Abstracts - "The regional diversity of the World War II experience in Brazil"
Flávia de Sá Pedreira, UFRN
The Brazil has never gone to Brasil: cinema, censorship and racism in the Good Neighbour Policy
This research Project aims to discuss, throughout Brazilian historiography framework, some of the limits of the ideology regarding the Good Neighbour Policy.
From 1933 onwards, the Inter-American relationship had highlighted by the replacement of the Big Stick policy by the ideology of the Good Neighbour Policy – i.e., due to a shift from an American army interventionism approach regarding Latin American countries to the adoption of practices of ideological co-optation, persuasion and espionage.
The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) creation, in 1940, had institutionalized these controlling practices, since it was an agency intertwined with the National Defence Council of the USA. Its Communications Division controlled press, radio, cinema, information and propaganda regarding South countries in the continent, which should follow the American Way of Life model. When the United States of America (USA) entered into the II World War, the collaboration with allies made obligatory to maintain the ‘war effort’.
Within this context, Carmen Miranda, Grande Otelo and Orson Welles professional trajectories were part of this Inter-American process effort. Carmen pioneered the divulgation of Brazilian Popular Music into the USA, under her ‘Bahian’ stylish vestment. She added tropical ornaments of an ‘exuberant nature’ that have been gaining space within the Yankees’ imaginaries at that time; whilst Orson Welles emphasized the Brazilian ‘splendid nature’ as a consequence of a ‘big Pan-American movie’, afterwards an invitation from Getúlio Vargas government. Both Carmen and Welles would be two main symbols of the Good Neighbour Policy.
Grande Otelo, in turn, had already acted with Carmen when she still was living in Brazil; Otelo was called by Welles as ‘the best actor in South America’. Otelo worked as the main character in Welles' It’s All True (1942), a film in which intrigue focused on Rio's Carnival, located between slums and Onze Plaza – this place was known as ‘Small Africa’, the birthplace of samba.
Carmen Miranda, besides her tremendous popularity and fame in Brazil and USA, suffered from class and genre prejudice. It happened as a result of being the daughter of Portuguese immigrants. She lived and shared spaces with black, brown and white impoverished samba musicians in Lapa’s bohemian neighbourhoods.
From Rio de Janeiro, Welles travelled to Fortaleza, where he filmed the everyday life of Ceará’s communities of fishermen – scenes that would give light to four jangadeiros’ epic journey regarding the pathway from Ceará until Brazilian Federal Capital at the time (Rio) to claim for their working rights to president Vargas. Welles aimed to insert these images in his new movie. Unfortunately, the reconstitution of the fishermen arrival in Copacabana had a tragic ending: a wave wrecked the boats and the jangadeiros' leadership died drowned.
On the other hand, Orson Welles role in Brazil was against DIP’s official planning – bureau for censorship in Vargas’ dictatorship – plus RKO (Rockefeller enterprise, which had hired Welles). In the end, Welles was fired and had to return to the USA.
Brazilian national identity construction, its symbols (samba music, Carnival and football) were being re-signified by the Estado Novo discursive approach, including a process of exclusion of projects such as the unfinished movie of Orson Welles. The shooting of It’s All True extrapolated not only the oficial planning, but also cinematographic themes of that time.
Maria Verónica Secreto (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
War commodity. Amazon rubber in World War II
With the entry of the United States into the war, an “economic” plan for Latin America was launched. The war had made it difficult to supply rubber produced in Southeast Asia. The Japanese invasion of Malaysia and control over the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) – the two latex producers that had replaced Brazil as the major supplier of rubber since the second decade of the 20th century – worsened the situation. The United States showed particular interest in strengthening ties with Latin America with the aim of developing the exploration of complementary and strategic raw materials for the war. The bases for hemispheric cooperation were defined at the Conference of Foreign Ministers, which took place between January 15 and 28, 1942 in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It consolidated a list of strategic products that the different countries of the continent should produce for trade with the United States. In 1942, the Commodity Credit Corporation was designated to negotiate contracts for many commodities, with the exception of strategic ones such as cinchona and rubber. For these, there would be credits, agencies and special agreements. This power would address the mechanisms of cooperation between Brazil and the United States and the forms of exploitation of rubber in this very special situation.
Patrícia Costa de Alcântara, Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro
Emergency Legislation and the Situation of Axis Workers on the Pages of Labor Journal
Created in 1933, the Magazine of the Labor was a monthly publication that remained in national circulation for subscribers until 1965. It proposed to be a “monthly journal of social legislation”: its project seemed to foresee that, in the following years, the State would govern through countless decrees and laws and that, therefore, it would be important to create a communication vehicle that could accompany this process of normative evolution. As Brazilian law schools did not yet have subjects focused on what would become the area of Labor Law, in a short time the periodical became an important space for sociability and training of professionals who would work in a branch of justice that was under construction. . In addition to publishing and debating new laws, jurisprudence and opinions originating from different regions of Brazil, the magazine published national and international doctrinal texts on state intervention in economic, social and labor relations in different countries. The numbers published between the years 1939 and 1945 demonstrate that this dialogue between internal and external events needed to include the adversities brought by the Second World War to the field of work. While ongoing domestic measures significantly altered the experiences of most workers, Brazil positioned itself in the face of conflict. “Emergency legislation” was drafted while some labor rights were suspended as a result of the confrontation. Workers who were not called up for military services were asked to act as “production soldiers” on the internal front, marked by the presence of foreigners who began to represent a potential danger to national security. Although texts on the regularization of foreign workers or on “nationalization of work” were present in the magazine since the first issue, from 1942 onwards Germans, Italians and Japanese were the subject of specific debates and regulations. The work analyzes the changes that the belligerent context caused in the regulations and content of publications relating to work and the presence of immigrants in the country. To this end, texts, opinions and laws on the subject published by the magazine over these six years were selected and analyzed. From the study it is possible to identify aspects of how events were instrumentalized in order to reconfigure representations of ethnicity and national identity according to the interests of different groups, including the State and Brazilian elites.