From Itinerant Trade to Moneylending in the Era of Financial Inclusion

Households, Debts and Masculinity among Calon Gypsies of Northeast Brazil

Martin Fotta

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319964089
• eBook ISBN: 9783319964096
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Economics

This book analyses how Calon Gypsies in Brazil have responded to global financial transformations and shifted their economic practices from itinerant trade to moneylending. It also explores their role as ethnic credit providers, offering rare insight into the financial lives of poor and lower-middle-class Brazilians.

More broadly, this volume examines how ethnic difference is created in a context where fixed and collective structures supporting ethnic identity are missing. It is important reading for economic anthropologists, cultural economists and all those interested in processes of financialisation from a local perspective, as well as those fascinated by informal economies, how exchange and debt relate to social and political marginality, and how financial credit becomes 'domesticated' by communities.

Part ISettlements, Personhood, and the Centrality of Households

© The Author(s) 2018

Martin FottaFrom Itinerant Trade to Moneylending in the Era of Financial Inclusionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96409-6_2

Begin Abstract

Chapter 1 ‘There Are Ciganos in the Town’

Martin Fotta¹

(1)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Martin Fotta

End Abstract

Two Decades in the Life of a Calon Family

Manuel Borges da Costa was born in the semi-arid hinterland , sertão, but in the second half of the 1970s he lived in the area that lay within the so-called agreste zone, located between the market town of Feira de Santana and the coast with its zona da mata, coastal forest zone. He was the leader of a small turma—an aggregate of people that live together—composed of five households: his own, which he inhabited with his wife and their eight children; that of his widowed mother, who lived alone; that of his brother and his family; that of his nephew and his wife; and that of his friend and his family. These Calon made a living primarily through buying and selling animals for work in sugar mills.

In 1979, Manuel and his wife arranged the marriage of their oldest son, Jorge, near Salgado, about 300 kilometres south. They planned to return to the coast after the wedding, but when the town’s mayor suggested that they settle there, Manuel accepted. He started building two houses—for his family and for Jorge. Soon, Mariazinha, his second-eldest child and oldest daughter, also married. She married Claudio, her cousin—her father’s sister’s son.

The newlyweds lived in a neighbouring town alongside Claudio’s family until, about two years later, they suddenly appeared at Manuel’s house. They explained that Claudio had gotten into an argument with his father, Eraldo, and pulled a gun on his father. His mother had stepped between them and was hit by a bullet. Claudio swore that he had not meant to shoot her. Manuel arranged for the couple to hide at an acquaintance’s farm for some time. His sister—Claudio’s mother—died the next day.

Manuel’s oldest sons, who had never liked Claudio, were against Claudio and Mariazinha joining their turma . Manuel also suggested that Mariazinha leave her husband, as they did not have any children yet, but she refused.

The couple moved to a town about 200 kilometres away. About a year later, Manuel learnt that Mariazinha was being abused by Claudio and that he had beaten her even after she had become pregnant. Manuel and his second-eldest son, Giovanni, drove to do something about the situation. When they arrived, they first talked to other Calon in the area, who confirmed the rumours. Manuel then invited Mariazinha to leave with them, bringing her baby as well. If she did not come, he warned her, he would never set foot into her tent again, as he did not want to see her suffer . She accepted.

A few months later, in June 1984, Claudio was killed in a bar fight. Eraldo, Claudio’s father, blamed Manuel for his son’s death. The way he saw it, Manuel was responsible, as Claudio had become uncontrollable after Mariazinha left him. To avenge his son, Eraldo killed Manuel in March 1985 at the marketplace in Salguerio. Within a few days, Manuel’s turma moved from Salgado to neighbouring Brejo Santo, where they built new houses and tents . A few months later, Manuel’s oldest sons, who were especially angered by their father’s murder, arranged for Eraldo to be killed in prison, where he had been incarcerated on unrelated charges.

The turma , now headed by Giovanni, lived in Brejo Santo for the next 12 years. In 1997, during a wedding in their family, a local councillor started claiming that one of Giovanni’s cousins had bought a gun from him, but had never paid for it. In the midst of a row that followed, the non-Gypsy was shot dead. The family of the late Manuel fled immediately, eventually returning to the humid coast.

