Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil: Black Women's Perspectives on Love, Respect, and Kinship

By Melanie A. Medeiros

Using an intersectional approach, Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil explores rural, working-class, black Brazilian women’s perceptions and experiences of courtship, marriage and divorce. In this book, women’s narratives of marriage dissolution demonstrate the ways in which changing gender roles and marriage expectations associated with modernization and globalization influence the intimate lives and the health and well being of women in Northeast Brazil. Melanie A. Medeiros explores the women’s rich stories of desire, love, respect, suffering, strength, and transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jul 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813588254

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Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil

Marriage, Divorce, and Distress in Northeast Brazil

Black Women’s Perspectives on Love, Respect, and Kinship

Melanie A. Medeiros

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Medeiros, Melanie A., author.

Title: Marriage, divorce and distress in Northeast Brazil : Black women’s perspectives on love, respect and kinship / Melanie A. Medeiros.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017033865| ISBN 9780813588247 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813588230 (pbk. : alk. paper) | 978-0-8135-8825-4 (epub) | 978-0-8135-8826-1 (Web pdf) | 978-0-8135-9806-2 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Marriage—Brazil—Bahia (State) | Blacks—Brazil—Bahia (State)

Classification: LCC HQ594.15.B34 M43 2018 | DDC 306.81089/9608142—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033865

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Melanie A. Medeiros

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

In loving memory of Maria de Lurdes Andrade, Irene Maria Rodrigues, and Clarice Ramos de Freitas

Contents

Chapter 1. Brogodó, Bahia, Brazil

Chapter 2. Gender, Employment, and Divorce

Chapter 3. Telenovela Reception and the Rise of Romantic Love and Companionate Marriage

Chapter 4. Respect, Infidelity, and Divorce

Chapter 5. Marital Distress and Social Suffering

Chapter 6. Matrifocal Kinship and Amor Verdadeiro

Chapter 7. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

1

Brogodó, Bahia, Brazil

"No início tudo são flores . . . depois vem os espinhos (In the beginning, everything are flowers . . . then come the thorns"). In rural Northeast Brazil, women often use this adage to describe courtship and marriage. The flowers symbolize the joy and hope women feel at the beginning of a marital relationship. The thorns depict the conflict that seems inevitably to arise in all marriages. For African-descendant women in the small, rural Northeast Brazilian town of Brogodó, marital conflict was commonplace and a source of distress.¹ However, shifts in sociocultural norms and values surrounding gender roles and identity, marriage, and divorce granted women in Brogodó the ability to put an end to marital conflict and dissolve their marriages. While discourse surrounding marriage in this community lamented the inevitability of marital conflict and divorce, it simultaneously celebrated women’s autonomy. As a result, younger women adamantly distinguished themselves from former generations, stating that they would not agüentar (endure) the marital relationships of antigamente (the old days), in which women suffered but remained married, only separating when they died. The views of women in Brogodó on marriage and divorce reflect processes of sociocultural and political economic change visible throughout Brazil as well as in diverse cultural contexts around the world, where global divorce rates are at an all-time high.

In conducting an ethnographic study of gender roles, marriage, marital conflict, divorce, and distress among African-descendant women, I set out to understand why women were choosing to end their marriages, to investigate changes in gender roles and marriage expectations, and to illuminate the perceived effects of marital conflict and dissolution on individuals, households, and kinship. In this book, I present observations and ethnographic data I collected during ten years of visiting and living in the welcoming and vibrant community of Brogodó. I describe how and why gender roles, courtship, and marriage were transforming among Afro-Brazilians in Brogodó, arguing that these changes are key to understanding black women’s perceptions and experiences of marriage dissolution. I explain how trends such as shifts in the gendered division of labor in a growing ecotourism economy and the spread of the modern notion of romantic love and companionate marriage through popular telenovelas (soap operas) were directly related to the perceived prevalence of divorce in Brogodó and in Brazil. I also describe the ways in which social and structural inequality at the intersection of race, gender, and class affected working-class black women’s daily lives, intimate interactions, and experiences of marital conflict and dissolution. I argue that for these women, social and structural inequality, marital conflict, and divorce were sources of embodied distress. Ultimately, this book demonstrates the complex ways individuals negotiate personal desires and social expectations for marriage while navigating the economic, social, and cultural circumstances that influence their daily lives.

