6

The Roots of Rural Poverty

Between 1679 and 1682, the residents of the town of São Paulo and its outlying rural districts were duly enrolled in a book kept by the Municipal Council that registered the contribution each head of household was to make to the Donativo Real (Royal Contribution).¹ The Donativo, a tax levied by municipal councils throughout the Portuguese empire, had existed since the early 1660s, but, at least in the captaincy of São Vicente, the criteria for its collection were laid out only in 1679, during the judicial inspection of the royal magistrate João da Rocha Pita.² The compiling of the Donativo created a valuable – indeed, indispensable – document for the study of Paulista society in the seventeenth century, one that has not yet provoked significant interest among historians.

The registry book contains lists of residents and the values of their annual contributions. The specific criteria employed to appraise the value of individual contributions are unclear, but Pita’s general instructions were that all residents, rich and poor, should contribute “according to their means.”³ There are two reasons why it seems likely that holdings of Indians served as the principal basis for establishing the amounts to be paid. First, there is a strong correlation between the size of the contribution of property holders who died within a decade of the assessment and the number of Indians found in their estate inventories. Second, a similar tax roll composed for Itu in 1728 clearly used the number of African slaves and Indian servants to determine the amount that each taxpayer was to contribute.⁴ Therefore, the Donativo lists should reflect not only general differences in wealth, but also the relative size of individual slaveholdings, the possession of captive labor having been the principal means of wealth-holding in the region.

Beginning with an analysis of the tax rolls of 1679–1682, this chapter seeks to examine the internal structure of the rural neighborhoods that surrounded the town of São Paulo in the seventeenth century. The rolls afford a partial glimpse at the distribution of wealth and of family relationships that defined each rural district, a view that may be enhanced by examining other documents from the period, particularly inventories and wills. The lists, in sum, provide statistical evidence that illustrates how processes of territorial expansion and rural development – though relatively modest in scale – determined, in large part, the basic contours of Paulista society.

The conclusions that emerge from this more comprehensive view refute certain ideas that have been fundamental to Paulista historiography. On the one hand, the tax rolls of 1679–1682 show that Paulista society in the “century of the bandeirantes,” far from being egalitarian, was marked by profound inequalities in the distribution of wealth. On the other, these same lists show that the spread of rural poverty, which is often attributed to geographic isolation and the less intensive variety of agriculture supposedly practiced in São Paulo, resulted from a process in which Indian slavery and commercial agriculture played key roles.

Rural São Paulo, 1679: The Distribution of Wealth

The formation of Paulista society in the colonial period was closely tied to the process of transforming uncultivated wilderness into fairly stable population centers, a process accompanied by the evolution of large-scale Indian slavery. Over much of the seventeenth century, new groups of colonists extended the limits of European settlement and organized new communities on a broad base of Indian labor. Territorial expansion depended upon the availability of abundant land and labor.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, access to economically viable lands, as well as Indian captives, became much more difficult. During the first half of the century, the acquisition of virgin land through sesmarias and municipal grants had been relatively easy. At the same time, the collective organization of large-scale slaving expeditions, made viable by the proximity of numerous Guarani villages, had afforded an abundant supply of labor for an entire generation. This picture began to change in the 1640s. Between 1638 and 1641, almost all of the best lands between the town of São Paulo and the Atibaia River were distributed, along with vast tracts along the Tietê River to the west of Santana de Parnaíba. In these same years, the Jesuits and the Guarani began to repel slaving expeditions, severely limiting the recruitment of Indian labor and forcing the colonists to reorganize their expeditions along more modest lines. Finally, the region’s wealth, based on the production and transport of a few commercial goods – wheat foremost among them – became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few privileged and powerful families who, by the 1650s, were struggling among themselves for absolute control over the reins of power.

If, on the one hand, the organization of agricultural production led to a sharp division between slaveowners and Indian slaves, exploiters and exploited, on the other, it also determined that there would be profound differences in wealth within the free population. In brief, while the formation of new communities and the expansion of production offered the prospect of wealth, the principal result of these processes was, paradoxically, the spread of rural poverty.⁵

Much of the wealth, power, and prestige of the leading families of rural São Paulo was rooted in the rural bairros that had emerged with the expansion of colonial production. In administrative terms, the bairro was little more than an appendage of the town, designed to provide an organizational structure capable of meeting some of the collective needs of its residents. Thus, each bairro had an internal structure of its own, particularly during the colonial period, when the pull of the urban market was weak and the dominance of city over countryside lay in the future.⁶

As constellations of rural properties more or less linked to one another, the bairros were composed of units of production that varied greatly in size. Although the term fazenda (estate) appears here and there in the documentation, even some of the largest units were called sítios (literally, “site” or “place”), which presents a problem for the historian, as the latter term would come to refer exclusively to smallholdings.⁷ Most seventeenth-century bairros originated with and grew around large commercial properties owned by the wealthiest and most prestigious residents. These leading residents reserved for themselves the position of local militia captain (capitão do bairro), a source of authority that ultimately mirrored the economic relations that predominated in the formation of the neighborhoods.

In many cases, the largest landowners raised chapels on their estates, which served as centers for the bairro’s religious and recreational activities. The founding of a chapel was an important event, as it reinforced the social prestige and economic power of its founder. Having raised a rural chapel, its founder would also assume the expenses associated with local religious services, which were the only way the Church reached much of the rural population under Portuguese colonialism. In seventeenth-century São Paulo, with few exceptions, the founding of a chapel was associated with the presence of large numbers of Indians. The spatial organization of the chapel itself mirrored the basic division in colonial society: the central and lateral areas were reserved for the free, while an ample area around the entryway was ceded to slaves and Indians who wanted “to glimpse the saints.”⁸ As a result of the subsequent economic and demographic development of their bairros, several of these early chapels came to have resident priests and, in some cases, became parish seats.

Each township had several bairros, though it remains difficult to recover the precise names and locations of all of them from the surviving documentation. Many had indigenous names, some of which have been maintained down to the present. Others, particularly newer ones, carried the names of their founders. For example, on a list of taxpayers in Itu for 1728, three of the nine rural bairros bore the name of their richest resident.⁹ Similarly, in 1679, one of the recently formed bairros in the township of São Paulo was called “Bairro of Antonio Bueno.”