* * *

This narrative is reconstructed from several conversations I had with Manuel’s son 20 years after the events. It vividly illustrates the ways in which movement and settlement are related to economic opportunities, households’ lifecycles, and changes in interpersonal relations. The family first travelled in order for Jorge to marry. As is still usually the case among Calon, it was the bride’s family that organised the wedding. While today grooms’ families sometimes raise tents in brides’ settlements or nearby, it is much more common for them to rent houses in brides’ towns; grooms’ parents often remain there for several weeks. In 1979, it took several months for Manuel’s turma to arrive to Salgado, since they travelled by mule and stopped along the way to make a living. At that time, the sight of such Ciganos tropeiros (drover Gypsies) was not uncommon; indeed, the interregional trade functioned primarily thanks to various kinds of itinerant traders. Although Calon travelling caravans were generally smaller on the coast, in the interior of Bahia some caravans are said to have been composed of as many as 200 individuals. These large groups frequently splintered into smaller bands that travelled and settled separately, but that would come together again after some time—usually in specific towns and during particular periods, such as those linked to bean harvests and regional markets organised around them.

Manuel and his turma never returned to the coast. This change in plans has to be seen in the context of his children’s marriages and his sons’ new status as household heads with their own networks and priorities, as well as in the economic opportunities that the area offered at the time. The offer from Salgado’s mayor is also important—in the past, a good relationship with influential non-Gypsies was especially central to the maintenance of a Calon mode of life (Medeiros et al. 2013). In the nineteenth century, as a source of goods, slaves , and animals, Ciganos were tolerated by elites and sought out their protection. The Scottish naturalist George Gardner encountered Ciganos between Ceará and Pernambuco who, according to him, ‘are generally disliked by common people, but are encouraged by the more wealthy, as was the case on the present occasion for they were encamped beneath some large trees near the house of a major in the National Guards, who is the proprietor of a large cane plantation’ (Gardner 1849: 146). Especially in the 1980s, local politicians in the Brazilian northeast seem to have encouraged Calon troupes to settle in their localities in exchange for votes and political loyalty, a decision that was not difficult for Calon to make given that itinerant trade was becoming unsustainable. Today, although Calon purchase or rent houses or plots for their encampments, their communal life still depends on the maintenance of relationships with Jurons. Calon men enter into economic transactions with Jurons in order to provide for their households, and settlements emerge around those who have particularly good relationships with local non-Gypsies, especially those of influence.

As this book shows, however, in 30 years things have changed: thanks to cars and roads, men can strike deals away from their settlements and towns, but do not have to move with their whole families. Nuclear families are smaller, and moneylending, in comparison with transporting animals, does not require the cooperation of a large number of people. However, although the speed, mode, and ease of travel have changed, other things have stayed the same. Today’s reasons for Calon to move and settle show continuity with those in the past. Thus, behind the façades of houses that have been gradually replacing tents and which, at first sight, could be suggestive of sedentarisation, Calon maintain a world structured according to specific principles.

Map 1.1

Schematic map of the region described in this book. Most of the Calon who I encountered in Santaluz have lived here for several decades and many were born here. For households from Orlando’s family this region represents their home range within which they move

Settlement in Santaluz

By 2008, Calon had resided in the Graça neighbourhood in Santaluz, in the vicinity of the street where my wife and I rented a house, for more than ten years. Graça is the biggest and the poorest neighbourhood in Santaluz. Many people occupy its land illegally, and most drug-related violence happens there. Even though Calon constituted only a minority of the residents on our street, its identification with Ciganos was such that even our electricity bill, rather than using the official street name , was addressed to Rua do Cigano—‘Gypsy Street’. Whenever my wife or I needed to explain to somebody where we lived, we said that it was ‘opposite the house of Orlando Cigano’. Houses belonging to Orlando and occupied by his family stood just opposite our house, and there was a Calon encampment about 100 metres down a dirt road from them. Very early in the morning, it was normal for Calon men to sit in front of our house, drinking coffee and discussing their plans for the day while watching fighting cockerels that they had brought to warm up in the sun. Later, during weekdays, Calon women in colourful dresses passed by our house on their way to the town’s centre to read palms, returning to the encampment just before noon carrying groceries. Non-Gypsy clients came to this part of the town in search of loans. Often, Calon men from other settlements arrived to Orlando’s house to play cards; I could see them leaving around two in the morning.

Calon did not always live on the Rua do Cigano. In the 1980s, a tent camp where some of them lived was in a neighbourhood called São Lázaro. When the camp first moved to Graça, it stood by the river next to a metal footbridge. In 1999, in the run-up to municipal elections when the mayor decided to turn the area into a small football field, most of the camp moved to what would come to be known as the Rua do Cigano. The camp first emerged on a plot that Djalma bought a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Consolidation of the Cigano Moneylending Niche in the Early Twenty-First Century
• Part I. Settlements, Personhood, and the Centrality of Households
• Part II. Calon Assimilation of the Local Economic Environment
• Epilogue: The Crisis, the Stranger, and the State
• Back Matter