Rural Reform in Brazil

Most rural Latin Americans have a standard of living no better than that of the Indians who were found on the land by the European colonizers or of the slaves that subsequently were imported into parts of the continent. In Brazil the evocation of the slave society provides more than a dramatic yardstick of the absence of material progress for the nation’s rural population. The “big house” and the senzala (slave quarters), the social poles of Brazilian plantation society, remain richly symbolic of a past that extends in subtle ways into the present.

Gilberto Freyre, who organized his search for fundamental truths about Brazilian culture and social organization around the big house and the senzala, saw most Brazili...