Catholic Internationalism and Urban Labor in Northeastern Brazil and the Amazon, 1950s–60s

This paper considers how the Brazilian Young Catholic Workers (JOC, Juventude Operária Católica) in the Amazon and Northeast shaped visions of Catholic internationalism amid the Cold War. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Brazilian JOC, the branch of Catholic Action that organized urban workers, became one of the most active and largest national branches within the international movement. The visit of JOC founder, the Belgian Father Joseph Cardijn, to the Southern Cone in 1947 helped galvanize the JOC across the region, including in Brazil. Initially, the Brazilian JOC tended to concentrate in the more industrialized center-south and south of the country in states like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Over the next two decades, the JOC expanded across Brazil’s vast territory to smaller cities in the Northeast and Amazon whose economies remained dominated by agricultural exports like cotton and related industrial activities such as textile manufacturing.

Here, I suggest that the spread of the JOC in the Amazon and the Northeast helped push the Brazilian JOC into assuming a sharper critique of structural inequality. While modern Latin American urban history has often focused on the largest metropolises and national capitals, unequal urbanization and industrialization shaped a diverse ecosystem of cities from large agglomerations like Recife to small industrial outposts tied to the export economy in the Amazon. Their inclusion into the national JOC brought new perspectives that shaped its comportment within the transnational Catholic youth workers’ movement. To trace this process, this paper draws on archives from across Brazil and the international JOC archives in Belgium. By connecting local struggles to the ebbs and flows of Catholic internationalism, this paper proposes that Brazilian workers in cities often left out of histories of social struggle in the period played a meaningful role in Catholicism’s Cold War.