Os Engenhos de Açúcar como Territórios de Autonomia Jurídica (1889-1930):

A Ordem Doméstica no Romance de José Lins do Rego

Abstract

This work investigates the domestic order of sugarcane farms in the First Brazilian Republic. José Lins do Rego's novels are the main source used, although they are compared, among others, with iconographies, legal doctrines, social and political treaties, legislation and works on oeconomics. Two methodological reasons influenced the decision to search a legal history of the sugarcane farms domestic order in literary texts. Firstly, the expropriation of autonomous powers operationalized by modern legalism deprived the legitimacy of non-state legal experiments. Therefore, when state or doctrinal sources portrayed the domestic order, they normally assumed its illegality, which omitted or obscured many of its characteristics. Furthermore, the literature of Rego, who lived on his grandfather's plantation, has a striking memorialistic characteristic, which can reveal specificities of a legal system that was quite intimate. It is concluded that sugarcane farms, in addition to being commercial enterprises, were places where the social life of hundreds or, sometimes, thousands of people, took place on a daily basis. Customary rules regulated coexistence in a relatively autonomous manner in relation to the state legal order. The landlord, a kind of community pater familia, was entrusted with the task of ensuring justice among the residents of his land. Although historiography has extensively studied the arbitrary and bossy aspects of the landlord, the domestic order also exercised important judicial functions, which are little explored: it protected important values for the community and prevented private revenge within the plantation lands.