom he is to be dened, in what manner, and to what end. The tension between autonomy and integration has been a recurrent theme in the history of relations between the state of Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil. Simultaneous emphasis on the peculiarities of the state and afrmation of its belonging to Brazil constitutes one of the primary foundations for the social construction of the gaucho identity. This identity is constantly brought up to date, restated and evoked. First, there is the so-called geographical isolation of the state of Rio Grande do Sul: an entity separated from the rest of the world by its coastal sandy areas, by its rivers, by its mountains, and by its forests (Prunes 1962: 143). While endowing Rio Grandians with an environment exceptionally conducive to human activity and well-being, nature at the same time placed

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them in what might almost be called the Rio Grandian Continent and thereby ensured their isolation from the rest of Brazil for some two centuries. We must add to this geographical peculiarity a history that can only be characterised as sui generis. This begins with belated integration with the rest of the country. Although discovered at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Rio Grande do Sul did not begin to participate in economic activities of colonial Brazil until more than a century later, through the herding of wild cattle with the primary objective of exporting hides to Europe through Buenos Aires or Sacramento. It was as recently as the end of the seventeenth century that these cattle rst gained importance on the national level as they began to nd an internal market in the budding mining industry in the zone of the Minas Gerais. The new industry stimulated people from Sao Paulo and Laguna to come to herd the wild cattle in Rio Grande do Sul and drive them to the mining area. The strategic objective of the Portuguese Crown was, however, to populate the land from the South of Sao Vicente, nowadays in the state of Sao Paulo, right down to the most southerly outpost of the Portuguese empire in the Americas, the Colony of Sacramento, a settlement founded in 1680 on the bank of the River Plate, opposite Buenos Aires. In this way, Rio Grande do Sul fullled a strategic function as a point of support for the maintenance of Portuguese possessions in the Plata region (Pesavento 1980: 13). This function prompted the Crown, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, to distribute land grants (sesmarias) to cattle traders and veterans to create ranches. Border disputes and military conicts around the Sacramento Colony brought growing militarisation of a region that, in 1760, was declared a captaincy or separate military province. This strategic function of Rio Grande do Sul in effect doubles its marginality: located at the edge of Brazil, its nal inclusion in the federal state was a contingent matter, dependent on the outcome of the historical forces at play. Responding to a north-eastern writer who considered the gaucho to be more Spanish and to belong more to the Plata region than to the Brazilian region, the novelist Erico Verissimo dened this situation of threshold:
We are a frontier. In the eighteenth century, when the Portuguese and Spanish soldiers fought for the decisive occupation of this then immense desert, we had to make a choice: remain with the Portuguese or with the Spanish. We paid a heavy tribute in suffering and blood to remain on this side of the southernmost border of Brazil. How can you accuse us of behaving like Spaniards? We have been, from colonial times until the end of the century, a chronically incendiary territory. In seventy-seven years we have had twelve armed conicts, including the revolutions. We lived in permanent readiness for war. Our women have seldom been out of mourning. Think of the harsh activities of country life rounding up, breaking in and branding the wild horses, herding the cattle, braving the heavy frosts of winter daybreaks to embark on the daily routine and you will understand why virility became the most sought after and appreciated quality of the gaucho. This type of life is responsible for the somewhat impetuous tendencies that remained in the collective unconscious of these populations. It explains our roughness, our disconcerting frankness at times, our habit of speaking

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loudly, as though uttering commands, often giving others the impression that we live for ever in the saddle. The truth is, however, that none of the authentic heroes of Rio Grande I met ever ponticated, ever bragged about any act of bravery. My fellow Rio Grandians who, after the victory in the 1930 revolution, set out for Rio [de Janeiro] in costume and chos, tied their horses to the obelisk on Rio Branco Avenue: those were not legitimate gau they were parodies, like something out of operetta (Verissimo 1969: 34).

