In a scene in Viramundo, a famous 1965 documentary directed by Geraldo Sarno, one of the north-eastern migrants interviewed tells enthusiastically of his life as an industrial worker in the city of São Paulo. “Inside my house”, he says:
I have a TV. I have a refrigerator. […] I like São Paulo very much. I really love these people; they're a people who look toward the future. I don't consider myself a nordestino, but rather a paulista, and I intend to spend my life here. I will not return to the north-east, because if I went back there, I would be going backwards. This is why I'm in São Paulo and want to move forward.
In April 2016, during the infamous session of the Brazilian Congress that opened impeachment proceedings against the then President Dilma Rousseff, federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right politician who two years later would be elected president, declared his vote in favor of removing Dilma Rousseff. Wrapped in the flag of the state of São Paulo, the younger Bolsonaro shouted, “For the people of São Paulo in the streets with the spirit of the revolutionaries of 1932!” He was referring to the so-called Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, a short civil war that São Paulo fought and lost to the central government of Getúlio Vargas.
Separated by decades and involving disparate characters, these two episodes illustrate, in very different ways, the creation and endurance of a proud regional identity among paulistas, that is, inhabitants of São Paulo, Brazil's wealthiest and most powerful state. This is the central theme of Barbara Weinstein's new book, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil.
The themes of Brazilian national and regional identities have long fascinated scholars. Both Brazilian intellectuals and foreigners interested in the country have analyzed the conflictive processes of nation building in a continent-size territory, riven by vast social, racial, and regional divides. Barbara Weinstein engages this tradition in a way that is both innovative and inspiring. One of the United States’ most accomplished specialists in Brazilian history, the New York University professor and former President of the American Historical Association had already written about the “regional question” at the start of her career, in her fascinating study of the Amazonian rubber boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After years studying labor history and the behavior and thought of industrial elites in São Paulo, in The Color of Modernity Weinstein takes up the emblematic case of the formation of paulista identity to convincingly demonstrate how distinctions based on race, region, gender, and class played a key role in shaping the nation's self-image and quest for “modernity” throughout the twentieth century.
The coffee economy transformed São Paulo into the most developed region of Brazil, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. A newly wealthy local elite invested on a massive scale in the subsidized immigration of Europeans (especially Italians), seeking a substitute for enslaved African labor on the coffee plantations. They also provided material support for an incipient industrialization that would soon turn São Paulo into the country's manufacturing capital. Politically, they championed an oligarchical, conservative liberalism that would dominate Brazil's republican government until the end of the 1920s. Even after they lost political power at the federal level in the wake of the rise of Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s, the paulistas would retain their economic supremacy. After World War II, the state would become the core of one of the world's most successful economies based on import substitution industrialization, and, more recently, Latin America's foremost financial center.
All this might was firmly anchored in a narrative of success, entrepreneurialism, and local exceptionalism. The image of São Paulo as the locomotive pulling the country's other train cars (regions) remains a common-sense belief among the state's natives to this day. This sense of economic superiority has served as a vital element in the construction of paulista regional identity. But Barbara Weinstein moves beyond this in her explanation. In her telling, this identity is inseparable from a process of racialization that linked region with modernity.
Inspired by Edward Said's concept of orientalism, the cultural studies of Stuart Hall, and the postcolonial theories of authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Weinstein convincingly argues for the importance of discourses of difference in the construction of paulista identity. In this way, the modernity that enabled São Paulo's progress was intimately tied to the paulistas’ whiteness. The other to which it was opposed was located in the north-east of the country, synonymous with backwardness, and intrinsically connected to the mixed-race and black nature of its population.
In its first chapter, The Color of Modernity explores the role of São Paulo's intellectuals, journalists, and politicians, particularly in the 1920s, in the construction of a discourse that linked notions of modernity with those of paulista superiority. To accomplish this, it was necessary to reinvent the tradition of the bandeirante, a figure from São Paulo's colonial past. Leaders of expeditions that penetrated Brazil's hinterland in search of precious metals and/or to capture indigenous people to be sold as slaves, the bandeirantes were rehabilitated during this period as true entrepreneurs with an enormous capacity for hard work and industry. Of mixed blood, for the most part, the bandeirantes, Weinstein argues, were “whitened” in literature, historical studies, iconography, and in forms of artistic expression in general. In this way, they were transformed into the founding myths of supposed paulista superiority. Ever since, the state of São Paulo has been nicknamed “Land of the Bandeirantes”.
In what follows, the book is divided into two sections of four chapters each. Here, Weinstein explores elements of the two defining events in the construction of paulista identity in the twentieth century. First, the 1932 regional uprising known as the Constitutionalist Revolution. Second, the 1954 commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the city of São Paulo's founding. Her meticulous research into these two events enables the author to delve deeply into these privileged moments of the elaboration and circulation of representations of “paulista-ness”. In addition to analyzing an enormous quantity of historiographic works, she uses an impressive range of sources and materials, including films; literary, theatrical, iconographic, memorialistic works; and oral history interviews and diplomatic documents.
Conscious of the risks that would result from an analysis based excessively on local elites’ discourses, narratives, and representations, Weinstein creatively seasons a culturalist approach with the techniques and methodologies of social history. Deserving of special mention is the book's innovative critical examination of the role of the middle classes in both events. In particular, The Color of Modernity argues that the Constitutionalist Revolution was fundamental for defining the contours and characteristics of what would become the paulista middle class. In addition, Weinstein offers powerful evidence of the active and engaged participation of workers, women, and even sectors of the black movement, who saw in the “Revolution” an opportunity to gain acceptance and respectability in paulista society.
Situated at the intersection of social, cultural, and intellectual history, The Color of Modernity overturns the dualist logic of various theories of modernization. By arguing for the historicization of the very idea of “region”, the book denaturalizes the imaginary surrounding regional identities and demonstrates how it does not simply oppose itself to, but is often linked with, the construction of national identities. Barbara Weinstein's brilliant book offers an excellent reminder to historians that national and global history are only possible when they take seriously the intricate processes of the social and cultural construction of the place we call “region”.
