The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil by Barbara Weinstein (review)

"São Paulo is modernity." This simple declarative sentence currently greets visitors from abroad when they arrive in São Paulo's international airport. Barbara Weinstein, a historian normally identified with labor history, probes the roots of this assertion in her latest book, an inventive and theoretically eclectic venture into cultural history. Referencing a rich array of modern and postmodern theory, Weinstein constructs a fascinating study of São Paulo's 1932 Constitutionalist revolt, its diverse representations, and what it all means in terms of defining the Brazilian nation, especially its underpinnings in racial, gender, and class relations.

The book is divided into two parts and bookended by a provocative introduction and a reflective conclusion. An initial chapter examines elite efforts to form an exceptional identity for São Paulo as Brazil's most "modern" state. In four chapters, part one analyzes the 1932 "war of São Paulo," when state leaders rallied the populace to challenge the provisional government of Getúlio Vargas, who was the former governor of Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul. (In 1930, Vargas led an armed movement to overthrow a constitutionally elected president who was from São Paulo.) The three chapters of the book's second part examine planning, commemorating, and representing São Paulo in 1954, when the fourth centennial of its founding was commemorated. In connection with these celebrations, elites recalled São Paulo's "heroic" 1932 revolt as proof of the state's exceptionalism and thus its right to a national leadership role. Weinstein demonstrates how characterizations of racial superiority colored these events.

A key theme is regional identity. This is strong in Brazil and very present in São Paulo, where a relatively vigorous economy has attracted migrants from all over the world, including poorer regions of the country. These people typically identify themselves according to their state of origin, clustering in communities of fellow migrants from states like Bahia and Minas Gerais. Weinstein charts the development of regionalism in the nineteenth century in an attempt to explain the paulista elite's "imaginative and productive ideological labors" to represent São Paulo state "as not only more prosperous but also more 'progressive'" (28–29) than other regions.

It is precisely the practice of constructing and reinforcing an image of regional chauvinism that links together Weinstein's examination of the 1932 war and São Paulo's centennial. The paulistas routinely contrasted the advances of industrial and financial capitalism in southeastern Brazil as signs of São Paulo's superiority over other regions, especially Northeast Brazil, which was said to be mired in backwardness arising from the region's self-evident African influences. Just as São Paulo went to war to contain these influences in the 1930s, one of the Northeast's world-renowned scholars, Gilberto Freyre, began to celebrate the contributions of "racial mixture" to Brazil's unique "tropical civilization." In both the 1932 war and centennial celebration case studies, Weinstein analyzes considerable documentary evidence to show the dialectical nature of regional identity formation and how the two regions fought to determine national identity.

The unique identity of São Paulo is known as paulistinidade. The book interrogates the "elements [that] made a particular narrative or interpretation viable and meaningful to those involved in its construction and dissemination, and why it resonated with a large public" (31). Successfully demonstrating the racial, class, and gender coherence of paulistinadade's ideologues as predominantly bourgeois white men, Weinstein devotes most of her efforts to answering the second question: how and why did workers, women, and Afro-Brazilians adopt and defend—that is to say, identify with—such elite representations?

To answer this question, Weinstein analyzes the evidence for details as to how and why elite images "elicited strong support from large portions of the regional population" and seeks to "understand the meanings and...