Table 10 summarizes the distribution of the Donativo Real of 1679 among the rural zones of São Paulo.¹⁰ The number of contributors is a rough measure of the number of productive units in each bairro. In turn, the average assessment demonstrates the relative wealth of the various bairros. The wealthiest bairros– Atibaia, Antonio Bueno, Barueri, and Juqueri – all included areas of recent settlement and were the principal centers for commercial agriculture at that time. In contrast, the bairros of Santo Amaro, Caucaia, and Caaguaçu, more densely settled and closer to the town of São Paulo, were inhabited by small farmers and marginal stockmen.¹¹

Table 10Distribution of the Donativo Real by Bairro and among Contributors (in réis), Rural São Paulo, 1679

Bairro	Contributors	Total assessed	Average contribution
Antonio Bueno	72	62,640	870
Atibaia	100	101,640	1,016
Barueri	56	46,440	829
Caaguaçu	118	40,080	340
Caucaia	116	56,820	490
Cotia	53	33,220	627
Forte	32	22,960	718
Juqueri	35	28,340	810
Santo Amaro	146	40,970	281
São Miguel	46	25,540	555
Tremembé	55	30,280	551
Total	829	489,210	590

Source: “Livro do rol das pessoas para o pedido real,” AHMSP, CM-1-19.

This picture is suggestive of a process of expansion and decline, in which older districts already felt the presence of widespread poverty while the newer, more dynamic bairros offered greater opportunities for the accumulation of wealth. In the seventeenth century, as territorial expansion was critical to the creation and maintenance of large fortunes, the wealthiest settlers constantly shifted resources to newer, more productive areas.

But that tells only part of the story. Soil exhaustion and demographic growth contributed to the spread of rural poverty and provoked territorial expansion at the same time. However, the roots of rural poverty lay not only in the decline of once prosperous bairros, but also in the structure of frontier expansion itself. On the Donativo rolls, even the wealthiest, most recently settled bairros included large concentrations of contributors at the lowest levels of wealth (Table 11 displays the distribution of taxpayers according to the size of their contributions). These figures suggest that a built-in structure of inequality accompanied frontier expansion, and that inequality probably tended to decrease in older zones as wealthier colonists moved on to new lands.

Table 11Distribution of Tax Contribution and Contributors by Amounts Assessed, Rural São Paulo, 1679

Bairro		Value of contribution (in réis)
		Under 400	400–639	640–999	1,000–1,999	Over 2,000
Antonio Bueno	%N*	37.5	15.3	16.7	19.4	11.1
	%R**	9.9	8.1	15.0	26.3	40.7
Atibaia	%N	58.0	10.0	8.0	11.0	13.0
	%R	12.5	5.2	6.1	15.6	60.6
Barueri	%N	55.4	12.5	12.5	8.9	10.7
	%R	9.6	7.6	11.2	13.5	58.1
Caaguaçu	%N	76.3	9.3	5.9	6.8	1.7
	%R	41.5	13.2	12.8	22.4	10.0
Caucaia	%N	67.2	6.9	6.9	13.8	5.2
	%R	23.7	6.9	11.2	33.5	24.7
Cotia	%N	52.8	15.1	17.0	9.4	5.6
	%R	18.2	11.8	21.1	18.3	30.6
Forte	%N	53.1	9.4	12.5	15.6	9.4
	%R	17.9	6.2	12.7	32.0	31.2
Juqueri	%N	62.8	8.6	8.6	11.4	8.6
	%R	11.3	5.8	7.0	15.2	60.7
Santo Amaro	%N	82.9	5.5	8.2	2.0	1.4
	%R	48.9	9.3	21.8	9.0	11.0
São Miguel	%N	56.5	15.2	17.4	2.2	8.7
	%R	15.9	14.6	23.5	3.9	42.1
Tremembé	%N	63.6	9.1	10.9	9.1	7.3
	%R	24.1	7.1	16.4	20.3	32.1

^*%N = Percentage of total residents of bairro.

^**%R = Percentage of total contribution of bairro.

Source: “Livro do rol das pessoas para o pedido real,” AHMSP, CM-1-19.

This assertion can be confirmed by two statistical measures of wealth concentration, the Gini coefficient of inequality, or Gini index, and the size share of the top 10 percent, sometimes referred to as the SSTT.¹² Table 12 presents these measures based on the Donativo lists. All the districts had relatively high concentrations of wealth in the hands of the richest 10 percent, with the wealthier bairros, especially Juqueri, Atibaia, and Barueri, showing more intense concentrations. The Gini index is more revealing, showing great levels of inequality, again particularly in the wealthier districts. The only major exception, Santo Amaro, with the low value of .16, is not surprising in that it was the oldest bairro, with few Indians and little wealth spread among its residents.

Table 12Indices of Wealth Distribution, Rural São Paulo, 1679

Bairro	Gini*	DPMR (%)**
Antonio Bueno	.48	38
Atibaia	.61	54
Barueri	.64	49
Caaguaçu	.41	37
Caucaia	.50	40
Cotia	.49	39
Forte	.47	31
Juqueri	.65	35
Santo Amaro	.16	37
São Miguel	.53	46
Tremembé	.52	37

^*Gini: Gini coefficient of inequality, in which 1.00 = perfect inequality and 0.00 = perfect equality.

^**DPMR: share of total wealth controlled by top decile of bairro residents.

Source: “Livro do rol das pessoas para o pedido real,” AHMSP, CM-1-19.

These figures may be compared with values calculated for eighteenth-century São Paulo by Alice Canabrava.¹³ Using the 1765 and 1767 censuses, Canabrava worked out Gini values ranging from .60 to .75 for rural São Paulo, but found much greater concentrations of destitute colonists than those appearing in the rolls of 1679–1682. This suggests that the commercial opportunities offered by the development of the mining economy of the eighteenth century benefited only a limited segment of the population, and, predictably, served to increase inequality.

