Black press and labor press: experiences and conflicts between the workers in the First Republic at São Paulo (1915-1930)

Abstract

Based on the analysis of newspapers of the labor press (A Plebe) and the black press (O Clarim da Alvorada), the present research seeks to identify the experiences, political actions and conflicts between different groups of workers in São Paulo during the immediate post-abolition: blacks and immigrants and their descendants. Although within the same context, living in spaces of the same city and in positions of subalternity, blacks and immigrants occupied different status of work and experienced different situations. These were inserted in the most dynamic sectors of the incipient industrialization of São Paulo, while the former ran into difficulties and prejudices to enter the formal labor market and occupied more precarious jobs. This differentiation reflected different projects of struggle, identities and objectives among these workers, directly announced through the presses analyzed. While immigrants and factory workers sought a class-based union and a project to confront bourgeois society in the traditional model of the European left; the black people faced particular problems, linked to racial inequality and discrimination, fighting for equal rights and social integration. In their speeches, eventually, the newspapers dialogued and confronted each other, a fact that suggests a tense and conflicting relationship between these workers, which contributed to the making of a heterogeneous and fragmented class. In this research we consider an extended notion of the working class, as it was thought since authors of the English Social History, not restricted to workers of factories or unions. (AU)