Lecture | How the Animal Game Escaped from the Rio de Janeiro Zoo: Brazil's Clandestine Lottery

In the early 1890s, the Brazilian government gave permission to Rio de Janeiro’s privately owned zoo to operate a raffle. Each entry ticket to the zoo bore a randomly selected animal printed on it that gave the patron a chance to win a cash prize. Soon, though, booking agents in the city center began to sell tickets to win the raffle at the zoo. By the middle of the 1890s, what had come to be known as the “animal game” was already disassociated from the zoo. Rio’s residents illicitly traded handwritten tickets to the jogo do bicho—or “animal game”—throughout the city: on street corners, the small kiosks that sold snacks and cigarettes, and dry goods and other retail stores. Following its invention in late nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital, the jogo do bicho became an integral part of the cultural landscape of the city and the incipient informal economy.

Although forbidden by law, the game spread throughout the nation’s capital and, eventually, all of Brazil. Official persecution of the jogo do bicho and the street merchants who dealt in it drove these economic practices “underground” yet never erased their powerful presence from the city’s cultural and economic landscape. By the middle of the twentieth century, the animal game had become an organized criminal practice based on an unofficial partnership between police and dealers of the game.

This lecture explores the early years of the animal game. During a fascinating time of dramatic urban reforms and social anxieties following the fall of the Brazilian monarchy and the abolition of slavery, the story of the jogo do bicho allows us to understand the origins and effects of a broader process through which completely ordinary and ubiquitous practices such street vending and petty gambling became crimes.

Speaker: A writer in residence in the Library's Allen Room, Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life as well as several articles about the history of crime, punishment, social life, and popular culture in Brazil.