Um Estágio na Fábrica: Understanding a Carioca Student's Path to Revolution, 1974–79

In 1977, it was brought to the attention of leaders of the left-wing group Liga Operaria that two of the group’s members had violated the moral code set by their Central Committee. Like many Marxist-Leninist organizations that were active during Brazil’s military dictatorship, the leaders of the Liga Operaria took it upon themselves to try to mold their membership base into a new “revolutionary vanguard” that would ultimately be capable to leading a working-class movement against the military regime. From 1977-1980, the group’s applied an inordinate amount of pressure on rank-and-file members to mimic a romanticized, and overly exaggerated, image of what the Central Committee believed to be working-class moral values. Thus when the leaders learned that Hilda Machado and Ana Nogeira had organized a party in which attendees were smoking marijuana and engaging in sexual promiscuity, the Central Committee decided that Hilda and Ana would have to either leave the group or fazer um estabio na fabria (do an internship in the the factory). Unable to conceive of a life apart from the Liga Operaia, Hilda and Ana doped out of school and began what they viewed to be a process of moral redemption as they learned how to effectively become blue-collar workers in the Greater Sao Paulo Area. The purpose of this paper is to explore the social transition of Hilda Machado, as she went from being a middle-class university student in Rio de Janeiro, to a factory worker in a Sao Paulo automotive plant.