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

This excellent study dissects discourses about regionalism and nationalism in Brazil primarily from the 1930s to the 1950s through a deep study of the state of São Paulo. Weinstein’s sophisticated analysis shows how Brazil’s most economically powerful state fashioned a regional identity built on whiteness, modernity, and economic success in a nation that has privileged a discourse of racial harmony and mixture. A largely frontier society until the mid-nineteenth century, the state (and city) of São Paulo emerged as the “locomotive” of Brazilian economic growth during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a country that imported 3 to 4 million African slaves prior to 1850, Brazil’s southern region (including São Paulo), which was populated largely by European immigrants after 1870, has remained stubbornly white.

Weinstein crafts her book around two major moments, the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and the 1954 comemoration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of the city of São Paulo. São Paulo was the dominant player in national politics from the 1890s to the 1920s, and the state’s failed 1932 revolt attempted to challenge the rise of the centralizing regime of Getúlio Vargas fueled by paulista perceptions that São Paulo’s interests were being sacrificed to those of national government and other states. The first half of the book carefully reconstructs the discourses surrounding the revolt; the second half uses the 1954 commemoration to unpack the discourses regarding the memory of the revolt and its meaning. Newspapers, magazines, the writings of diplomats and travelers, personal archives, photographs, and literature are just a few of the many sources that Weinstein explores in her wide-ranging examination of the many social and political groups involved.

Weinstein argues that “discourses of difference are generative of policies and decisions that consolidate and exacerbate regional inequalities” (2). The emergence and consolidation of a paulista identity that privileged the whiteness and modernity of the south had its flip side—the disparaging of blackness and backwardness in northeastern Brazil, the other major population center. Regional identities, she argues, emerged in concert with national identities in the twentieth century. São Paulo saw itself at the top of a national hierarchy. Weinstein argues, “National identities, in Brazil and elsewhere, will always be imagined through regional referents” (343).

The paulista identity that took shape during the 1930s (galvanized by the failed revolt) was built (ironically) on the image of the racially mixed colonial pathfinder/frontiersman (bandeirante). Despite lip service to racial mixture and harmony, paulista identity emphasized whitening and whiteness. As São Paulo urbanized and industrialized, regional identity became equated with progress and modernity, and an urban middle class. As Weinstein deftly shows, these images were complicated and often contradictory. The paulista woman, for example, was both modern and traditional, and São Paulo was both exceptional and exemplary.

The 1932 revolt crystallized São Paulo as the most successful, modern, and progressive region of Brazil. Even though the 1954 commemoration updated this imagery, it had become harder to make the claim that São Paulo’s success was good for the nation, let alone representative of it. By the 1950s, the paulistas were imagining their state as the Brazil that had turned out right (deu certo). But a white, middle-class, industrial, and modern São Paulo seemed increasingly to be a regional exception rather than a national rule.