Dance Imitates Life

Every June, rural Northeast Brazilians celebrate the festa de São João (St. John’s Day) with a weeklong festival honoring the saint and the corn harvest, paying homage to rural life in Northeast Brazil. For the festival in Brogodó, the hilly cobblestone streets and pastel-colored colonial homes were decorated with colorful and patterned bandeirinhas—small flags hanging from long streamers extending from house to house and between lamp posts. The town squares were dotted with temporary, straw-roofed adobe cottages and large cardboard cutouts of cartoon people in farmers’ clothing, endearing attractions for tourists from cosmopolitan Brazilian cities. As I walked through the streets, I could hear the sound of forró—a genre of music originally from the Northeast—emanating from the windows of homes, restaurants, and other commercial businesses. The smell of roasting corn and peanuts permeated the air as households prepared local dishes such as canjica (hominy) porridge in commemoration of the holiday. The atmosphere was festive and warm, as local residents anticipated the influx of visitors who flooded the city for the festival.

As part of these celebrations, local groups organize amateur dance troupes to act out a casamento do caipira (wedding of a country bumpkin) and perform a quadrilha folk dance. Quadrilha is akin to American square dancing, in which a caller calls out sequences of steps to the dancers. Groups ranging from schoolchildren to adults perform these dances throughout the week of the São João festivities. For children, dancing in a quadrilha is an opportunity to mimic the dances they had watched their parents perform. For the adults, there is great pride in producing an entertaining quadrilha and performing it with energy and charisma in front of the entire town and visitors in town for the holiday. Boys and girls, men and women dress as caipiras (country bumpkins), exaggerated, cartoon-like versions of rural Northeast Brazilians. The girls and women don ruffled skirts in bright patterns and floral and polka-dot prints, wear their hair in pigtails or braids, and paint on rosy cheeks. Boys and men wear jeans with fake patches sewn onto them, button-down plaid work shirts, bandanas around their necks, and beat-up straw hats. The costumes of the caipira bear no resemblance to current fashions and represent an effort to spark humor in distinguishing themselves from rural Brazilians of the past.

The quadrilha performance begins with the casamento do caipira, in which a pregnant girl marries her reluctant boyfriend under the watchful eyes of her parents; the chief of police, who prevents the boy from running away; and the wedding guests, the quadrilha dancing troupe.² The quadrilha dancing begins after the wedding ends, with the wedding guests taking the stage to dance and celebrate. The segments of the quadrilha start with boys/girls or men/women facing each other in lines and dancing in place until a sequence is called out, at which point they pair off to perform, dancing between the two lines formed by their troupe members. As I watched the quadrilha performances over the course of several years, it became apparent to me that not only did the dances depict gender roles and conjugal relations, but the sequences showing conflict between men and women elicited the greatest audience response. For example, in an audience favorite, what I call "A Conquista (The Conquest), the boy/man follows the girl/woman as she struts between the facing lines. He pleads with her to be with him, taking off his hat, getting on his knees, holding his hands in prayer—all depending on the creativity of the performer. At the same time, the girl/woman remains coy and indifferent until they reach the end of the dance lines, where she eventually agrees to the match. This is repeated down the row until each boy/man is paired with a girl/woman—thus anywhere from twenty to forty times depending on the size of the performance group. Another sequence, which I refer to as Marido Bebedo (Drunk Husband), is performed by each pair as they walk between two lines of dancers, and it depicts the wife going to the bar to bring her husband home. This involves grabbing the husband by the arm as he stumbles around drunk, often leaning on his partner or falling, as they move between the other dancers. In another sequence, the wife catches the husband with another woman and, in a jealous rage, tears the husband from the embrace of the other woman and begins to fight with the alleged mistress. This same story line is also performed in reverse, with the husband being jealous of the wife." Although the performance of each of these dances by all the couples of the performance troupe may seem repetitive, both the dancers and audience relished in the nuances of each couple’s performance and sat through anywhere from two to six troupe performances in a row each evening of the festival week.

