Proletários de casaca

In Brazil’s late Empire and early First Republic, Rio de Janeiro was a city of merchants: thousands of small business owners and their employees who proffered goods and services to the capital city’s swelling population. This aspect of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Rio captivated a generation of contemporaneous commentators but curiously has failed to translate into a present-day field of scholarly inquiry. The archival record brims with fascinating, yet largely untapped, information about the almost exclusively male shop employees — “empregados” and “caixeiros” — who occupied the space between feudal servitude and the nascent service sector and urban working class. Historian Fabiane Popinigis has authored a monograph that begins to fill this gap.Popinigis frames the story of the lives and struggles of Rio’s shop workers as labor history, an analytical strategy that constitutes this book’s greatest historiographic contribution. Through the mid-nineteenth century, shop workers had been beneficiaries of a quid pro quo with shop owners that offered them paternalistic protection and the hope of social ascent. By the century’s end, most caixeiros could no longer realistically aspire to attain the position of their bosses. Shop workers nonetheless still had to live with their bosses, or in the store where they worked, and labor for extraordinarily long hours. Tracing the fitful transition from patrimonialism to modern employer-employee relations, Popinigis shows how caixeiros became a proletariat housed within the walls of the petite bourgeoisie. The book’s title, “Proletarians in Suits,” alludes to their complex identities and divided loyalties; their distinctive work attire “became an important metaphor” for the “ideological distinction” between “worker [operário]” and “employee [empregado]” (p. 47).The author goads us past persistent stereotypes of the empregado no comércio, a figure mocked for over a century by the media and in literary works that portray him as a mediocre citizen incongruously clothed in finery and deride him for his presumed false consciousness. Rather than the politically “reactionary” lackeys of the petite bourgeoisie, Popinigis shows that one may usefully see workers in petty commerce as the advance guard of modern labor relations (p. 24). Caixeiros reacted to their proletarianization with their own version of labor militancy. As their chances of social mobility waned, shop workers did not hesitate to demand from the state the fair protection that their bosses could no longer be counted on to provide. Caixeiros did not join the workers’ movement but rather took part in a vigorous legalist, reformist struggle for rights “restricted to their profession” (p. 56). Their campaign to regulate working hours and force shop owners to close on Sundays came to a head in the 1910s. Ultimately, the state’s failed policies forced caixeiros back to the mercy of their bosses. Yet Popinigis convincingly argues that the Brazilian government’s early attempts to regulate urban petty commerce attests to the existence of “channels of communication” between the state and the plebian classes, whose aspirations of social mobility and justice are conventionally understood to have been definitively betrayed by the new Republican leadership (p. 25).A similar process of proletarianization of shop workers simultaneously occurred in France’s cities, which Popinigis uses as a “comparative reference” for her study of the Brazilian capital (p. 30). Boycotts, political campaigns and, from 1890 on, increasingly violent protests in French cities promoted the cause of shop workers in their attempts to reduce hours. While evocative, Rio’s shop worker – activists’ perennial references to their French counterparts do not justify this extended attempt at comparative analysis, which would have required a more fully developed analysis of French consumer protest, retail commerce, and urban labor history than the author offers. As the author herself points out, Francophilia shaded nearly all corners of carioca life. Rather than dwelling on the correspondence between Rio and Paris, already well-trod territory for historians of the Latin American urban belle époque, the author might have surveyed the simultaneity of similar popular movements in many cities in the transatlantic world. Such a broad, transnational vantage might have helped Popinigis uncover both the universality of the Brazilian case and its particularities, such as the impact of slavery and abolition on the social relations in petty commerce, a subject that she raises but leaves largely unexplored.Another dimension of urban petty commerce suggested but not sufficiently analyzed in this book is the fact that caixeiros’ struggles concerned consumption as well as work. Resistance against the movement to close businesses on Sundays came from the charge that consumers demanded a seven-day shopping week. The patronage relationship between boss and worker was problematic exactly because in-kind benefits no longer would suffice in a modernizing, urban society where cash, not loyalty and favors, sustained life. What role did the advent of a nascent consumer culture play in the historical process that the author analyzes? Had she attempted to answer this question, Popinigis’s study would have provided a rare opportunity to analyze work and consumption together, something almost completely missing from both labor history and consumer culture studies.Although at times encumbered by lengthy expositions of the existing scholarship, Popinigis’s richly detailed narrative integrates petty commerce into Rio’s labor history and points the way toward better incorporating labor history into other crucial subfields of urban social and cultural history. Popinigis has provided future historians with a vivid reconstruction of the daily life and social dynamics of work in petty commerce. She has forced us not only to rethink the stereotyped profile of Rio’s thousands of sales clerks, cashiers, custodians, and other employees but also to consider the crucial methodological question of how to study those who have been repeatedly besmirched in the records that we use to reconstruct their lives — and how to use those very stereotypes to think usefully about the labor politics of historical memory. Popinigis has produced a work of great interest to urban and labor historians of Brazil, the rest of Latin America, and beyond

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