Interview with Pedro Jimenez Cantisano, author of “A Refuge from Science: The Practice and Politics of Rights in Brazil’s Vaccine Revolt”

Pedro Jimenez Cantisano is assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. He holds an LLM from the University of Michigan Law School and an MA and a PhD in history from the University of Michigan. His work focuses on sociolegal histories of cities and public health in Latin America. You can read his article “A Refuge from Science: The Practice and Politics of Rights in Brazil’s Vaccine Revolt” in HAHR 102.4.

1. How did you come to study early twentieth-century Brazil?

I began my research around 2012, when Rio de Janeiro’s municipal government was removing people who lived in squatter communities to open space for the stadiums and transportation systems that prepared the city for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Because I was interested in this topic, more specifically in the “right to the city” movement and the resistance against removals, it seemed logical to begin with the first grand removal project that transformed Rio de Janeiro: the early twentieth-century urban reforms.

2. Your article addresses Rio de Janeiro’s 1904 Vaccine Revolt from a legal perspective. What does such a perspective teach us about the Vaccine Revolt?

Historians have looked at the revolt from social and cultural perspectives that tell us a lot about why people resisted mandatory vaccination. They have also pointed out that there was a rights discourse against the vaccine circulating in Rio de Janeiro. But they have understood this rights language as a tool of the elites, especially liberal elites suspicious of state interventionism. My perspective is that the poor also appropriated this language of rights. Rights resonated with their long-lasting struggles against the violent interventions of slaveholders, the police, landlords, and others in their bodies and homes. Looking at the judicial cases also helps us understand how social activism benefits from strategies that combine both legal and nonlegal channels.

3. Your article intriguingly reveals the legal knowledge and rights-based opposition of everyday actors beyond the lawyers and politicians with whom we routinely associate these discourses. What challenges, if any, did the source base pose to accessing these everyday discourses, and how did you address these?

There were many challenges. The most important one is the fact that most people who participated in the Vaccine Revolt did not produce the archives. We know what they heard, read, and saw on the newspapers and recorded public meetings. Now, with my research, we also know that a small group took their grievances to courts. Yet, to imagine how most people interpreted this language of rights we must turn to contextual evidence. That’s where the work of social historians who investigated the histories of rights claiming related to slavery, housing, work, and honor come in. They provide enough context to imagine how poor workers interpreted the rights discourse against the vaccine.

4. Your article inevitably raises contemporary comparisons, at a moment of a rising anti-vaccination movement and misinformation regarding vaccines. What lessons, if any, does the opposition surrounding the Vaccine Revolt have for our contemporary moment?

The first lesson may be one that we don’t want to hear: Public health has a complicated history and, for some people, resistance to vaccination was an emancipatory goal. Under the conditions of scientific uncertainty and of brutal exclusion and state inflicted violence, resisting public health mandates was a stand for one’s rights. But the lesson that follows is something that we all should be paying attention to: Instead of focusing on the antivaxxers who are aligned with certain political ideologies or who suspect the vaccine for exoteric reasons, we should probably focus on the poor and minorities who are suspicious of governments, industries, and health systems that perpetuate racial and economic inequalities.

5. Is this essay part of a broader project? If so, would you mind giving us a preview? If not, what are you working on for your next project?

Yes. I’m working on a book manuscript temporarily titled Confronting the Common Good: Law, Science, and Revolt in the Age of Progress, in which I use the Vaccine Revolt and the resistance to other urbanistic and public health policies in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro to show how people changed their conceptions about individual rights and the common good. My argument is that popular resistance to these policies pushed law and policymakers to consider poor people’s rights and interests in their conceptualization of the common good. At the same time, however, there was a liberal elite who pushed against the common good, invoking fears of socialism and collectivism that they equated with the rise of a dictatorship. I hope the book will shed some light on historically grounded ideas that fuel public debates about pandemics today.

6. Read anything good recently?

I’m currently reading Manuel Barcia’s The Yellow Demon of Fever, which is about the spread and fight against diseases during the “illegal” phase of the transatlantic slave trade. Barcia focuses on the exchanges that created an Atlantic medical culture associated to the slave trade and the efforts to end it. As with other books about the history of epidemics, I read this thinking about the legal instruments and ideas that multiple actors used to justify public health measures. One interesting “legal” aspect of this book is that a lot of the efforts to fight disease came from the mixed commission courts that trialed slave traders in places such as Rio de Janeiro.