The casamento do caipira and quadrilha performances portray gender roles and conjugal relations being renegotiated amid transformations wrought on the community by social and political economic change. In Brogodó, the casamento do caipira and quadrilha dances were a sanctioned venue in which conjugal relations were performed and mocked. They also served as a point of reference. In interviews, women distinguished themselves from the characters they portrayed in the quadrilha, stating that the scenes were exaggerated representations of the past. This disassociation was due in part to changes in gender ideologies, and yet many of the gendered interactions performed depicted the struggles still experienced in contemporary marriage. The conflict between historic and contemporary ideologies surrounding gender roles, courtship, and marriage was at the nexus of marriage dissolution in this close-knit community.

Brogodó, Bahia, Brazil

To fully contemplate the social and cultural changes that occurred in Brogodó and the effects these changes had on marriage, it is necessary to examine the context of Brogodó in relationship to Brazil’s historical, social, and political economic landscape. Brazil is a country with dramatic socioeconomic inequalities that date back to its colonial period and the century of political and economic instability that followed independence from Portugal. Brazil’s colonial economy thrived on the production of sugarcane on the northeastern coast, relying heavily on the importation of an estimated four million African slaves—40 percent of all slaves in the Americas—to work the cane fields (Graden 2006). Brazil won independence from Portugal in 1822 when Pedro II, the son of the Portuguese king, claimed the Brazilian throne. In 1888, Brazil became the last country in the world to abolish slavery. This was closely followed by a military coup in 1889 that deposed Pedro II and created the first Brazilian republic with a democratic constitution. Over the course of the next one hundred years, Brazil experienced periods of political instability, led at times by military dictators and at other times by democratically elected leaders. The economy was also unstable. The economic miracle from 1968 to 1973 saw the rise of a middle class. However, a severe economic crisis started in 1985, intersecting with the presidency of Collor de Mello, the first democratically elected president in close to thirty years. During the economic crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, declines in foreign investment, extreme inflation (20 percent per month in 1991), and high unemployment disproportionately affected working-class Brazilians (O’Dougherty 2002). President Collor’s neoliberal economic plan to fight high inflation and stabilize the economy—the Plano Collor—further jeopardized the economic security and well-being of the working class and increased social inequality.³ After President Collor resigned in 1992, President Cardoso implemented the Plano Real in 1994, introducing a new currency (the real), which temporarily benefited the middle and upper classes before the economy destabilized again, although less severely, from 2001 to 2003 (Mendes 2015).⁴

These historical political economic events contributed to social and structural inequality in Brazil, the effects of which were experienced by working-class women in Brogodó in their day-to-day lives and intimate relationships. Brazil has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world, with the richest 20 percent of the population earning thirty-three times more than the 20 percent of the population earning the lowest income (World Bank 2004). In 2002, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) became Brazil’s first socialist president. In his efforts to reduce social inequality and address the needs of the working class, President Lula implemented the unsuccessful Programa Fome Zero (Zero Hunger Program) and the comparatively more successful Bolsa Família (Family Stipend; Ansell 2014; Fraundorfer 2015; Kenny 2007).⁵ The Bolsa Família was successful in improving the circumstances of Brazilians living in abject poverty, reducing Brazil’s poverty rate by 50 percent (Soares, Ribas, and Osório 2010), and is credited with a 13 percent reduction in socioeconomic inequality between the 1990s and 2012 (Mendes 2015).⁶ However, decreases in inequality stabilized after 2012, and high rates of inequality persist in Brazil. After a period of dramatic economic growth from 2004 to early 2014 that seemed to imply that the government’s social spending and economic growth were not mutually exclusive, Brazil’s economy once again began to decline in mid-2014, the start of a severe economic recession that was further complicated by political instability.⁷

