The Asilo de Meninos Desvalidos in Rio de Janeiro (1875–1889): A Welfare Institution?

Abstract

This article examines the concept of child welfare in the second half of the 19th century, focusing on the Asilo de Meninos Desvalidos, which opened in Rio de Janeiro in 1875, a few years after the Free Birth Law was enacted. The research is based on an analysis of primary sources held by the National Archives—notably correspondence exchanged between the Asylum’s board of directors and the Ministry of the Empire, and the admission and discharge records of the residents—cross-referenced with the legislation of the period and the institution’s annual reports, in dialogue with specialized studies on the Asylum, the social history of abandoned children in Brazil, and the historiography of the Second Empire. Three arguments are put forward. First, that the twenty-year interval between the institution’s planning (1854) and its actual inauguration can only be explained by the specific political and economic context in which the Asilo emerged, marked by the crisis of the Empire and the uneven reforms of the Rio Branco cabinet. Second, the care provided at the Asilo was based on a utilitarian logic of reform and education through work, occupying a specific place within a broader institutional network for the classification of poor children. Third, this logic was reaffirmed even in the face of families’ resistance to compulsory training in manual trades, through the systematic expulsion of residents deemed unfit. It can therefore be concluded that the Asilo operated less as a charitable welfare institution than as an institution for training a free labor force in the Imperial Court.