The Donativo Real tax rolls offer some notion of the distribution of wealth in rural São Paulo in the seventeenth century. Other relevant figures, taken from inventories and wills, also show concentrations in the holding of Indian slaves that seem to reflect the distribution of wealth in the bairros.¹⁴ Indeed, statistical analysis of slaveholding over time shows that Indians were distributed very unevenly throughout the century.¹⁵ Once again, this indicates that the process of expansion incorporated strong elements of inequality from the start, which favored a few wealthier colonists to the detriment of an ever-increasing number of impoverished smallholders.

The Concentration and Consolidation of Wealth

In order to clarify these processes further, it is necessary to examine the trajectories of a few bairros and provide specific examples of these general patterns of wealth concentration and family consolidation. From their founding onward, the bairros shared certain characteristics, though their individual fortunes were not the same. The wealthier bairros grew out of sesmarias granted during the first half of the century and developed around prosperous wheat-producing estates. The original estates were subdivided among favored heirs, often through the careful application of a dowry rich in land and Indians. Each of these bairros was still thoroughly dominated by one family in 1679.

The rise, consolidation, and decline of the Pires family provides a noteworthy example of a more general trajectory taken by the leading kin groups of seventeenth-century São Paulo. During the first half of the century, the brothers Salvador and João Pires de Medeiros emerged as the premier wheat producers in São Paulo, settling the area that would later be known as Juqueri. As settlement advanced, Juqueri came to refer to the area north of the Cantareira Range but south of the Juqueri River.¹⁶ In the 1620s, Salvador Pires and his wife Inês Monteiro de Alvarenga established an estate with hundreds of Guarani captives in the region. There they constructed the chapel of Nossa Senhora do Desterro, to accommodate the devotional needs of the bairro.

The wealth of this estate, measured in land and Indians, was transferred to the succeeding generation in the manner most characteristic of the reproduction of rural wealth in colonial Brazil. The ten children of Salvador Pires and Inês Monteiro by no means received equal shares in the partition of the property, despite essentially egalitarian inheritance laws.¹⁷ The oldest son, Alberto Pires, married into the Camargo family in an ill-fated attempt at alliance between the two families, though he probably remained in the bairro. Of the five daughters, three were married with handsome dowries, thus establishing the foundations for large properties with ample holdings of Indian slaves. Two of the other sons were favored with lands and Indians, themselves leaving holdings of more than 150 captives at the times of their deaths in the 1660s. The youngest, João Pires Monteiro, became the captain of the bairro in the 1660s, following in his father’s footsteps.¹⁸

In 1679, reminders of the imposing presence of Salvador Pires and Inês Monteiro continued to dominate the structure of the bairro. The two richest residents – a daughter of Salvador Pires and her son – accounted for nearly 54 percent of the Donativo contribution. Isabel Pires de Medeiros (listed as Isabel Gonçalves), widow of Domingos Jorge Velho (not to be confused with the leader of the campaign against Palmares), paid a substantial contribution of 6,720 réis, while her son, Captain Salvador Jorge Velho, contributed 8,500. Salvador Jorge Velho became even wealthier a few years later, when he inherited 560 Indians from his mother-in-law, who was also his godmother.¹⁹

The imprecise denomination Juqueri was also applied to the bairro of Antonio Bueno, which developed similarly to the Juqueri of Salvador Pires. The origins of the bairro date back to a 1627 concession of a sesmaria to Amador Bueno da Ribeiro, who had petitioned for 2 leagues (10,800 meters) of land to accommodate his large family.²⁰ The grant began on the banks of the Juqueri River and extended to the Atibaia River, including a village belonging to an Indian named Maracaña. It seems unlikely that Amador Bueno da Ribeira occupied the sesmaria himself, as he probably remained on his large wheat-growing estate in Mandaqui, closer to the town of São Paulo, where thanks to the labor of hundreds of Guarani captives brought from Guairá by his sons in the expeditions of 1628–1632, “he had every year abundant harvests of wheat, corn, beans and cotton.”²¹ The fact that the bairro was named for Amador Bueno’s second son, Antonio, also suggests that the original owner never occupied his lands. Most likely, as he stated in his petition for the sesmaria, the land was acquired for future use, specifically by his sons and sons-in-law. Indeed, of Amador Bueno’s nine children, seven established productive estates in the bairro. The first large-scale occupation of the area took place only in the 1650s, and benefited from an influx of Indians captured by the slaving expeditions then sweeping the region. The bairro was consolidated after the great expedition of 1666, which counted among its members Amador Bueno (o moço, or “the younger,” son of the original grantee), Antonio Bueno, Baltasar da Costa Veiga (Amador moço’s son-in-law), and Mateus de Siqueira, all masters of large numbers of Indian slaves and prominent residents of the bairro in 1679.²²

The case of the bairro of Antonio Bueno illustrates better than any other the importance of the dowry in strategies for the reproduction of rural wealth. Dowries, in seventeenth-century São Paulo, served to consolidate or maintain the hegemony of a particular family or a larger family-based group. For example, Francisco Arruda de Sá saw three of his sons marry three Quadros sisters and, in a case of four brides for four brothers, Luzia Leme and Francisco de Alvarenga gave their daughters to the Bicudo de Britos, thereby establishing uncontested control over one of the rural bairros of Santana de Parnaíba.²³

Seventeenth-century dowries in São Paulo ordinarily included trousseaux, Indians, and landed property (usually in the form of virgin lands), to which were sometimes added capital, cattle, and credits for shipments of wheat to market. André Fernandes, for example, outfitted his niece Suzana Dias with 40 “servants [serviços] of the heathen of land,” 800 alqueires of wheat “placed at Santos,” and a section of virgin land measuring about 3 square kilometers.²⁴ Assets like these were essential to the creation of new units of production, given the limited possibilities offered in the economic context of rural society. As already observed, the most common strategy for young men seeking a livelihood was to combine a favorable marriage with the business of the sertão– that is, the acquisition of Indian labor through slaving expeditions – thereby obtaining the material basis for a new household.

