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Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-7288325

1527-1900

Nadya Araújo Guimarães,

Urban Development and Societal Issues

Today's São Paulo—South America's largest metropolis—would not exist without an influx of migrants. By 1970, 60 percent of the city's inhabitants had been born elsewhere—unsurprising given that from 1940 to 2000 nearly 40 million Brazilians left the countryside for urban areas, especially São Paulo state.Paradoxically, both the popular imaginary and the academic literature did not do justice in describing the nordestinos who moved to São Paulo. Locals stripped these migrants of their cultural markers and homogeneously referred to them as baianos (people from the northeastern state of Bahia). Prejudice put the finishing touch, marking the nordestinos as inferior. Deeming these migrants' way of adjusting to industry as typically limited by their rural origins and the experience of patriarchy, sociologists of work in the 1950s and 1960s were surprised by the 1978 emergence of a vigorous union movement that confronted the military regime. Such surprise reveals the limits of sociological studies on industrialization, the working class, and capitalist development in mid-twentieth-century Brazil. Their macrostructural bias obscured evidence of the class formation then underway, which was left to a new generation of scholars to uncover.Paulo Fontes's recent book is one of the most significant academic contributions of this new generation. The original Portuguese edition, published in 2008, was very well received by Brazilian academics and won the first Thomas E. Skidmore Prize, sponsored by the Brazilian National Archives and the Brazilian Studies Association. This revised English-language edition leaves no doubt that it will be a lasting contribution to studies of migration, identity, and agency within the Brazilian social sciences.Fontes examines a broad range of local, union, and nationwide periodicals; police documents (particularly at the Departamento Estadual de Ordem Política e Social); criminal records; the institutional memory of the company Nitro Química; municipal and state legislative documents; and international archives containing diplomatic correspondence regarding São Paulo workers, unions, and communist militants. The book interweaves this vast material with just under 100 oral narratives, 40 of which Fontes personally recorded. This allows him to reconstruct, from the most varied perspectives, a wealth of everyday experience perceived by multiple actors. The result is a new and complex representation of the remarkable migratory movement that shaped Brazil's largest city.Fontes's empirical starting point is São Miguel Paulista, a neighborhood on São Paulo's periphery where factory workers and predominantly northeastern migrants built lives around Nitro Química. Fontes reconstructs the creation of nordestino identity by transcending conventional analytical modes that reduce the study of migration to understanding whatever caused initial immigration and the study of work to analyses of strikes and unions. By focusing on the decision to leave, the journeys themselves, and adaptation, Fontes documents how men and women transformed migratory movement into a strategy based on robust social networks. Fontes describes how such networks forged neighbor relationships that affected everyday factory life and even political parties. He also explores how geographical displacement and the homogenizing racialization of migrant workers as baianos created a sense of belonging to an (imagined) community of origin. But the diversity of departure points continued to inform how these migrants experienced the plurality of experiences in São Paulo city.Fontes then examines worker experience, including realms beyond factory life such as culture, leisure, religion, and politics. In these milieus migrant workers of different provenances both built their identities as nordestinos and forged their own view of Others, such as parties, political leaders, the church, and employers. This allows Fontes to move beyond the notion of neighborhood as his fundamental empirical reference and to focus instead on community. Constructions of difference based on regional origins, gender (his approach to masculinity is particularly strong), and social position allow Fontes to challenge the purported homogeneity of the community of nordestinos created in São Miguel Paulista.In the final two chapters, Fontes examines political and social movements as well as the disputes between the parties that sought to galvanize community support. Here again the book breaks new ground. For instance, it documents the robust membership in the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) among São Miguel Paulista residents and Nitro Química workers following World War II. For the duration of the PCB's legal existence, São Miguel Paulista was home to the largest party cell in São Paulo state. That later São Miguel Paulista's workers voted for the conservative populism of Adhemar de Barros and Jânio Quadros, after the PCB had been declared illegal, had nothing to do with the migrants' clientelist apathy, as has frequently been claimed. Fontes underscores that neighborhood associations and organizations (whether established for mutual assistance, leisure, or the struggle for urbanization) enabled populist expansion in São Miguel Paulista. Local leadership remained central mediators in negotiating the exchange of fulfillment of community interests for political affiliation. This long subterranean organizational tradition allowed new militants and groups to become protagonists in the late 1970s workers' uprising.More than a careful historiographic investigation of São Paulo from the 1940s to the 1960s, Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo is a solid theoretical-methodological construct, mandatory reading for those social scientists and intellectuals of diverse academic fields who wish to better acquaint themselves with Brazil and to investigate the vicissitudes and legacies of those who built the great cities of Latin America.