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68 chapter three The Port and the City of Santos A Century-Long Duality fernando teixeira da silva The port is the driving force of this city. The city will die if one day the port dies. It dies, and there will be nothing else. —Interview with B, former employee of the port administration On the eve of World War I, the city of Santos was known as the “Brazilian Barcelona” because of the uncontested hegemony of anarchists in the local labor movement. Between World War II and the military coup in 1964, Santos became known as the “Brazilian Moscow” and its harbor as the “Red Port” because of the strong presence of Communists in unions and the city’s politics. The port workers took pride in these epithets. They were the bedrock of Santos’s working class with an emblematic influence on national politics. The special connection between port and city played an important role in the emergence of this strong labor movement between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1960s. The monopoly power and intransigence of the Companhia Docas de Santos (cds; Santos Docks Company), in control of most port operations, strengthened the ties of solidarity among the workers and gained support for their strike movements among the people of Santos. The employees of cds, and in particular the stevedores, forged a culture of work that shaped city life and allowed for the creation of institutions to unite different categories of workers.1 The Santos Docks Company determined the economic fate of the city, but Santos was no classic company town. It was neither a planned community nor in an isolated location. The company never introduced the paternalist welfare programs so characteristic of company towns, in which the community appears as an appendix to the company. Santos was never—strictly speaking— The Port and City of Santos • 69 a single-industry town with a “system of domination” powerful enough to control the workers’ social relations both in the port and the urban space beyond. Still, Santos is best understood as a city dependent on one industry, as its local economy and its labor market were a function of the port. The economic power relations in Santos thus resembled those of classic company towns, but the city’s history of urban development did not. The case of Santos highlights that the classic company town constitutes an extreme form of an urbanity where the economic power relations between a dominant company and its workers shape social life. Since the late nineteenth century, the Santos Docks Company pressured the city and its people to submit to the logic of the port as a capitalist enterprise. It tried to gain control over all loading and unloading operations and to “immobilize ” the labor force by eliminating casual work, hoping to make port operations more efficient. The company’s strategy violated the workers’ sense of freedom and independence, their notion that they were “workers without bosses” for lack of a permanent employment relationship. The company portrayed casual labor as the cause for the workers’ uprootedness and their supposed disregard for social institutions such as family, regular work, and a steady home. It blamed casual work for moral ills such as a lack of discipline, urban violence, alcoholism , and worker radicalism. Thus, the fight against casual work had a moral dimension, even if the Santos Docks Company did not pursue a broader agenda of moral reforms.2 If successful, the company’s campaign to eliminate casual work would have diminished the daily presence of the port workers in the city. The workers resisted this attack on their independence, however, and the stevedores in particular maintained a strong presence in the urban space that connected house, street, and port. the port and the city Santos was eminently a port city with characteristics unlike most cities historians of labor have studied closely. Even more than for other Brazilian coastal cities, the Santos port was the engine of the local economy and its principal source of employment. Maritime commerce shaped the urban, economic, and demographic development of the city since the late nineteenth century. Santos had few large factories and some smaller industrial firms in food processing and civil construction. They produced for a city in rapid expansion whose economy closely followed the impulses from the port.3 From 1850 onward, the extraordinary advance of coffee cultivation in the interior of São Paulo integrated the port into the world economy, turning it into a key...

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