The gaucho tradition In the passage just quoted, Verissimo evokes recurrent elements in the regional discourse of Rio Grande do Sul. The rst of these is the frontier character of the state. The second is the choice the state made: Rio Grande preferred to belong to Brazil when it could have opted to belong to the Spanish Empire. A third is the high price that was paid for this choice as represented by the wars involving the state and by the need it felt to bring about insurrection against the central government when it perceived itself a victim of injustice a need to intervene in national politics in moments of crisis. A fourth element touches on the question of authenticity of customs and behaviour. Also noticeable here is the presence of women who always appear in mourning. They appear in this text in an indirect form as a consequence of their mens belligerent behaviour. But it is frequently up to them, in their condition of being orphans, widows and mothers who lost their sons, to assume the responsibility of caring for the family. Women create (give birth) whereas men destroy (kill). What one gleans from this set of elements is a constant climate of adversity. The need to secure the border, to dominate nature, to rebel against the transgressions of the central government, besides ghting the states own internal conicts, helps to explain the somewhat impetuous character that has been incorporated into the gaucho collective unconscious. And binding all these together is the existence of a specic social type the gaucho distinguished by his courage, as much in the face of the forces of nature and the hardships of frontier life as when confronted by the enemy. The image conjured up by the mention of gaucho traditions always has its root in a region called Campanha. It is located in the Southwest of Rio Grande do Sul, where the province borders the Argentinean and Uruguayan pampa, vast open plains with natural pasture ideal for cattle raising. The region is characterised by its estancias or ranches, often of immense extent. The cult gure of the gaucho is that of a free and adventurous man, a prince so long as he is in the saddle, his only interlocutor nature unfolding across the boundless plains. From the eighteenth century, when colonisation of Rio Grande do Sul began, until the Farroupilha Revolution of 1835 to 1845, the south-western region of the state was a region whose borders coincided with the limits of the province, since the Campanha constituted the only gaucho space effectively incorporated into the national economy. In the words of Roche, Rio Grande do Sul was the pampa (Roche 1969). During the Empire, immigrants were

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brought in from Germany (from 1824) and Italy (from 1875). The emergence of a strong contingent of small farmers and merchants in the northern half of the state, the descendants of those immigrants, taken together with the cattle crisis that began around 1870, posed a serious threat to the economic and political hegemony of the Campanha. Franco points out that, in spite of this, a good portion of their Brazilian compatriots still identify Rio Grande do Sul with the socio-cultural characteristics of the Campanha, ignoring the fact that nowadays this region occupies a second-rank position in the economic picture of the province as a whole. The Campanha has lost its demographic hegemony, and consequently its political dominance, and is an area marked by the darkest corners of underdevelopment (Franco 1969: 656). In spite of the decadence of the Campanha, and the rise of other regions like the mountainous region cho, with his rustic of German and Italian colonisation the gure of the gau accoutrements: his horse, his Chimarra (yerba mate or unsweetened herbal o tea) and the ideal of a free and brave social type, came to serve also as a model for different ethnic groups. This image of the gaucho unites the inhabitants of the state and marks it off from the rest of the country. The peculiarities of Rio Grande do Sul have contributed to the construction of a cluster of representations that have nally attained an almost mythic force which persists even today and allows them to contribute to contemporary actions and dictate current practices. In spite of the internal diversity of the state (to the point that one author speaks of twelve Rio Grandes; Barbosa Lessa 1981), regional tradition and historiography tend to represent its inhabitants through a single social type the gaucho, the horseman and farmhand in the southwestern region of Rio Grande do Sul. Although he is Brazilian, he would be very different from other social types in the nation, having more proximity at times with his namesake in Argentina or Uruguay. In the social construction of the gaucho identity, there is a constant reference to elements that evoke a glorious past into which his gure was forged. His existence was marked by life in the wide open spaces, by the omnipresence of the horse, by the border status with the Plata region, by virility, by loyalty, by honour, and so on. But the gure of the gaucho, as we know it, had to undergo a long process of cultural elaboration before it achieved the current gentried meaning of a citizen of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Tracing the history of the word gaucho, Meyer demonstrated that it did not always have the heroic meaning it was later to acquire in regional literature and historiography. During the colonial period, the inhabitant of Rio Grande do Sul was called guasca and later gauderio (vagrant, vagabond). This latter term had a pejorative sense and referred to the adventurers from Sao Paulo who deserted from the regular army and adopted the rough life of the hide traders and cattle thieves. They were errant vagabonds and smugglers of cattle in a region where the border was quite uid because of the conicts between Portugal and Spain. At the end of the eighteenth century, they were called gauchos, a term that kept the same pejorative connotations as the older terms until early in the nineteenth century when, with the organisation of the large ranches, it came to mean

