Banca de DEFESA: PATRÍCIA COSTA DE ALCÂNTARA

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : PATRÍCIA COSTA DE ALCÂNTARA
DATE: 31/07/2025
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: videoconferência
TITLE:

From a coveted workforce to “subjects of the Axis”. Class relations and ethnical conflicts
in Belo Horizonte during the Second World War. (1939-1945)

KEY WORDS:

World War II. Labor Justice. Class conflicts. Ethnicity.

PAGES: 322
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: História
SUBÁREA: História do Brasil
SUMMARY:

National and international events that marked the first decades of the 20th century
demanded greater government interference in dealing with social and labor issues, with
the year of 1942 being a period of intensification of policies of rapprochement between
the State and workers in Brazil, lined, above all, on the discourse of collaboration
between the classes. Supported by a nationalist discourse of valorization and protection
of national workers, since coming to the presidency, the government of Getúlio Vargas
has intensified and developed new restrictive measures related to the entry and stay of
foreigners in the country. By examining laws, decrees and regulations on the entry, work
and stay of foreigners in Brazil; of texts published by Revista do Trabalho and the
newspaper Estado de Minas between 1939 and 1945; and of individual labor lawsuits
initiated in the Conciliation and Judgment Courts of Belo Horizonte during the same
period, the research demonstrates how Brazil's participation in the Second World War
strengthened the discourse of social peace between the classes, reinforced the opposition
between foreign and Brazilian workers and shook, to an unprecedented degree, the
status of immigrants previously considered superior, technically and racially. It
demonstrates how the war effort and the Estado Novo’s national mobilization policy
impacted labor relations in the city; how national and foreign workers and employers
mobilized identity, nationalism, and ethnicity according to their class interests; and how
the Labor Court, which was being constructed and consolidated at that time,
experienced the situation. While immigrants and their descendants had to develop
strategies to deal with the inhospitable situation, Brazilian workers made use of the
belligerent context to obtain benefits, through the intensification of the valorization of
national labor and the newly acquired status of “soldiers of production”. This work joins
a set of studies that seek to highlight how the struggles waged in the institutional field,
together with other strategies and extrajudicial actions, were part of the political
formation of workers as a class. As a specific contribution, it highlight the way in which
war nationalism and the opposition between national and foreign workers added to this
construction process in Brazil, since they contributed to the development of the notion
of the “Brazilian working class” and shook hegemonic conceptions about ethnic-racial
hierarchies.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Externo à Instituição - FERNANDO TEIXEIRA DA SILVA - UNICAMP
Presidente - 1308466 - ALEXANDRE FORTES
Interno - 1775134 - FABIO KOIFMAN
Externo à Instituição - FELIPE AUGUSTO DOS SANTOS RIBEIRO - UESPI
Externa à Instituição - ISABELLE CRISTINA DA SILVA PIRES - OUTRO