Volta Redonda in Black and White: racial relations, developmentalism and modernization in the "heat of fire" and race (1941-1980).
Race, Class, workers, Volta Redonda, CSN.
This thesis aims to study the relationship between race and class in one of the great industrial centers of the Brazilian postwar period, analyzing the place of this issue in the populist political system. We propose that for the locality of Volta Redonda the ideals of the national developmentalism and the developmentalism used of the racial discourse, becpoming positive and or negativating certain groups. At certain moments the context was exacerbated by issues of a more economic than cultural nature (such as the dismantling of the Steel Family), helping to shape certain identities that blended with that of the working class, such as black workers. In addition, at the time, even though Volta Redonda was a city symbol of a new type (urbanized, planned and filled with the "new" Brazilian worker) and the center of the steel production chain, research shows that other geographic areas were involved both in as in the dissemination of certain ideals. The constant, in addition to the migration process and the transformation of rural workers into urban workers, was that in the production chain of Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) the racial disparity was structural among groups of workers.