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peon and warrior in a laudatory sense (Meyer 1957). What then occurred was a re-semanticisation of the term, through which a social type previously considered deviant and marginal was appropriated and re-worked until it acquired a new positive meaning to the point of being transformed into a symbol of regional identity. Representations of the gaucho, which are now considered denitional, can be seen in the accounts of foreign travellers who visited Rio Grande do Sul during the nineteenth century like Saint-Hilaire (1974) and Isabelle (1983). These images are also present in a vast Brazilian literary tradition that has as its origin the book O Gaucho, published in 1870 at the height of Romanticism. It was written by Jose de Alencar (1978), a north-eastern author who, never having even visited Rio Grande do Sul, nonetheless idealised and mythologised the gaucho, calling him the centaur of the pampas. From a sociological perspective, Oliveira Vianna, a thinker from the state of Rio de Janeiro, in his classic Southern Populations of Brazil, attributed to the Rio Grandian cattleman special characteristics and a distinctive mentality that marked him out from the typical social types of the north-eastern backlands or the forests of the south-central part of the country. These differences were attributed to the environment and the political superiority that derived from the military experience of the gauchos: The gaucho is socially a product of the pampas, as he is politically a product of war. Thus the experience of war gave to the gaucho elite the capacity for the command of large human masses and the practice of organising them, at the same time that it developed in the collective consciousness of those people, besides the interdependence between social life and private family . . . also an awareness and appreciation of government as the supreme organ for collective interests. Oliveira Vianna also offers the most well-developed theory of so-called southern democracy, when he argues that in Rio Grande do Sul there was a tradition of equality and familiarity between bosses and servants. He goes on to write of this inter-penetration of the two rural classes the high and the low, the master and the servant [as] a phenomenon that constitutes, in its substance, the spirit of Rio Grandian democracy. A decisive element in the creation of the social democracy would be the environment, responsible for the lightness of work. The pampas with its amplitude, its freedom, its vast horizons, its grassy vegetation makes a veritable sport out of the pastoral work (Oliveira Vianna 1974: 159, 1689, 1956). To the ideal of social democracy must be added that of racial democracy. The argument that the life of slaves in Rio Grande do Sul was easier when compared to that in other places of Brazil rests on a confusion between domestic slaves on the ranches (who did not contribute directly to the productive process) and the slaves of the meat-processing plants. This misunderstanding brought about an idealised vision of the living conditions of blacks in the state. In the process of glorifying the gaucho, which is part of the social construction of his identity, it became necessary to distinguish him from his namesake in other countries. Thus in 1927, trying to describe the comparisons

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and contrasts between the Rio Grandian gaucho and the gaucho from Argentina and Uruguay, Goulart wrote:
The cruel gaucho is a creation of the Plata region Pampas. This sui generis type who ghts merely for the love of ghting, eternal enemy of society and justice, untameable and adventurous warrior, dominated by the vice of gambling and by the love of bloody struggle, anonymous hero of the Pampas: this type is peculiar to the Spanish population. The Rio Grandian is not [cruel]. He is sober, orderly, although he never fears confronting the enemy so that social organisation can be maintained. The long series of bloody facts that the history of the Plata region registers is completely alien to the history of Rio Grande do Sul. . . . The Plata region gaucho is a rebel against society and the laws that govern it. The dictator who achieves supreme governance does not look for the good in people because he does not understand people. All the prerogatives in his personality are those of a rude and rustic autocrat. The Rio Grandian is just the opposite. In [18]35 he rebels to give his land a more secure government, more in accord with the necessities of his people (Goulart 1985: 1089).

