“Fazendo parecer que caminhamos para uma democracia tipo americana...”: colonialismo, classe operária e o jornal A Alvorada de Pelotas

Abstract

The present master's research involves the discussion of the idea of the working class and the black movement and how these causes were related to each other, in the context of the city of Pelotas in the post Estado Novo period. The focus of the study is on the newspaper A Alvorada, a weekly periodical of black and labor causes, which circulated in Pelotas between 1907 and 1965, restricting it to the period 1945-57, trying to observe how this newspaper was included in this discussion, and to what extent it was limited by context. The choice of this time delimitation for the research is due to the fact that 1945 was the year of the end of the Estado Novo, which marked great changes in the labor field, and ending in 1957 because we believe that this way we formed a sufficiently skillful time for the study. Thus, thinking about the concept of the labor movement in the post-slavery period, we will discuss the movement of the black working class under the debate called by Sidney Chalhoub the “historiographical Berlin wall”, the unbridgeable division between post-slavery and labor studies, summarized by the absence of consideration of color within analyzes of the working class. Also thinking about the anti-colonialist discussions that took place outside Brazil – mainly in the French colonies – contemporaneously with the period studied, we intend to observe to what extent the discourses of anti-colonialist theorists and revolutionaries can approach the claims made explicit in A Alvorada, and how we can discuss the concept of colonialist ideology in already republican Brazil.