Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo

About the Book

Published in 2008 and winner of the 2011 Thomas E. Skidmore Prize, Paulo Fontes's Migration and the Making of Industrial Sao Paulo is a detailed social history of Sao Paulo's extraordinary urban and industrial expansion. Fontes focuses on those migrants who settled in the suburb of Sao Miguel Paulista, which grew from 7,000 residents in the 1940s to over 140,000 two decades later. Reconstructing these migrants' everyday lives within a broad social context, Fontes examines the economic conditions that prompted their migration, their creation of an integrated identity and community, and their efforts to gain worker rights. Fontes challenges the stereotypes of Northeasterners as culturally backward, uneducated, violent, and unreliable, instead seeing them as a resourceful population with considerable social and political resolve. Fontes's investigations into Northeastern life in Sao Miguel Paulista yield a fresh understanding of Sao Paulo's incredible and difficult growth while outlining how a marginalized population exercised its political agency.

Table of Contents:
Foreword / Barbara Weinstein  vii

Acknowledgments  xiii

Introduction  1

1. A Cardboard Suitcase and a Backpack: Northeastern Migration to SÃo Paulo in the 1950s  15

2. Land of the Northeasterners: Migration, Urbanization, and Factory Work in SÃo Miguel Paulista  48

3. Worker Community and Everyday Life: "Becoming Northeastern" in SÃo Paulo  79

4. The Right to Practice Politics: Parties and Political Leadership in SÃo Miguel Paulista  131

5. Workers and the Neighborhood: Social Movements and the Struggle for Autonomy  178

Conclusion  208

Notes  211

Bibliography  249

Index  271

About the Author :
Paulo Fontes is Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences (CPDOC) FundaÇÃo Getulio Vargas – Rio de Janeiro; a researcher at the Brazilian Council of Research and Development (CNPq); and the coeditor of The Country of Football: Politics, Popular Culture, and the Beautiful Game in Brazil.

Barbara Weinstein is Silver Professor of History at New York University and the author of The Color of Modernity: SÃo Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil, also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
"Fontes offers an unprecedented closeup account of Brazil’s most crucial yet understudied mass movements of people: the migration of thousands of impoverished rural northeasterners to the country’s burgeoning industrial centers in the mid-20th century. . . . By centering the complexity of this important working population, Fontes contributes a fresh perspective on the vital processes of urbanization and labor activism that defined and continues to shape this crucial South American powerhouse. Highly recommended." - B. A. Lucero (Choice) "Migration and the Making of Industrial SÃo Paulo offers critical tools for understanding not just the understudied period of migration it takes as its subject. It should encourage us to take seriously the continuation of the cycles of poverty, unemployment, and uneven development-often stratified along lines of class and race-that drive ordinary people to leave behind everything they have ever known in search of something better." - Baird Campbell (Cosmologics) "[T]his is an outstanding book that enriches our understanding of the Latin American working class during the Cold War era.... [T]he masterly incorporation of the voices of the many men and women who worked and lived in SÃo Miguel provides a genuinely bottom-up approach and a rich social history." - Àngela Vergara (Journal of Latin American Studies) "A superb study of migration, adaptation, the interplay of ethnic and class identity, popular politics, and a particular pattern of postwar development in SÃo Paulo. To begin with, the methodology is both solid and creative. . . . Its bottom-up approach, street-level perspective, and multi-faceted analysis enhances our understanding of issues usually discussed in the abstract." - José C. Moya (Canadian Journal of History) "More than a careful historiographic investigation of Sao Paulo from the 1940s to the 1960s, Migration and the Making of Industrial Sao 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." - Nadya Araujo Guimaraes (Hispanic American Historical Review)