It is interesting that at the time these remarks were made, the Farroupilha Revolution was only a few years away from its centennial and the wars of the Plata region had ended a long time before. What had happened recently in Rio Grande do Sul were internal conicts of an extremely bloody and cruel nature (Motta 1989). Thus from 1893 to 1895, the state had been submerged in the Federalist Revolution, the bloodiest civil war in Brazils history; a war that lasted thirty-one months and produced ten to twelve thousand casualties in a state population of one million (Love 1971: 72). The conict was between the group that took power in Rio Grande do Sul when the Republic was proclaimed and the landowners of the south of the state who had dominated politics during the Empire. In 1923 a new internal conict sprang up between the same groups that had been involved in the Federalist Revolution. One of the issues of the dispute was precisely the autocratic style of government of those in power. The conict ended with a pact that prohibited the state governor from electing himself again. During that time the dictators were central gures in the states conicts and politics. It may seem strange, therefore, for Goulart to have spoken of the orderly character and peaceful nature of the Brazilian gaucho at such a time. Again, one cannot help but note that constant preoccupation of gaucho historio graphy, from that time on, with the non-separatist character of the Farroupilha Revolution. True, this preoccupation was already present at the time of the movement itself. In 1838, Bento Goncalves, leader of the revolutionaries, published a manifesto to civilised nations arguing that the Rio Grandian Republic was a last stand in the struggle against the intransigence of the Empire. A classic episode is frequently evoked recounting the offer of troops by Rosas, the Argentine dictator, to the leader of the farroupilhas David Canabarro. The latter is said to have rejected the offer with the following words: Sir! The rst of your soldiers who crosses the border will furnish the blood with which we will sign the Peace of Piratini with the Empire, for even more important than our love for the Republic is our Brazilian honour (Vellinho 1964: 217).

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More than the egregious silence about what was actually going on as they wrote, what one notices in the writings of the intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, with their insistence on the non-separatism of the Farroupilha Revolucho and the tion and on the essential differences between the Brazilian gau Argentine and Uruguayan gaucho, is an attempt to afrm the Brazilian national identity of Rio Grande do Sul and its inhabitants. Although today this may seem superuous, it is useful to remember that many of these men were writing before or immediately after 1930, when the economic and political integration of the country was not yet solid. One of the central themes of intellectuals at the time was the formation of a national identity and national integration. The 1930 Revolution, in as much as it heralded a growing process of economic and political centralisation, accentuated the idea of national unity and conferred on the state the task of accomplishing it. It was necessary, cho but to therefore, not only to afrm the Brazilian identity of the gau emphasise his positive traits, even if in so doing it became necessary to massage reality, glossing over the elements that could be considered barbarian. These had to be exported to the other side of the border, to the Plata region. It is signicant that today the headquarters of the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul is called Farroupilha Palace and that the headquarters of the state government, located next door, is called Piratini Palace, evoking the place that was the headquarters of the Rio Grandian Republic. Likewise, the anthem of Rio Grande do Sul is the anthem of the farrapos. In fact, the Farroupilha Revolution has been fully incorporated into Rio Grandian public life, remembered and ritualised annually during a week of commemoration that bears its name and culminates with a state holiday on 20 September, when there are parades and celebrations in all cities of the state. The peculiar relationship between Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil is expressed symbolically in the current state ag. It is composed of three coloured stripes: one green, another yellow, evoking the colours of the national ag, and a red stripe separating the two, denoting the blood that was spilled in the history of the state. In the middle of this red stripe, symbolising so passionately the quota of sacrice paid by its inhabitants when they entered the federation, is a coat of arms that contains, among other objects, cannons, lances, bayonets and two phrases Liberty, Equality, Humanity (the motto of the farrapos) and Rio Grandian Republic, 20 September 1835 (the date when the Farroupilha Revolution started). These words serve as a constant reminder that, although Rio Grande do Sul is part of Brazil, it was once an independent republic and that this fact must remain vivid in the collective memory of its citizens.

The revival of gauchismo: traditionalists vs. nativists At the end of the decade of the 1970s it was common to hear that gaucho tradition was an endangered species or that it was reduced to pockets of

