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5 books match the query 'São Paulo (Brazil)'

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A Place in Politics

São Paulo, Brazil, from Seigneurial Republicanism to Regionalist Revolt

James P. Woodard

Duke University Press, 2009

A Place in Politics is a thorough reinterpretation of the politics and political culture of the Brazilian state of São Paulo between the 1890s and the 1930s. The world’s foremost coffee-producing region from the outset of this period and home to more than six million people by 1930, São Paulo was an economic and demographic giant. In an era marked by political conflict and dramatic social and cultural change in Brazil, nowhere were the conflicts as intense or changes more dramatic than in São Paulo. The southeastern state was the site of the country’s most important political developments, from the contested presidential campaign of 1909–10 to the massive military revolt of 1924. Drawing on a wide array of source materials, James P. Woodard analyzes these events and the republican political culture that informed them.

Woodard’s fine-grained political history proceeds chronologically from the final years of the nineteenth century, when São Paulo’s leaders enjoyed political preeminence within the federal system codified by the Constitution of 1891, through the mass mobilization of 1931–32, in which São Paulo’s people marched, rioted, and eventually took up arms against the national government in what was to be Brazil’s last great regionalist revolt. In taking to the streets in the name of their state, constitutionalism, and the “civilization” that they identified with both, the people of São Paulo were at once expressing their allegiance to elements of a regionally distinct political culture and converging on a broader, more participatory public sphere that had arisen amid the political conflicts of the preceding decades.

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Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won

Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paolo and Salvador

Butler, Kim D

Rutgers University Press, 1998

Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won explores the ways Afro-Brazilians in two major cities adapted to the new conditions of life after the abolition of slavery and how they confronted limitations placed on their new freedom. The book sets forth new ways of understanding why the abolition of slavery did not yield equitable fruits of citizenship, not only in Brazil, but throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.

Afro-Brazilians in Sao Paulo and Salvador lived out their new freedom in ways that raise issues common to the entire Afro-Atlantic diaspora. In Sao Paulo, they initiated a vocal struggle for inclusion in the creation of the nation's first black civil rights organization and political party, and they appropriated a discriminatory identity that isolated blacks. In contrast, African identity prevaled over black identity in Salvador, where social protest was oriented toward protecting the right of cultural pluralism.

Of all the eras and issues studied in Afro-Brazilian history, post-abolition social and political action has been the most neglected. Butler provides many details of this period for the first time in English and supplements published sources with original oral histories, Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and new state archival documents currently being catalogued in Bahia. Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won sets the Afro-Brazilian experience in a national context as well as situating it within the Afro-Atlantic diaspora through a series of explicit parallels, particularly with Cuba and Jamaica.

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I’ll Samba Someplace Else

A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity, and Displacement in São Paulo

Andrew G. Britt

Duke University Press, 2026

In I’ll Samba Someplace Else, Andrew G. Britt maps the interwoven histories of three of the city of São Paulo’s most iconic ethnoracialized neighborhoods, popularly known as “African” Brasilândia, “Japanese” Liberdade, and “Italian” Bexiga. Following these spaces over the mid-twentieth century through inventive methods of spatial history, archival research, and sustained engagement with African-descendent cultural organizations, Britt shows that these ethnoracialized neighborhoods did not accrue naturally over time. Instead, they were planned, produced, and contested by an array of individuals, from powerful urbanist-politicians and neighborhood businessowners to celebrated samba composers and historic preservationists. The ethnoracialization of these neighborhoods, Britt argues, served paradoxical ends: it reproduced consequential racialized inequities while, simultaneously, bolstering discourses of multicultural harmony. By untangling the paradoxes of ethnoracial space in Brazil’s most populous, diverse, and unequal city, I’ll Samba Someplace Else elucidates how popular ideologies of multiculturalism endure despite persistently high levels of racialized inequity and anti-Black violence in both Brazil and beyond.

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The Edge of the Law

Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo

Jacinto Cuvi

University of Chicago Press, 2025

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.

With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade; others do not. All of them strive to make it—or stay afloat.

In The Edge of the Law, sociologist Jacinto Cuvi introduces us to the world of street vendors and teases out the relationship between the construction of legality and the experience of citizenship. As São Paulo’s city government undertakes a large-scale plan to cancel street vending licenses and evict street vendors, Cuvi reveals how the rights of informal workers can be revoked or withheld and how the lines can be redrawn between work that is “legal” and work that takes place under constant fear of law enforcement. Alongside the mechanics of disenfranchisement, Cuvi captures the lived experience of criminalization, dissecting the distribution of (shallow) rights among vendors who continually reinvent strategies to eke out a living while dealing with the constraints and pressures of informal citizenship at the edge of the law.

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The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria De Jesus

Levine, Robert M

Rutgers University Press, 1998

Carolina Maria de Jesus' book, Quarto de Despejo (The Trash Room), depicted the harsh life of the slums, but it also spoke of the author's pride in her blackness, her high moral standards, and her patriotism. More than a million copies of her diary are believed to have been sold worldwide. Yet many Brazilians refused to believe that someone like de Jesus could have written such a diary, with its complicated words (some of them misused) and often lyrical phrasing as she discussed world events. Doubters prefer to believe the book was either written by Audáulio Dantas, the enterprising newspaper reporter who discovered her, or that Dantas rewrote it so substantially that her book is a fraud. With the cooperation of de Jesus' daughter, recent research shows that although Dantas deleted considerable portions of the diary (as well as a second one), every word was de Jesus'.

But Dantas did "create" a different Carolina from the woman who coped with her harsh life by putting things down on paper. This book sets the record straight by providing detailed translations of de Jesus' unedited diaries and explains why Brazilian elites were motivated to obscure her true personality and present her as something she was not. It is not only about the writer but about Brazil as recorded by her sarcastic pen. The diary entries in this book span from 1958 to 1966, five years beyond text previously known to exist. They show de Jesus as she was, preserving her Joycean stream-of-consciousness language and her pithy characterizations.

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