'Squatter' families on public lands were also often ignored, giving peasants another means of survival.
However, when railways began to be rapidly snake across the nation, the potential for making profits off of the land seismically increased. From 1907-1914 the entrepreneurial capitalist Percival Farquhar began to engage in a massive construction campaign. Huge waves of immigrants to work for the railroad made an influx into formerly homogeneous regions, profoundly destabilizing the lives of residents as well as of these new arrivals. Violent clashes were common between railroad workers and peasants -- although peasants were forced off of their land to work on the railroads as well.
Diacon calls the forces that brought change to Brazil a "deadly triumvirate" of the state government, the Brazil Railway Company, and the landowners looking for a quick profit (Diacon 59). Even many smaller landowners lost tracts to the powerful railroad companies. Regardless, the patron-client relationship was completely severed because now worker labored directly for the railroad companies, with old landowners effectively betraying their old tenants by contracting them out, acting as brokers. The work on the railroad was hard, and provided none of the benefits of tilling the land in terms of feeding the worker's families. Being a pure 'wage slave' was a relatively new concept to the rural people of the region.
Rural Brazilians looked backward in terms of their religious...
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