The connections between the richest residents of the bairro of Antonio Bueno indicate that the dowry was the preferred mode by which to transmit wealth. The wealthiest, Baltasar da Costa Veiga, was the son-in-law of Amador Bueno, the younger, while the second- and third-richest, Captain Antonio Ribeiro de Morais and Captain Domingos da Silva Guimarães, were sons-in-law of Amador Bueno da Ribeira. Their contributions to the Donativo were assessed at 5,700, 4,100, and 3,500 réis, respectively. This ranked them far ahead of the sons of Amador Bueno da Ribeira, who also lived in the bairro. Captain Diogo Bueno, the youngest son, was to contribute 1,200, Captain Antonio Bueno, 1,000, and Amador Bueno, the eldest, 800. The bairro’s rural chapel also followed the female line, as the chapel of Belém, founded by Antonio Bueno on the Canduguá estate, to the north-northwest of the town of São Paulo, was administered by his son-in-law, Gervásio Mota de Vitória.²⁵

Similar family relationships also intertwined the leading residents of the bairro of Atibaia, the newest and richest area of settlement in São Paulo when the Donativo lists were drawn up. Several sesmarias had been distributed in the area in 1639–1641, but it would seem that there was no direct connection between the holders of the original grants and the principal residents of 1679, as was the case in the bairro of Antonio Bueno. Only the sesmarias of Paulo Pereira de Avelar, whose sons figured among the most prominent residents of the bairro, and of Fernão de Camargo, whose family dominated the area, were exploited by the original grantees. Permanent settlement of the area did not begin until the 1660s, and the establishment of the bairro as such resulted from the bandeira of 1666. Before that date, the banks of the Atibaia River provided one of the last refuges of the Guarulhos Indians, who in 1665 were contacted by Father Mateus Nunes de Siqueira, who established a mission village there at his own expense. Within a year, settlers from neighboring bairros became interested in this new potential source of Indian labor and began to approach the banks of the Atibaia. At the same time, the Municipal Council of São Paulo attempted to drive Father Siqueira from the mission village and transfer its Indians to Conceição dos Guarulhos, a mission village located significantly closer to the municipal seat.²⁶

Nothing more is known about the former mission village, but by 1669 several sítios dotted the area. In that year, the Municipal Council accused one Frei Gabriel, a Capuchin, of setting up a utopian community on the Atibaia, which was attracting Indians from the mission village of Conceição as well as from nearby estates. The Council expelled Frei Gabriel and supposedly returned the Indians to Conceição, though most likely this was a ruse and most of the Indians ended up in the hands of local slaveowners.²⁷

It was around this time that Jerônimo de Camargo established his wheat-growing estate, for he had returned from the sertão in 1666 at the head of some 500 newly captured Indians.²⁸ He soon founded the chapel of São João, which by the 1680s had its own curate. According to the Donativo assessment, Camargo was the wealthiest man in São Paulo at that time, his contribution assessed at 12,000 réis. Three of his brothers and most of their sons-in-law also resided in the bairro, all appearing among the top 15 percent of contributors. Even so, their domination did not appear as complete as that achieved by other kinship groups in different bairros, since several families unrelated to the Camargos, most notably the Cardoso de Almeidas and the Pereira de Avelars, held significant shares of the local wealth. This may be due to distinct bairros being listed under the heading Atibaia. At least in the case of the Cardoso de Almeidas, their sphere of dominance was in the area that later became Bom Jesus dos Perdões, at some distance from the original settlement controlled by the Camargos. The list also includes the bairro that later became the parish of Juqueri, as it features the names of Pedro Fernandes Aragonês and Antonio de Sousa Dormundo, the founder of the chapel of Nossa Senhora do Desterro, which served as the nucleus of the original settlement.²⁹

In any case, despite the geographic imprecision of the lists, it is clear that the Camargos and Buenos had become the dominant families in São Paulo in the second half of the seventeenth century. Nearly half (48 percent) of the wealthiest tenth of all taxpayers belonged to these two families. Members of the two families controlled several of the basic institutions of the town of São Paulo. The brotherhood of the Misericórdia, for example, was virtually dominated by the Camargos, who were also its principal benefactors.³⁰ By the 1690s, a Bueno was in control of the probate office, a key institution in the provision of credit. While they had to share leadership of the Municipal Council with the Pires, as stipulated by a formal agreement worked out in 1655, their interests were better served by that body.³¹ Perhaps most important of all, it was the Camargos who controlled the vast majority of the Indian population in the township of São Paulo, which, in the final analysis, guaranteed their wealth, power, and prestige.

The rise of the Camargos to their hegemonic position was one of the most significant events in seventeenth-century São Paulo. Their struggle with the Pires brought together a series of conflicts and pressure points that afflicted the plateau in the mid-1600s, including the explusion of the Jesuits, the question of Indian labor, and the problem of maintaining social control over a vast population of captives.³² Moreover, commercial wheat production and the growth of large holdings of captive Indians had concentrated a disproportionate amount of wealth in the hands of very few families, most notably the Pires and Camargos, who struggled against one another for much of the seventeenth century.

One of the major sources of the struggle between the two families lay in the formation of the bairro of Tremembé, where the dominant interests came head to head in the 1640s. The relative decline of the Pires and the rise of the Camargo family is illustrated by the trajectory of this bairro. Once a major center for wheat production, by 1679 it was a site for small-scale cattle raising, with most of its settlers living in the shadow of the Jesuit estate at Santana. The major figures associated with the development of Tremembé were João Pires, whose distribution of dowries laid a firm base for the permanent settlement of the bairro, and Amador Bueno da Ribeira, whose wheat farm and mill at Mandaqui was one of the most important agricultural units in São Paulo in the first half of the seventeenth century. At the time of the Donativo Real, however, the heirs of João Pires no longer figured very prominently in Tremembé, where the Camargos now controlled much of the wealth. The Camargos had established marital alliances with Amador Bueno and were represented in the bairro by Captain Marcellino de Camargo. Some years earlier, Marcellino’s brother Francisco had married a sister of Amador Bueno and established a valuable wheat-growing property, becoming one of the wealthiest mill-owners in the captaincy. When he died in 1672, he left no direct heirs, and so ownership of the estate passed to Marcellino, who kept it until his own death in 1684.³³

Competition between the families peaked in the 1650s, when the two factions and their Indian followers fought pitched battles in the town of São Paulo. Faced with a state of near anarchy, aggravated by the problem of the general unrest of the Indian population, in 1655 the Governor-General approved an agreement that proposed that control over the Municipal Council alternate between the two families. While the principal result of the conflict between the two families was victory for the Camargos and conciliation for the Pires, it meant further alienation from power for most colonists, once and for all excluding those not aligned with the two principal factions from access to municipal institutions.

