Sugar Workers, Planters, Industrialists and Their Wives in São Paulo, 1880–1950

This paper looks at family strategies for upward mobility among humble and elite segments of São Paulo’s sugar industry. Many emancipated slaves hoped to protect wives and daughters from work in the cane fields. This was the general rule for former slaves in the historically-important sugar regions of Northeastern Brazil and Campos, Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s São Paulo region, in contrast, witnessed different ethnic and gendered patterns. There, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the booming coffee industry attracted large numbers of immigrant families. Many opted to grow sugar-cane, manioc, beans, and other crops alongside their coffee trees, and wives and daughters joined their husbands, fathers, and brothers working in these fields to accumulate as much wealth as possible through salaries and the sale of subsistence produce in local markets. The Institute of Sugar and Alcohol’s 1940s issues of the Brasil Açucareiro magazine featured photographs of strong female women with European-sounding last names winning contests for fastest and strongest cane-cutter in Southern Brazil that were reminiscent of women in the 1930s Soviet Union or WWII United States. By pooling the wages of wives, daughters, sons, and husbands, many immigrant families managed to buy their own coffee or sugar-cane farms. Several families who made it to cane farmer status, as in the Ometto Brothers, subsequently married into industrialist families like the Dedini Group, and this allowed for a fusion of what sociologists Maurice Zeitlin and Richard Ratcliff called “Landlords and Capitalists” (in their 1988 book with that title and the subtitle: the Dominant Class of Chile). When the Ometto Brothers (and sisters) combined their agricultural knowledge of cane with the Dedini family’s know-how for sugar-factory machinery, São Paulo began its trajectory to becoming the most important sugar-producing region of Brazil.