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tradition and folklore. After all, Brazil was taking huge steps towards national integration. The military government that took power in 1964 promoted a conservative modernisation and a gradual political and economic centralisation. This meant, among other things, that Brazilian television, with its primetime soap operas and eight oclock news watched by millions of people, began to reach the majority of the population and began to promote a culture that seemed increasingly to be a national culture. Considering that Rio Grande do Sul had become an industrialised state in which a large majority of the population was urban, it was thought that there was no space within its culture for the rustic and mounted gure of the gaucho. But the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were marked by the process of abertura (political opening) in which Brazilian civil society organised itself and began to put pressure on the government for the democratisation of the regime. As new political spaces were conquered, different political actors appeared and new social identities were created. It came as a surprise to many that the organisation of civil society occurred not only at the level of political parties and labour unions but also at the level of social movements. Here, myriad groups fought on specic issues which, up until then, had not played an important role on the Brazilian stage. These new voices included feminist groups, homosexuals, green movements, consumer movements concerned with price increases, religious movements, and so on. It is in this context of clamouring for a voice that we nd the revival of gauchism (Oliven 1996). When one observes the cultural manifestations that were evident during the 1980s and 1990s in Rio Grande do Sul, the number of activities linked to tradition is impressive. The revival of gaucho memorabilia has been responsible for the creation of approximately 2500 Centres for Gaucho Tradition throughout Rio Grande do Sul as well as in other states and countries to which Rio Grandians have migrated (Oliven 2000b), for more than forty gaucho music festivals involving a public of approximately one million people, and for several rodeos. This growing interest also helps to explain the consumption of cultural products surrounding gaucho themes: television and radio programmes, newspaper columns, magazines and specialised newspapers, publishing houses, books, bookstores and regional book fairs, publicity that refers directly to gaucho values (Jacks 1998), folk-dance halls, music groups, singers and records, typical restaurants featuring music and dance shows, stores that specialise in gaucho clothing, and so on. All this adds up to a signicant and expanding market for material and symbolic goods that engage a great number of people and substantial resources. Although there always was consumer demand for gaucho cultural products, it was previously much smaller and was concentrated in the countryside or in elements of suburban and urban society with rural origins. The novelty is that young people in the cities, a good number of them from the middle class, have recently begun to drink mate tea, wear bombachas (baggy pants traditionally worn by the gaucho), and enjoy regional music all habits that have lost their stigma of inferiority. Considering that approximately

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eighty percent of the states population lives in urban settings, this market is concentrated in the cities and is formed, for the most part, by people who have had no experience of rural life and who would almost certainly fall off a horse if they tried to ride. It is also interesting that a new eld of intellectual debate developed and that within it, different actors appeared wishing to speak on behalf of gaucho tradition. The central point around which the debates about gaucho identity revolve is located in a past that existed in the Campanha region and in the real or idealised gure of the gaucho. Today, the representation of both place and hero is being attempted in circumstances quite different to the mid-twentieth century, since Rio Grande do Sul is now urbanised and modern. At the same time, Brazil itself has developed a greater integration in politics, economics, transportation and communication, thereby effectively articulating its regions. During the 1980s and 1990s gaucho identity was the object of an intense and heated debate. Although trying to position themselves in opposite camps, in their hearts the contenders were circling one another within the same quite restricted semantic eld: the gure of the gaucho, the means of constructing it, the criteria for dening its authenticity, the instances of its legitimacy and consecration, and so on. Basically two groups were involved in this dispute: the traditionalists and the nativists. Although they frequently proclaimed themselves the antithesis of each other, they followed essentially the same model, varying merely in outward appearances. In the nal analysis, what is at stake is who monopolises the right to afrm what is and what is not gaucho tradition and culture as well as who exercises the greater inuence over the marketing of symbolic goods. The rst and oldest actors in gauchism are the traditionalists. They maintain an organised movement, Movimento Tradicionalista Gaucho (Gaucho Traditionalist Movement), are attentive to all that is related to symbolic goods of Rio Grande do Sul and try to exercise control and orientation over these goods. They are joined by intellectuals who write about the movement and who occupy strategic positions. For them it is fundamental to demarcate what the true gaucho values are; hence their need to make themselves the guardians of tradition. The maintenance of the distinction between Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil is a way to preserve the states cultural identity. Therefore, a recurrent theme in the traditionalist discourse is the threat hovering over gaucho integrity. Threats to gaucho integrity come from the outside, from the introduction of alien customs spread by mass communication, as well as from the inside, through the misrepresentations of bad traditionalists, through their inadequate use of artistic groups, through aberrations in the choreography of gaucho dances. From such sources as these springs the imperious need to dene what is right and wrong or, more precisely, what is authentic and what is spurious. Therefore, the traditionalists are constantly preoccupied with establishing parameters, separating the pure from the impure, in a process analogous to that described by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (Douglas 1966). Thus no amount of care is too great to stop the unbridled erosion of culture and