This exclusion, in turn, resulted in the migration of several families and the consequent founding of new towns deeper in the interior. The councils of São Paulo and Parnaíba reacted immediately to this new situation, as it threatened their control over the rural population. The situation also concerned colonial authorities because the new communities, particularly Itu and Jundiaí, were raised to the status of towns under circumstances that were irregular or otherwise suspect.³⁴ Most colonists, however, remained in the bairros of São Paulo, resigned to a reality of political exclusion, reduced access to economic resources, and, ultimately, rural poverty.

The Spread of Rural Poverty

One of the first consequences of increasingly restricted access to economic resources was a renewed cycle of predation on the region’s mission villages, which already occupied a marginal position in the colonial economy. Some of the poorer bairros owed their existence to the occupation of Indian lands, a process that intensified after 1640. With the expulsion of the Jesuits, the mission villages of Pinheiros, Barueri, Conceição dos Guarulhos, and São Miguel were entirely exposed to land- and labor-hungry settlers, who promptly launched all-out efforts to transform the remaining mission villagers into personal servants and, at the same time, to carve up the 6 square leagues of land belonging to each community. Several colonists had already occupied Indian lands before that time, often acquiring them with the cooperation of officials charged with protecting Indian property. For example, when his late wife’s inventory was drawn up, Gonçalo Ferreira declared to the probate judge that he “owned two hundred and fifty braças of frontage in the lands of the Indians where his estate is located … on which land they are by authority of the legal representatives of said Indians.”³⁵ Other settlers on Indian lands had received authorization from the proprietor of the captaincy by claiming that deposits of mineral wealth were to be found on them, a condition under which the alienation of the inalienable was permitted. Finally, the Municipal Council of São Paulo, in its capacity as administrator of the mission villages after the first expulsion of the Jesuits, itself began to authorize the wholesale spoliation of Indian lands beginning in 1660.³⁶

Colonists occupying Indian lands often justified their claims by alleging they were idle public lands, never effectively occupied by the Indians. One petitioner, in his request for an island in the Tietê River belonging to the Indians of Conceição, remarked that former Governor Diogo Luís de Oliveira had ordered that “the lands of the Indians be divided among the residents, without harming the Indians.”³⁷ Under Portuguese law, unoccupied sesmarias did revert to the Crown after a certain period, but Indian lands were usually exempt from this clause. Though this juridical issue was not addressed in São Paulo until the early eighteenth century, there is reason to doubt the colonists’ claims that Indian lands were unoccupied or idle. In fact, whenever possible the Indians of the mission villages maintained roças for their own subsistence, even supplying occasional surplus quantities of maize and manioc for the markets of the towns. In 1623, for example, the Municipal Council of São Paulo ordered cattle owners to remove their livestock from Indian lands because of the damage being done to the “seedbeds” (sementeiras) of the Indians.³⁸ A few years after the expulsion of the Jesuits, a magistrate suggested that the Indians were not planting their lands because the colonists did not let them, preferring to subject them to personal service. The Indians who were able to escape the settlers’ clutches, he added, “withdrew and hid themselves in the woods because said residents took their lands and do not allow them to cultivate them.”³⁹ Two years later, the Indians of the mission village of São Miguel complained that certain colonists “were planting on the lands of the Indians and pushing them off of them causing great harm with their livestock such as cattle and saddle animals and damaging their fields and crops for which reason all the heathen were dispersed and away from the village.”⁴⁰

The question of Indian land, therefore, remained inextricably linked to the struggle for labor. When the influx of Guarani captives was at its peak, during the era of great slaving expeditions that began in 1628 and ended definitively in 1641, the mission villages were a supplementary reserve of labor for the colonial economy. Beginning in the 1640s, however, with the deepening crisis in the supply of captives, the mission-village residents once again came to be the immediate objects of labor-seeking colonists. Indeed, with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1640, the settlers counted on the authority of the Municipal Council to take possession of the Indians of the mission villages. In 1664, a royal official observed that the villages “are today much damaged and nearly extinct, for the officials [of the Municipal Council] ordinarily appoint their kinsmen as captains there that both take from them the Indian men and women as they see fit for the service of their homes and estates.”⁴¹ Not long thereafter, another authority observed of the villages: “Now they are found to be much despoiled, by the excess with which the various colonists take from them the Indians for their service, [and for] journeys to the wilderness, treating them as their slaves, and occasioning not only much harm to the service of Your Majesty, but the ruin of the villages themselves.”⁴² A few years later, the Indians of Pinheiros presented a petition requesting that the posts of lay captain and administrator be eliminated because both were only “a means for them to use their services.”⁴³

Under these conditions, the population of the mission villages declined rapidly after 1640. In a report presented to the Overseas Council, Salvador Correia de Sá expressed this decline in numerical terms, reporting that in 1640 there had been 2,800 casais (literally “couples,” but referring to households) in the mission villages, a figure that had shrunk to 290 in 1679, the date of the report. Barueri, the largest mission village, had declined from 1,000 casais to 120; São Miguel, from 700 to 90; Conceição, from 800 to 70; and in Pinheiros only 20 casais remained of the 300 that had once inhabited the mission village.⁴⁴ Local sources indicate even lower figures. For example, in the same year as Salvador de Sá’s report, representatives of the Municipal Council of São Paulo counted 58 Indians in São Miguel, while only 17 were found in Barueri the following year. As far as Conceição is concerned, twenty years earlier the councilmen charged with inspecting the mission village were surprised to find only the white “captain,” Estevão Ribeiro, and the “Indian headman,” Diogo Martins Guarulho. In each case, the missing Indians were reportedly dispersed throughout the rural estates of the region.⁴⁵

