"WE ARE ALL EQUAL": Nacional Developmentalism, Economic Modernization and Racial Segregation at Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (1963-1973).
National developmentalism; Racial segregation; Working class; Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional; Military dictatorship
This research, analyzing the first half of the period of the Military Dictatorship, aims to describe and contextualize how the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional promoted with its workers the ideals of national development and modernization of the economy, associating them with the idea that there would be a racial democracy in the company, at the same time that it reproduced within it spheres of social stratification and inequality. Most research from the perspective of the Social History of work carried out on Volta Redonda, during the military dictatorship, focus on the late 1970s and 1980s.
This results in less contextualization of the military's abuses of power against workers of the city, giving the impression of a certain passivity of the workers. There are few works that analyze the strategies that the military, through the CSN, used in order to instrumentalize the workers' ideological formation. Given this still hegemonic historiographical framework, I intend to nuance these points of view, proposing a new interpretation for the period from the perspective of the social history of work, particularly with regard to the connections between the racial and class question.