Paranapiacaba: a village for workers in the age of slavery

Book describes urban structure and lifestyle in a housing project for navvies and other employees of the British-run São Paulo Railway, which took coffee to the Port of Santos, Brazil.

By José Tadeu Arantes  |  Agência FAPESP – Built to house the employees of the São Paulo Railway, which ran between the Jundiaí coffee-growing region and the Port of Santos, from which most of Brazil’s coffee was then exported, the Model Village of Paranapiacaba may have been the first community in Brazil designed specifically for workers. Nestled between peaks of the Serra do Mar range, less than 50 km from the city of São Paulo, it was inhabited by 5,000 wage-earning laborers while the railroad was under construction, although fewer lived there once the railroad was completed. The railroad began operation in 1867.

A arqueologia da São Paulo Oitocentista: Paranapiacaba (“Archeology of 19th Century São Paulo: Paranapiacaba”), a book by archeologist Cláudia Regina Plens, a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), describes the structure of the village and the daily lives of its inhabitants, as well as the role of the rail network in capitalist expansion in Brazil.

The book is based on data collected in a field survey supported by FAPESP, and FAPESP also funded its publication.

Plens, whose research focuses on Brazilian archeology (for more information, in Portuguese, see agencia.fapesp.br/23383), refers in this book to the ideas of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) to explain how the British engineers in charge of building the railroad transplanted to Paranapiacaba an ordered and systematic model of society in accordance with the social hygiene movement, which was widespread in the nineteenth century.

“The chief engineer’s house, known as ‘the Castle’ today, stood in the middle of the village on top of a hill, from which he could watch over everything and keep an eye on the workers. It was a kind of panopticon, as described by Foucault in 1975 in his celebrated book Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison [published in English as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison],” Plens told Agência FAPESP. “There were strict rules governing not only work, but also leisure. The workers could only be on the street until a certain hour. Even the village club, called Lírio da Serra, was on a lower level so that the chief engineer could keep an eye on that, too.”

This rational and rigid order was designed to extract maximum productivity from the workers and keep the village and railroad running with clockwork regularity. Brazil was still a slaveholding society, but Paranapiacaba was a model capitalist enclave, built and managed by the British. “The entire village was prefabricated,” Plens said. “The homes and other buildings came from the UK and were put up here. They’re listed as historic heritage buildings and protected by Condephaat [the São Paulo State Historical, Archaeological, Artistic & Tourist Heritage Council].”

Like the streets, which in the New Village of Paranapiacaba were all laid out in a grid formation, the social stratification was also rigid and hierarchical. At the base of the pyramid were the workers of various origins, mainly Spanish and Italian. One step up came the Portuguese merchants. Above everyone else were the British engineers and physicians, with the chief engineer at the apex. “The British were interested in the abolition of slavery in Brazil and helped runaway slaves escape to the Jabaquara Quilombo in Santos. However, they didn’t employ such slaves on the railroad or in the village. The people who are living in Paranapiacaba today aren’t descendants of those earlier inhabitants,” Plens said.

Paranapiacaba was divided into three districts: the Old Village, with irregularly laid out streets, where the first workers lived, single men in rooming houses and married couples in town houses; the New Village, laid out as a grid and inhabited by the British engineers and physicians; and the shopping district on the other side of the hill, occupied by the Portuguese. The buildings all belonged to the São Paulo Railway. Today, they belong to the City of Santo André. 

One of Plens’ initial aims was to find archeological remains that could tell her about consumer habits in these three districts.

Upon excavating the areas around the homes in Paranapiacaba, Plens discovered that the yards were paved with a layer of tar. This procedure, which was unknown to urban Brazilians of the time, was used to keep the village clean and hygienic. “In other towns, people threw their waste into the street or back yard. In Paranapiacaba, the garbage was collected once a week and taken away to a dump,” Plens said.

In a trash bin on the site of what was once the Engineers’ Hotel and in the chief engineer’s house, Plens found shards of glass and china – various kinds in the case of the hotel and plain ones in the chief engineer’s home. “The absence of china in the workers’ homes suggests their living standard was lower, probably involving clay pots. These remains don’t withstand weathering. They may have had utensils made of more resistant material, such as enameled ironware [agateware], but they would have taken these away with them when they left,” she said.

Paranapiacaba’s wage workers enjoyed benefits they would not have received elsewhere, such as hospital care and a school for their children. However, they were not free to leave the village. This was required by the logic of capitalism at a time when employers had an interest in keeping workers tied to a particular place, which is not the case today. 

In Tupi, paranapiacaba means “place with a view of the sea” and, on the rare days when the sky is clear, you can indeed see the coast of Cubatão from the top of the hill. “There are Indian trails in the region, but as far as we know, there were no prehistoric settlements here,” Plens said. “The township was built because of the railroad, which was entirely financed by Irineu Evangelista de Sousa (1813-1889), Baron and later Viscount Mauá. The British never repaid his loans.”

An entrepreneur and abolitionist, Mauá is considered the first great Brazilian capitalist. At the time the railroad began operating, he owned assets worth an estimated 115,000 contos de réis. The Empire’s budget in the same year was 97,000 contos de réis. His ventures were undermined by the Government’s conservative policies and, having lost a fortune because of the São Paulo Railway, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. He sold most of his businesses to foreign capitalists and used his personal fortune to try to settle his debts. 

A arqueologia da São Paulo Oitocentista: Paranapiacaba (“Archeology of 19th Century São Paulo: Paranapiacaba”)
Author: Cláudia Regina Plens
Publisher: Annablume
Year: 2016
Pages: 138
Price: R$51.83

For more information, visit: annablume.com.br/loja/product_info.php?products_id=2108&osCsid=ih6nkjj8p3h.