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customs (Tradicao 1981: 4). All this preoccupation translates into a search for norms and the elaboration of documents that attempt to design directives. Traditionalists are a group of intellectuals who wield a certain amount of knowledge as a form of power. They began by inventing and appropriating a series of traditions, some of which became so popular that they are frequently considered as having a folk origin in spite of their originators claims that they were indeed their own creations. They quote Hobsbawm (1993), an author who criticises the invention of traditions, as an a posteriori legitimiser of the Gaucho Traditionalist Movement, thus showing the extent of academic reection and self-consciousness among the movements intellectuals. Frequently the revival of gaucho culture is seen to have been a victory for traditionalism. Of course this victory is undermined by the fact that new artists are re-elaborating Rio Grandian themes without adhering to any kind of dogma and at times even parodying the traditional gure of the gaucho. The Gaucho Traditionalist Movement cannot control all cultural expressions in the state nor can it claim hegemonic status for its own messages. These are different times, engendering different notions of what it means to be a gaucho, notions that do not necessarily correspond to the beliefs of the Centre for Gaucho Traditions. The market for symbolic goods has increased, and new actors have begun to claim positions in it. The other group of contenders in this polemic is formed basically by artists and journalists who call themselves nativists and who do not accept the control and patronage imposed by the Gaucho Traditionalist Movement. Constant battle rages between the two groups. Music festivals provide the arena for much of the debate about what it means to be gaucho. A constant dispute between traditionalists and nativists simmers. The latter believe that their style is just the opposite of the former, which is seen as very poor in resources, founded only in the accordion, resistant to any electronic resources and tied to well-beaten themes from the past. The traditionalists, on the other hand, invoke an authority deriving from their having been the creators of the rst festivals and the instigators of the revival of all things gaucho. These differences, besides generating heated debates, do not run deep, however, since the traditionalists and the nativists both deal with the same theme. If one weighs the polemics, the differences between traditionalists and nativists are a matter of style. The former almost deliberately assume a more conservative and less developed position, whereas the latter appear more progressive and innovative, intending to bridge the states past and present. What they have in common, besides the preoccupation with gaucho roots, is that they ght for the same market of symbolic goods and access to recognition, such as the music festivals, journalistic debates, and so on. In a certain way they could be characterised as intellectuals who are on the periphery of the established circles of intellectual legitimisation, in so far as they do not have access to the classic institutions, such as universities, academic journals and scientic congresses.

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At rst sight it may seem strange to nd this revival of gauchism at a time when Brazil is so well integrated nationally. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this growing centralisation, one observes today in Brazil tendencies that are contrary to this process, tendencies that manifest themselves through the afrmation of regional identities, with Rio Grande do Sul serving as an expressive example. If gauchism rewrites rural tradition and life, it does so in an urbanised state that wishes to be modern. It may seem curious that this movement should take hold of rural and past values when Rio Grande do Sul is predominantly urban and quite industrialised. This fact has made some consider the phenomenon as a mere passing fashion or as an anachronistic ideology, albeit curiously efcacious: some kind of cultural survival (Tylor 1913, vol. 1: 16). However, because of the breadth and duration of the phenomenon, it is difcult to label it as a fashion or as an ideology that has passed its time. With regard to the aspect of fashion that publicity can attribute to any phenomenon, this has lasted far longer than other waves. At the same time, although a certain number of intellectuals point to the ideological and reactionary aspect of a purported return to some idyllic time that no longer exists, if it ever did, this criticism does not resolve the question. In this context, for example, it is difcult to explain why a state in which a conservative ideology aspires to be hegemonic has a distinctive and radical political role in contemporary Brazilian politics. The Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party) has a strong presence in the political system of Rio Grande do Sul having exercised power at the level of the state and its capital city. The World Social Forum was created in Porto Alegre, capital of the state. When one attempts to compare Rio Grande do Sul with the rest of the country, pointing to differences and constructing a social identity, it is almost inevitable that this process will reach out to the states rural past and to the gure of the gaucho, since these are the distinctive emblems of the state. What is happening in Rio Grande do Sul seems to indicate that, today, the national is realised through the regional: that is, the people of Rio Grande do Sul can only be Brazilian if they are Gaucho as well. Translated form the Portuguese by Carmen Chaves Tesser (Department of Romance Languages, University of Georgia) Note
1 Whereas in Portuguese the word gaucho is pronounced with the accent on the letter u, in Spanish the word gaucho is pronounced with the accent on the letter a.

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