Lands belonging to the mission villages of Conceição and São Miguel made up parts of at least three bairros listed in the Donativo rolls of 1679. The bairro of Caucaia, which later became the parish of Guarulhos, incorporated much of the lands of Conceição while also extending through the area along the Jaguari River, including the spot where Matias Lopes de Medeiros founded the chapel of Nazaré in 1676. The first colonial settlement in the region bordered on Indian lands, most likely encroaching upon them on various occasions. The origins of Caucaia as a properly constituted bairro probably can be traced back to the activities of Miguel de Almeida Miranda and his nephew Jerônimo da Veiga, each of whom established prosperous wheat-producing properties in the region around 1650, Miguel de Almeida having received sesmarias in the region in 1625 and 1639.⁴⁶ As in other bairros, most of the wealthiest residents listed in the Donativo rolls traced their lineage directly to these founders. Three sons-in-law of Miguel de Almeida lived in the bairro, while two others figured among the most prominent residents of Votorantim, occupying lands along the Juqueri-Mirim River. Of the three in Caucaia, Henrique da Cunha Gago was captain of the bairro, and in 1660 represented one of the three parcialidades (factions) called upon by authorities in an effort to resolve factional disputes.⁴⁷ Cunha Gago’s son-in-law – Antonio Soares Ferreira, also the bearer of a quasi-military title – in turn emerged as the richest resident of the bairro.

A second wave of settlement concentrated expressly on Indian territory, beginning with the sesmaria of Geraldo Correia Soares, which covered the area that would later be called Minas de Geraldo Correia or Minas Velhas. Claiming that gold deposits existed along the Baquirivu River, on lands belonging to the mission village of Conceição, Correia opened the way for settlement. In the 1660s, the Municipal Council began attending to colonists’ petitions for Indian lands in the area, transferring numerous plots to private settlers. Officially, these grants were lease agreements, though no quitrents were collected until 1679, during the judicial inspection of the Crown magistrate Rocha Pita. Like the municipal commons distributed by the Council, these plots were treated as settlers’ private property. The expropriation of previously indigenous spaces was completed with the seizure of control over the mission village of Conceição, as Geraldo Correia Soares himself was named its “white captain” with the connivance of the Indian captain.⁴⁸

The bairro of São Miguel also grew out of the expropriation of the lands and labor of a pre-existing mission village. The original sesmaria of Ururaí, granted in 1580, included lands on both sides of the Tietê River to the east of the town of São Paulo, though the colonists’ bairro appears to have been on the north bank. The mission village was on the south bank, but the lands surrounding it apparently were considered part of the bairro of Caaguaçu. What appears on the Donativo rolls as the bairro of São Miguel consisted mainly of the small properties surrounding the chapel of Bonsucesso, on the estate of Francisco Cubas. Cubas, son-in-law of the great backwoodsman Manuel Preto, had inherited considerable holdings of Indian slaves from his father-in-law, to which he added many more through the slaving activities of his son, Francisco Cubas Preto, a skilled backwoodsman in his own right who participated in the expedition of 1666 and was the owner of nearly 200 Indians at the time of his death in 1673.⁴⁹ Thus, Francisco Cubas provides yet another example of the relationship between the founding of chapels – and, consequently, of rural bairros– and the arrival of large groups of captive Indians, a pattern also seen in the cases of Manuel Preto, Fernão Dias Pais, Afonso Sardinha, Jerônimo de Camargo, Fernão Pais de Barros, and Pedro Vaz de Barros, among others.⁵⁰

Though several relatives of Francisco Cubas were among the leading residents of the bairro in 1679 – Cubas Preto’s widow, for example, was the wealthiest, with a contribution of 4,000 réis – São Miguel departs from some of the patterns of wealth distribution and transmission observed in other bairros. Unlike the heads of other kinship groups, whose holdings were splintered by successive dowries, Cubas sought to keep his estate and his family intact. Toward the end of his life, Cubas transferred much of his wealth and Indians to the chapel of Bonsucesso. In his will, he instituted his four spinster daughters as administrators of the chapel, which of course gave them free access to its lands and Indian labor. This access, however, was conditional, as any daughter who married would lose the right of administration and would therefore have to move from the chapel. For some unknown reason, then, Francisco Cubas declined to transmit his wealth through a well-chosen son-in-law, a procedure that was one of the cornerstones of the reproduction of rural society.⁵¹ Within a generation of Cubas’s death, the wealth and prestige of his family withered, and by the mid-eighteenth century the chapel itself was in a lamentable state.⁵²

Even in the seventeenth century, however, the few wealthy wheat producers and stockmen of São Miguel shared their bairro with an ever-increasing number of poor farmers eking out a meager existence on the small plots of Indian lands distributed by the Municipal Council. In 1678, the Council surveyed the limits of the mission village of São Miguel and, as in Conceição, began to distribute parcels among petitioners. Unlike in its dealings with the settlers of Caucaia who occupied lands deeded to the mission village of Conceição, in São Miguel the Council began to charge an annual money rent, which varied from the trifling 100 réis to the still modest 640 réis. In addition, the Council sought to have settlers pay some rents in advance, with some tenants paying up to eleven years at one time.⁵³

While at first glance this might be interpreted as having been a revenue-raising scheme intended to increase the Council’s receipts in the short run, it was actually a way of limiting access even to these lands, often suitable only for small-scale cattle raising. It also placed poorer colonists in a dependent position as far as the Municipal Council was concerned. With the payment of rent, the occupant’s chances of permanently alienating the property were slim and the security of their tenure remained uncertain. This problem emerged in an increasingly acute form in the eighteenth century, when wealthy proprietors, including the religious orders that came to administer the mission villages beginning in 1698, began to expel poor tenants and squatters. Such was the case of Antonio Ribeiro Maciel, who submitted a petition requesting possession of lands near the mission village of São Miguel that he had occupied for twenty-three years, “paying rent for them to said village.” Together with other poor farmers of the area, Maciel had faced attempted evictions “by force of armed persons” acting on behalf of the Jesuits of the College of São Paulo, who alleged that their order had legal title to the lands. Even after hearing the corroborating testimonies of several neighbors, the authorities could not guarantee possession, as the lands in question were Indian lands.⁵⁴

According to the lists of the Donativo Real of 1679–1782, a large proportion of the rural population of the São Paulo region lived in poverty, their material conditions barely a cut above the dwindling mass of Indian slaves. To a certain degree, the pattern of wealth distribution in the bairros of Santo Amaro and Caaguaçu presaged what was to be the general condition of rural São Paulo by the mid-eighteenth century. Excluded from access to large numbers of Indian laborers with which to cultivate virgin lands, inheriting run-down establishments and exhausted soils from the first Portuguese occupants, most free Paulistas, along with an ever-decreasing number of Indian subalterns whom they brought at great sacrifice from distant sertões, cultivated primitive subsistence plots to feed family, relatives, and Indian servants, only occasionally producing a tiny surplus that was sold in the limited markets of nearby towns. In short, the expansion of settlement and development of agriculture in São Paulo in the seventeenth century created the prospect of commercial wealth even as it set the measure for rural poverty.

