Content area
Full text
* I wish to thank Jean-Christophe Agnew, Ala Alryyes, Michael Denning, Seth Fein, Joanne Freeman, Chris Gill, Paul Gootenberg, James N. Green, Gilbert Joseph, Pablo Piccato, Stuart Schwartz, Barbara Weinstein, participants in the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, and the anonymous JLAS readers for their insightful comments on this article at various stages in its development. Funding from several institutions made the library and archival research for this article possible; I am grateful for grants from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, PSC-CUNY, Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research, and the Yale Council on International and Area Studies. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
This article inquires into the late-nineteenth century origins of a still-existing, clandestine lottery that has evaded scholarly attention for as long as its players and dealers have evaded the police: Brazil's jogo do bicho , or 'animal game'.1 It began as a legal raffle intended to fund Rio de Janeiro's privately owned zoo, but soon slipped irretrievably from state control. Within less than a year after its invention, the animal game caught the nervous eye of judicial and political authorities in the Brazilian capital city, and eventually throughout the country. Over the century or more that followed, it became both the object of bouts of legal repression and a paragon of popular culture. In the acts and rhetoric that began to populate the city jail with those accused of selling and, sometimes, buying tickets for this clandestine lottery, one can witness the formation of both the socio-economic stratification and the besieged realm of unregulated commercial activity that characterise modern, urban public life.
As Brazil's new national leaders shed what they reviled as an embarrassingly outdated regime of slavery and monarchy, they sought to implement a modern nation through the law. In the new penal code of 1890, lawmaker-ideologues at the national level included articles, such as those pertaining to petty crime and vice, that aimed to control social conditions at the local level. Following the end of slavery and the collapse of the Empire, Brazilian jurisprudence increasingly accommodated the efforts of agents of the state to label popular practices such as the jogo do bicho as affronts to the public...