Class and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century São Paulo

São Paulo (whether the city or the state) had been a location of little importance in the decades immediately following Brazilian independence.  However, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, São Paulo was widely regarded as Brazil’s most powerful economic region, and would soon assume political preeminence as well.  While São Paulo’s initial “divergence” from the previously dominant regions around Rio de Janeiro and the lower Northeast could be ascribed to fortuitous circumstances, the consolidation of its position first as Brazil’s leading agricultural zone, and then as its first major industrial center, can be attributed to the formation of an elite that was unusually effective in advancing regional interests.  In this paper, I examine the formation of two different but overlapping class identities in São Paulo, and the way in which transnational networks and exchanges allowed these segments of the elite to distinguish themselves from the traditional agrarian “oligarchies” (both in São Paulo and in other regions of Brazil) they associated with political and economic backwardness.  I discuss the formation of a self-conscious industrial bourgeoisie around the figure of Roberto Simonsen; these industrialists and industrial-engineers based their claims to authority both in the factory and in the political sphere on their mastery of new rationalizing techniques—what Antonio Gramsci dubbed “Americanism”—that would heighten productivity and advance the national welfare.  The other is a more diverse group of journalists, politicians, and intellectuals who projected a “modern” middle-class sensibility, and formed the core of the regionalist movement that, in 1932, mobilized a broad segment of the population of São Paulo in bloody civil war against the authoritarian regime of Getúlio Vargas.  In both cases, I demonstrate that transnational connections were crucial to the construction of identities that positioned São Paulo as the center of whiteness and modernity in twentieth-century Brazil.