Notes

1.“Livro do rol das pessoas para o pedido real do ano de 1679,” AHMSP, CM-1-19.

2.On the early years of the Donativo, see CMSP-Atas, 6a:393, Nov. 1, 1664; also, Governor Francisco Barreto to Municipal Council of Guaratinguetá, Jan. 20, 1663, BNRJ-DH, 5:186.

3.“Auto de correição,” Sept. 8, 1679, AESP, Atas da Câmara Municipal de Parnaíba, cx. 6063-1. In principle, the Donativo was a fiscal onus designed to pay for the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, who was married to Charles II of England in 1662, together with the indemnity Portugal owed the Netherlands under the 1661 treaty that brought a formal end to the Luso–Dutch War.

4.“Relação das quantias oferecidas pelos moradores do bairro de Araritaguaba,” Nov. 24, 1728, AHU-SP, doc. 653. The title of this document is incomplete, as along with Araritaguaba (later renamed Porto Feliz) it lists residents of the town of Itu and its outlying settlements.

5.The spread of rural poverty in colonial and imperial Brazil has been the subject of an interesting array of works. See, for example, Laura de Mello e Souza, Desclassificados do ouro: a pobreza mineira no século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1982), a noteworthy study of the process of marginalization of the majority of the free population in the development and decline of the mining centers of Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century; Luiza Rios Ricci Volpato, A conquista da terra no universo da pobreza: formação da fronteira oeste do Brasil, 1719–1819 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1987), which discusses the origins of colonial Mato Grosso in an innovative fashion while upholding some of the conventional approaches of Paulista historiography; and Dirceu Lindoso, A utopia armada: rebeliões de pobres nas matas do Tombo Real, 1832–1850 (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1984), which contains revealing information on the poorer strata in the northeastern interior during the first half of the nineteenth century, emphasizing their relationship with the export economy in the context of the War of the Cabanos, a conflict that had as its apparent cause inter-elite conflict but that generated a mass rebellion by Indians, slaves, and the rural poor more generally along the border of the provinces of Pernambuco and Alagoas. On urban poverty, see the important work by Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Quotidiano e poder.

6.The rural bairros of the São Paulo region have been the subject of numerous sociological studies, but a more detailed treatment of their historical dimension is lacking. See, among other works, Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza, Os parceiros do Rio Bonito, 5th edn. (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1979 [1964]), and Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, Bairros rurais paulistas: dinâmica das relações bairro rural-cidade (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1973).

7.It is worth noting that Sérgio Buarque de Holanda debated this issue in a posthumously published essay in which he coined the binomial “Grande propriedade, pequena lavoura” (“Large property, small agriculture”). In addressing this apparent paradox, he countered the positions held by Alfredo Ellis Júnior and other historians, who asserted that smallholding was one of the pillars of the unique character of the old Paulistas. Holanda, Monções, 181–184.

8.On the founding and function of chapels in colonial Brazil, see Eduardo Hoornaert (ed.), História da Igreja no Brasil: ensaio de interpertação a partir do povo, 2 vols. (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1977–1980), 1:292–294. These private initiatives provide an interesting contrast to the collective projects that would later result in the founding of chapels in communities of the rural poor.

9.“Relação das quantias oferecidas pelos moradores do bairro de Araritaguaba,” AHU-SP, doc. 653.

10.On the boundaries between townships, see “Auto de medição,” Parnaíba, 1681, AESP, cx. 6066-18; “Demarcação do distrito de Mogi das Cruzes,” Oct. 23, 1665, Arquivo da Prefeitura de Mogi das Cruzes, Registro do Foral.

11.Two of the last three bairros already boasted sufficiently dense populations in the 1680s to justify their being raised to the status of parishes, in spite of their proximity to São Paulo. The parishes of Santo Amaro and Guarulhos (Caucaia) were created in 1684 and 1686, respectively. Caaguaçu, its population much more dispersed, eventually became the poor parish of Penha in the eighteenth century.

12.The Gini index figures presented here were calculated according to the formula outlined in Charles M. Dollar and Richard Jensen, Historian’s Guide to Statistics: Quantitative Analysis and Historical Research (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 121–124.

13.Alice P. Canabrava, “Uma economia de decadência: os níveis de riqueza na capitania de São Paulo, 1765–1767,” Revista Brasileira de Economia 26/4 (Oct.–Dec. 1972): 95–123 (at 112).

14.A useful discussion of the use of inventories for analyzing the distribution of wealth may be found in Gloria L. Main, “Inequality in Early America: The Evidence from Probate Records of Massachusetts and Maryland,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7/4 (1977): 559–581.

15.See the tables presented in John Monteiro, “Distribuição da riqueza e as origens da pobreza rural em São Paulo no século XVII,” Estudos Econômicos 19/1 (1989): 109–130. The distribution of Indian slaves in São Paulo may be compared to the distribution of African slaves in other parts of colonial Brazil. See, in particular, Stuart B. Schwartz, “Patterns of Slaveholding in the Americas: New Evidence from Brazil,” American Historical Review 87/1 (Feb. 1982): 55–86, and Francisco Vidal Luna, Minas Gerais, escravos e senhores: análise da estrutura populacional e econômica de alguns centros mineratórios, 1718–1804 (São Paulo: Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas, 1981), esp. 123–136.

16.This route through the Cantareira Range is discussed in Fina, O chão de Piratininga.

17.On this subject, with reference to Santa de Parnaíba in the eighteenth century, see Metcalf, “Fathers and Sons.”

18.The genealogical information presented here comes from a variety of sources, including wills, inventories, and parish registers, as well as the following indispensable works: Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, and Silva Leme, Genealogia paulistana.

