Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The anarchist movement had a substantial presence in Brazil in the early twentieth century. Eclipsed by the ascension of the communist left and crushed by anti-communist military regimes, it still survives, and its traces can be seen in some contemporary political and cultural movements. During the colonial era some aspects of the numerous slave rebellions had an anti-authoritarian character, notably the quilombos – independent agrarian settlements formed by escaped slaves in the Brazilian hinterlands. The inception of Brazil's anarchist movement per se , however, is generally dated to the arrival of European immigrants, particularly Italians, in the late nineteenth century. It was a number of Italian anarchists, led by Giovanni Rossi (1856–1943) and Gigi Damiani (1876–1953), who founded the Colônia Cecília (1890–3), a notable Utopian experiment in the rural province of Paraná on land purchased from the liberal emperor. Experimenting with free love, libertarian education, and collective land tenure, the colony was blighted by a croup epidemic in its fourth year, then undone by new arrivals who betrayed the trust of the founding families. Unlike Rossi's pioneers, however, the bulk of the Italian immigrants, imported by employers as a factory workforce, were only radicalized after their arrival in the new country; hence, Brazilian anarchism can be considered a domestic product, ... log in or subscribe to read full text