Cars and Trucks and Things that Went: Automobiles and the History of 20th-Century Brazil

Few technologies or artifacts of material culture loom as large in twentieth-century Brazilian history as automotive cars and trucks. Like the railway locomotive in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, the very image of the automobile stood as metonym for progress—technological, material, even civilizational. In the middle of the twentieth century, the building of a domestic automotive industry was, for many Brazilians, emblematic of their country’s arrival in the modern world, its “passport to modernity,” in Glauco Arbix and Mauro Zilbovicius’s words. In 1970, Minister of Finance Delfim Netto argued that the diversification of passenger-car manufacturing showed that Brazil had achieved the “grown-up market of any civilized nation.” Through the 1980s and 1990s, automobile ownership and automotive sport (in the form of Formula One racing) were national aspirations and passions, respectively. In a work conceived in the latter decade, Joel Wolfe took an ambitious first stab at charting the total impact of “automobility” (his preferred term) in Brazil over the course of the previous century. When published in 2010, as Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity, it joined a larger body of work on the subject. Over the dozen years since then, newer scholarship and—perhaps more importantly—developments outside of the academy have combined to offer new perspectives on the place of the automobile in the history of twentieth-century Brazil. An interpretation informed by those new perspectives—from historiography, political economy, urbanism, environmental science, and events since 2010—will be offered.