Elites locais e caridade: estudo sobre os benfeitores do Asilo de Mendigos e do Asilo de Órfãs São Benedito em Pelotas – RS (1880-1920)

Abstract

In the city of Pelotas in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century, the assistance to the needy, children, elderly, beggars, or other risk groups was not carried out by the state but by the local population, mainly by those better located at the social pyramid. The present work will focus on the Asylum of Beggars and the Asylum of Orphans Saint Benedict institutions and their benefactors during the period between 1880-1920. The research has the scope of discussing the various forms of charity, considerations questions about the exchanges that happened between institution and benefactor who predominantly belonged to the local elites. The study will bring political, social and economic elements of the dominant groups of the period and their connections with charitable practices. Finally, we will analyze the trajectory of three influential individuals in the city of Pelotas, who were some of the few who knew how to practice charity and benefit from it, albeit indirectly. This work was based on diverse primary sources (Personal objects, newspapers, reports, records, history, portraits, etc.) and we used our won methodology based on the portraits in the salons of honorof those institutions with the purpose of identifying who were the most important Pelotenses in the local charity circuit. After identifying the political, economic and charitable elite, it was sought to answer the importance of charity for the dominant groups and for the groups that wanted to ascend socially and what was the role of the institutions in this process