The implications of political and economic instability and social and structural inequality are felt most dramatically in the Northeast region of Brazil, including towns like Brogodó. Up until the 1700s, the coastal colonies of the Northeast thrived from sugarcane production, but with increased competition from the Caribbean and the shift in investment to coffee production in southern Brazil, coffee soon replaced sugar as Brazil’s major export (Gregg 2003). Rather than encourage African-descendant Brazilians from the Northeast to work the South’s coffee plantations, the government instead recruited close to four million Europeans to work as tenant farmers—leaving Northeast Brazilians cut loose from their prior source of income (O’Dougherty 2002). Additionally, decentralizing economic policies during the first Brazilian republic (1889–1930) targeted the South—granting residents high percentages of federal revenue and incentives for coffee production—while isolating and marginalizing the Northeast through neglect (O’Dougherty 2002). The industrialization of the South in the twentieth century and unequal land distribution further contributed to regional inequality and poverty in the Northeast (Mayblin 2012; Pereira 1997). The Northeast continues to be the poorest region in Brazil, with social indicators well below the southern regions. As a result of structural inequality, the Northeast has higher rates of infant mortality and lower life-expectancy rates (Gragnolati, Lindelow, and Couttolenc 2013). Public education in the Northeast is some of the worst in the country, and literacy rates are the lowest in the country (Borges 2008; JHU 1993). Access to reliable electricity, running water, and sanitation systems is also reduced in the Northeast (Heikkila et al. 2012). These issues cause hundreds of thousands of Northeasterners to migrate to the southern Brazilian cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where they live in poverty in dangerous slums on the outskirts of these cosmopolitan cities, potentially even further marginalized than when residing in the Northeast.

Brogodó is located in Bahia, the largest state in the Northeast, which is well known globally for its vibrant tourist industry centered on the beautiful coast and the marketing of Afro-Brazilian material culture such as music, dance, and capoeira.⁸ However, Bahia’s coast contrasts starkly with the dry, rural interior of the state, where drought and the lack of economic development contribute to the poverty and insecurity of its inhabitants. Historically, while the Bahian coast developed through its sugarcane economy, working-class colonists and escaped and freed slaves moved around the sertão—the semiarid interior of the state—where they worked as tenant farmers on cotton farms and cattle ranches while subsisting on what they could grow for themselves (Mayblin 2010).⁹ However, the economic history of the rural town of Brogodó differs slightly from neighboring communities in the interior of Bahia and the sertão.

With a population of 10,368 residents in 2010, Brogodó is located a little over 400 kilometers (250 miles) from Bahia’s state capital, Salvador (IBGE 2011). In the mid-nineteenth century, it was the discovery of diamonds in the area rather than opportunities for tenant farming that drew Brazilians of both European and African descent to the area. The town of Brogodó developed as a result of the diamond-mining trade. When diamond mining came to a halt in the early twentieth century, the miners without means to migrate to the urbanizing coastal cities moved to slightly more arable land to subsist on small-scale farming. The women and children of miners who did migrate remained in Brogodó, living in abject poverty, dependent on remittances and performing domestic chores for families that were only slightly better off. A small number of miners did remain to conduct small-scale mining, relying on the occasional diamond find and sale for their families’ survival. Largely as a result of the social memory of the mid-twentieth-century struggle in Brogodó, the descendants of the miners and miner families who remained—the vast majority of whom are of African descent—strongly ascribe to identities as nativos (natives) of the area.¹⁰ The life-history narratives of nativos as young as thirty years old describe childhoods of collecting firewood for cooking as well as frequent trips to the river to collect drinking water and wash clothes and dishes, alluding to the challenging living conditions of the period following the decline of the mining industry. By the early twenty-first century, the majority of homes in Brogodó had electricity and running water and used gas stoves for cooking; however, many women continued to wash their laundry at the river to avoid paying for expensive piped-in water.

For women in Brogodó, social and structural inequality intersected with social and political economic change that significantly altered their hopes and desires for their lives and relationships as well as heightened their frustrations and perceived sense of vulnerability. In the late twentieth century, Brogodó experienced a shift in its socioeconomic structure due to the increase of tourism to the town and the surrounding area. In 1973, the Patrimônio Histórico Nacional (National Preservation Society) added the late-nineteenth-century colonial buildings in Brogodó to its registry of protected historical architecture (Funch 1999). In 1985, the Brazilian government declared the area surrounding Brogodó a national park, and the rivers and sandstone rocks and mountain ridges that had been ideal for diamond mining gained national and international renown as a bastion of natural beauty. The former miners’ trails lent themselves well to hiking, making for an easy physical transition from mining territory to ecotourism destination. In the aftermath of the park’s creation, Brogodó underwent a renaissance as one of the gateway towns to the national park. In 2013, it boasted the region’s largest tourist infrastructure, containing more than fifty small inns, twenty-eight tour agencies, and forty-two restaurants (Flora Comunicação 2013), and the tourism industry was the main source of employment in Brogodó. The creation of the national park and the development of the tourism infrastructure had significant ramifications for social and kinship relations in this community.

