Abstract
The new form of labour exploitation was then not simply the result of the coffee growers’ uncontested pursuit of profit under changing technical conditions. The workers’ reactions were crucial in shaping the new productive relationships. But if the workers did play an active role, one should enquire also into how they experienced this process themselves. The issue is not only to document the workers’ presence in history but to capture their own images of their past which forms part of this history.
‘Landowners (solemn)
— The order is to expel those who mistreat the innocent trees!
Colono men (melancholic and tame)
— Rascals those who abused of the innocent fruit, retaining them in the insatiable storehouses, burning them in the clandestine fires of dawn!
Landowners (harsh)
— Foolish are those who talk without knowing the supreme laws of History!
Colono women (irritably, several voices at the same time)
— History! The ignorance of the humbled, the smartness of the scholar!’
Mario de Andrade, Café — Concepção Melodramática (em tres atos) (São Paulo, 1933, 1939, 1942) in M. de Andrade, Poesías Completas (São Paulo, 1966) p. 348
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Notes and References
L. F. Rainho, Os Peões do Grande ABC (Petrópolis, 1980) presents research among unskilled workers employed in the large industries in São Paulo before and during the organised struggle for wage readjustments in accordance with inflation in 1977 and the first large strike of 1978. These unskilled workers labelled themselves peões (peons). In more generic terms, they regarded themselves as operários or trabalhadores (workers). Rainho did not inquire into their perception of the social order at large, yet it seems that, like the rural workers, they conceived of themselves also as the poor pitched against the rich.
Cane workers in Pernambuco perceive the hierarchy of exploitation to which they are subjected in similar terms: ‘we work for three: for ourselves, for the estate and for the contractor’. L. Sigaud, ‘A idealização do passado numa ãrea de plantation’, Contrapunto, II (2) (November 1977) p. 166.
W. Baer, The Brazilian Economy, Growth and Development (New York, 1983) pp. 119, 141.
Little research has been done in Brazil on the political memories of specific social groups. The fear that Vargas inspired in the dominant class and élitist interpretations of his popular appeal to the working classes, generally attributed his populist manipulations to the ignorance of the masses precluding any serious attempts to understand the hold of the Vargas myth over the popular imagination. In an excellent study of electoral attitudes prior to the 1978 national elections in a working-class neighbourhood in the city of São Paulo, Vargas, Janio Quadros and Joao Goulart are all remembered as having favoured the poor and as a consequence having been killed or deposed. Among the urban electorate, however, memories of Quadros and Goulart are stronger than in the countryside presumably because urban areas had more direct and sustained exposure to their electoral campaigns. But they are generally as uninterested in and sceptical about elections as the rural workers. T. Pires do Rio Caldeira, ‘Para que serve o voto?’ (As eleições e o cotidiano na periferia de São Paulo), B. Lamounier (ed.), Voto de Desconfiança, Eleições e Mudança Política no Brasil, 1970–1979 (Petrópolis, 1980) pp. 81–115;
L. T. Pires do Rio Caldeira, A Política dos Outros (São Paulo, 1984).
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© 1988 Verena Stolcke
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Stolcke, V. (1988). Memory and Myth in the Making of Workers’ Identity. In: Coffee Planters, Workers and Wives. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19412-4_5
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