Brazil’s fascination with cars first began with the early arrival of foreign cars in the 1890s and 1900s. Thereafter, the desire to adopt this particular form of transportation became an obsession of policymakers, elites, and popular culture alike. Over the course of the next century, Brazil’s adoption and adaptation of the car profoundly transformed the country and its people. This panel explores the varied ways that the car reached into every aspect of Brazilian life.

This panel will explore the connections between the automobile and Brazilian society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Traditional studies of cars have focused on the US and Europe but given little attention to the development of a global car culture outside western markets. However, a rich Brazilian car history illuminates the complexity of the car’s global impact. Brazil’s size and lack of domestic makers provided an ideal platform for global car manufacturers to compete for market share, but Brazilian policymakers focused their efforts on creating a domestic car industry as part of a path to becoming a “modern” country. As a country without large oil reserves for much of the 20^th century, Brazil’s unique investment in sugar-based ethanol also influenced the trajectory of its automotive industry. From the government’s strategic introduction of a domestic automobile industry in the 1950s through its unique launch of ethanol-fueled vehicles in the 1980s to the massive expansion of car ownership in the 1990s and the 2000s, these papers will engage an evolving historiography on Brazilian cars.

Through discussion of how Brazil transformed its environmental, cultural, political, and social structure to become a car country in the 20th century, this panel will advance and challenge some of the major debates about national development, modernization, technological innovation, urbanization and environmentalism that pervade Brazilian historiographical debates. With automobiles and auto-ideas at the center of panelists' historical analysis, members of the Conference on Latin American History and general AHA members alike will find important global and transnational connections to enduring debates about the role of the state, development, technology, environmental degradation, and climate change that reach far beyond Brazilian studies with ongoing policy implications.