As a result of the popularity of the park and the success of the ecotourism industry, Brogodó became a prosperous town. However, fifteen years after the creation of the park, the incidence of relative poverty in Brogodó was still 47.12 percent (IBGE 2000).¹¹ In 2000, 57 percent of the residents with an income were paid less than or equal to minimum wage, and 46 percent of residents did not have a monthly income (IBGE 2000). Brogodó was a microcosm of Brazil’s socioeconomic stratification, and the inequalities between nativos and business owners from Brazilian cities became a source of social strain and discontent. In a town as small as Brogodó, socioeconomic inequalities were very apparent, augmenting the frustration experienced by nativos who struggled to make ends meet while their employers lived comparatively comfortable lives right in front of them. The majority of nativos in Brogodó lived in small, cement, two-to-three-room structures on the steep, unpaved roads that sloped up from the center of town, whereas business owners lived in renovated homes in the center of town or large, newly built houses on its outskirts. The residential neighborhoods inhabited by nativos were a stark contrast to the small but lively town center where restaurants, tourism agencies, and shops lined quaint cobblestone roads and the town’s two main praças (town squares). The socioeconomic divisions existing in Brogodó were visible within the town’s geography, where distinctions between the charming center of tourism, managed by nonnativos, and the working-class residential neighborhoods, inhabited by nativos, were evident.

As socioeconomic change both wiped out jobs for some nativos and gave jobs to others and increased the presence of middle- and upper-class business owners in the town, Brazilian broadcast media outlets, specifically Rede Globo (Globo Network), also broadcasted television shows and films focused on the Brazilian middle and upper classes living in cosmopolitan cities. The storylines of the extremely popular telenovelas depict women’s independence from men—including their employment and ability to choose their partners—preferences for relationships based in romantic love, and an intolerance for infidelity in those relationships. In Brogodó, telenovelas by Rede Globo were viewed in every household I surveyed, either passively (with the television as background sound while household members cooked, ate, and cleaned) or actively (with household members deeply engaged with the plots of the programs). Although nativos struggled with relative poverty, a television set was seen not as a luxury item but as a necessity. Certain places and spaces act both as sites for reproducing normative gender scripts and as sites for transformation (Giddings and Hovorka 2010). The coinciding of local socioeconomic change with exposure to the norms and values articulated through the telenovelas had significant ramifications for gender roles, identity, marriage, and divorce in Brogodó, making it a site for transformation.

Defining Marriage in Northeast Brazil

Marriage in Northeast Brazil—similar to many Caribbean countries—is not necessarily predicated on legal or religious formalities and can be what some call as-if marriages (Gregg 2003; Rebhun 1999), or simply coupling. These marriages, referred to as consensual unions or common-law marriages in scholarly literature and Brazilian law, are defined by space and language and form when consenting adults move in together and begin referring to one another as husband and wife. Although increasingly popular among the Brazilian middle and upper classes (Leone and Hinde 2005),¹² consensual unions have existed since colonial Brazil, when they were common among slaves and working-class colonists (Barickman 2004; Kuznesof 1993).¹³ For Brazilians of African descent, the legacy of consensual unions dates back to slavery, when slaves were required to meet certain criteria—such as gaining their master’s consent, learning prayers, and confessing—before they could be married by the Catholic Church (Myscofski 2013), all but reserving marriage for the elites (Freyre 1933). Rather than attempt to fulfill these requirements, many slaves opted to establish consensual unions of their own accord. Famed Brazilian sociologist and historian Gilberto Freyre (1933) popularized the belief that, historically, the Brazilian family was based in a patriarchal casa grande (big house) plantation household structure, in which slaves were part of a larger family structure. However, research shows that there were actually multiple family structures during the colonial period, including solitary households, extended family households, and nuclear families formed through consensual unions among slaves as well as among members of the working-class (Barickmen 2004; Fonseca 2004). Furthermore, white colonists prohibited by the Catholic Church from divorcing their wives in Portugal, and by social propriety from marrying outside their own races, entered into informal marriages based in cohabitation in order to establish unions among themselves as well as with people of African descent (Holt 2005). Therefore, the extended patriarchal family that Freyre discusses was only one form of family structure in colonial Brazil, and consensual unions in Brazil, rather than being a relatively new trend like in North America and Western Europe, have a historical foundation.¹⁴ Additionally, prior to the legalization of divorce in 1977, individuals who were legally married and wanted to remarry would enter into a consensual union, popularizing these unions among the middle and upper classes.