19.Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, 3:79.

20.“Traslado da sesmaria concedida a Amador Bueno (16 de agosto de 1627),” June 11, 1756, in Mazzuia, Jundiaí e sua história, 88–91.

21.Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, 1:75–76.

22.On the expedition of 1666, see the discussion in Chapter 2, above.

23.Silva Leme, Genealogia paulistana, vol. 4; inventory of Luzia Leme, Parnaíba, 1653, AESP-INP, cx. 1.

24.“Escritura de dote,” Jan. 27, 1641, AESP-Notas Parnaíba, 1641, cx. 6074-26. For interesting discussions of the dowry in colonial São Paulo, see Metcalf, “Fathers and Sons,” and Muriel Nazzari, “Dotes paulistas: composição e transformações, 1600–1870,” Revista Brasileira de História 17 (1988–1989): 87–100, as well as the latter author’s broader study, Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in São Paulo, Brazil, 1600–1900 (Stanford University Press, 1991).

25.Inventory of Maria Bueno, 1673, IT, 18:387–398.

26.CMSP-Atas, 6a: 428–429 and 508–509, July 3, 1665 and Nov. 29, 1666.

27.CMSP-Atas, 6:161–162 and 165, May 13 and 25, 1669.

28.Pedro Taques de Almeida Paes Leme, Historia da capitania de S. Vicente (São Paulo: Melhoramentos, n.d.), 149, where the author asserts that Camargo possessed more than 500 warriors at that time. On the land grant and the chapel, see Waldomiro Franco da Silveira, História de Atibaia (São Paulo: by the author, 1950), 114, 119.

29.On the chapel of Nossa Senhora do Desterro do Juqueri, see “Livro de Tombo” of the Parish of Sé, 1747, AMDDLS.

30.For a list of the benefactors of the brotherhood, see Laima Mesgravis, A Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo, 1599?–1884: contribuição ao estudo da assistência social no Brasil (São Paulo: Conselho Estadual de Cultura, 1976), 48–55.

31.CMSP-Registro, 3:547–550.

32.On the social conflicts of the 1650s, see Monteiro, “São Paulo in the Seventeenth Century,” 367–373. The standard work on feuds in colonial Brazil, though based on a very weak theoretical framework, remains Luiz de Aguiar da Costa Pinto, Lutas de famílias no Brasil: introdução ao seu estudo, 2nd edn. (São Paulo: Nacional, 1980 [1949]), 37–94 of which refer to the Pires and Camargos. See also Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay, História seiscentista da villa de S. Paulo: escripta á vista de avultada documentação inedita dos archivos brasileiros e extrangeiros, 4 vols. (São Paulo: H. L. Canton, 1926–1929), where the author compares the two families to the Capulets and Montagues, “of Shakespearian memory” (vol. 2, quote on 55); and Francisco de Assis Carvalho Franco, Os Camargos de São Paulo: noticia sobre os representantes dessa linhagem, na capitania vicentina, nos seculos XVI e XVII (São Paulo: Editora S. P. S., 1937).

33.Inventories of Francisco de Camargo, 1672, AESP-INP, cx. 10, and Marcellino de Camargo, 1684, IT, 21:481–501.

34.BNRJ-DH, 3:271; Atas da Câmara, Parnaíba (June 23, 1679), AESP, cx. 6063-1.

35.Inventory of Isabel Fernandes, 1641, IT, 28:160. These lands belonged to the mission village of Barueri. On the spoliation of Barueri’s lands, see the interesting anonymous account from the eighteenth century, “Historia de Barueri,” BNRJ, Coleção Morgado de Mateus, 30.24.19.

36.These grants of Indian land are registered in Cartas de datas de terra, vols. 2 and 3, and in CMSP-Registro, 3. The distribution of these lands was later sanctioned by the Crown magistrate João da Rocha Pita (CMSP, 7:27, auto de correição of May 8, 1679), but its legality would be challenged in the early eighteenth century.

37.Petition of Henrique da Cunha Gago, Jan. 15, 1661, CMSP-Registro, 3:12–13.

38.CMSP-Atas, 3:56, Oct. 21, 1623.

39.CMSP-Atas, 5:367, Mar. 16, 1649.

40.CMSP-Atas, 5:468–469, May 6, 1651.

41.Agostinho Barbalho Bezerra to Conselho Ultramarino, Aug. 18, 1664, AHU-SP, doc. 23.

42.Carta patente to Antonio [sic] Ribeiro Baião, Oct. 5, 1671, BNRJ, 1.2.9, no. 140.

43.CMSP-Atas, 7:217, July 3, 1683.

44.Boxer, Salvador de Sá, 126–127.

45.CMSP-Atas, 7:67–68, Sept. 7, 1680; CMSP-Registro, 3:467, provisão of Jan. 21, 1679; and 2:581–582, July 27, 1660.

46.Inventories of Jerônimo da Veiga, 1660, AESP-INP, cx. 5; Maria da Cunha, 1670, IT, 17:461–501; and Maria do Prado, 1670, AESP-INP, cx. 7.

47.CMSP-Registro, 3:547–550, Jan. 25, 1660.

48.CMSP-Atas, 6a:337, Oct. 6, 1663.

49.Inventory of Francisco Cubas Preto, 1673, IT, 18:309–350.

50.For a reasonably complete listing of rural chapels in seventeenth-century São Paulo, see Monteiro, “São Paulo in the Seventeenth Century,” 431–435.

51.Will of Francisco Cubas (partial copy), “Livro de Tombo” of the parish of Conceição, 1747, Arquivo da Cúria Diocesana de Guarulhos. One of Cubas’s daughters, Maria Antunes, married and petitioned to have her father’s will legally annulled. Her three spinster sisters, however, won a favorable decision upholding the stipulation in question, preventing Maria Antunes and her husband from making use of the Indians and other property belonging to the chapel. AMDDLS, processo-crime de 1695.

52.For further details on the chapel of Bonsucesso, the subject of extended litigation, see Chapter 7.

53.Cartas de datas de terra, vol. 3, passim.

54.Petition of Antonio Ribeiro Maciel, 1723, AESP-AC, cx. 12, doc. 170.