An important consideration for my study is the fact that official census data highly underestimate the rates of marriage and divorce in Brazil because they fail to recognize noncivil marital unions as marriages, even though consensual unions are given many of the same legal rights as civil unions. There are three categories of marital relationships existing in Northeast Brazil. Civil marriages or legally recognized marriages—often called um casamento do papel (a marriage on paper)—are a marker of status usually associated with the middle and upper classes and white Brazilians. Although civil unions fulfill a formal ideal of courtship, engagement, and marriage (Kuznesof 1993; Rebhun 2004), they were uncommon in Brogodó. Women argued that it was neither worth paying the fees required to officiate such a marriage nor worth paying for the party expected to follow it. To illustrate this point, several of my informants quoted a popular song with the lyrics If marriage was good / One wouldn’t need a witness / Why a priest? / Why a judge?¹⁵ According to women in Brogodó, marriages formed by a religious wedding ceremony, which I refer to as um casamento da igreja (a marriage of the church), used to be more common in Brogodó. However, during my time in Brogodó, outside of the small evangelical community, religious wedding ceremonies were all but nonexistent.¹⁶ The remainder of marriages are what I have referred to thus far as consensual unions, but in Northeast Brazil are referred to simply as um casamento (a marriage). For the younger generations, such marriages were associated with the same expectations and responsibilities of legal or religious unions.¹⁷ Significantly, residents of Brogodó argued that there was no experiential difference between the types of marriage, and as a result, women in my study did not differentiate between marriages formed through these diverse means.¹⁸ In this book, I follow suit, using the term marriage to refer to civil, religious, and common-law marriages. For a community of people among whom common-law marriage was the most prevalent, census data underestimated the true extent of marriage dissolution as well as failed to capture the larger complexity of marriage relationships emerging as a result of marriage dissolution, such as namoridos, partners who were more than a namorado (boyfriend) but not quite a marido (husband).

Families are locally defined and consist of subjective social relations (Sarti 2004). They are not biological facts but rather historical and political institutions (Fonseca 2007). Families are constructed over both space (habitation) and time (ages, time periods; Fonseca 2005). Although Freyre’s (1933) depiction of the extended patriarchal family continues to inform ideology surrounding the family and gender roles in Brazil, it does not reflect the complex family structures existing in contemporary Brazil (Fonseca 2004).¹⁹ I concur with other scholars that kinship norms and values, laws, and technology are dynamic, and there is no longer a model Brazilian family (Fonseca 2008; Sarti 2004).

Deconstructing Divorce

In as much as marriage is a complicated cluster of practices, so too is marriage dissolution. Global rates of marriage dissolution and divorce are increasing, and anthropologists are beginning to make ties between global processes of social and political economic transformation, changing marital expectations, and marriage dissolution (Constable 2003). In Latin America alone, from 2002 to 2006, documented divorce rates increased 219 percent in Guatemala, 111 percent in Uruguay, 47 percent in Venezuela, 28 percent in the Dominican Republic, 27 percent in Ecuador and Costa Rica, and 19 percent in Mexico (United Nations 2006). In Brazil, the divorce rate rose steadily from the legalization of divorce in 1977, multiplying by 500 percent between 1988 and 2009 (Chong and La Ferrara 2009). Notably, women requested 72 percent of divorces, marking a significant departure from historically male-driven marriage dissolution (Cano et al. 2009). These demographic statistics represent a dramatic increase in divorce rates but nonetheless underestimate the prevalence of marriage dissolution, as these statistics do not include the end of marriages formed through a religious ceremony or cohabitation—uncoupling—nor civil marriages ending in permanent separation. Almost half of the women I surveyed in Brogodó had experienced marriage dissolution.²⁰

Divorce has a conflicted social and political status in Brazil. Historically, heteronormative conjugal relations were at the center of the family, and for generations, the Catholic Church and government treated