XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Writings to a (Future) President: The 1989 Letters to Lula

• In Event: Electoral Politics and Struggles for Representation in Contemporary Brazil

Abstract

In 1989, for the first time in Brazilian history, a member of the working class had a real chance of winning the presidency. Twenty-five years after a military coup had plunged the country into one of its darkest periods, presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva managed to galvanize many of the country’s most progressive sectors and historically marginalized communities. It was as if those who supported their new leader were finally being recognized and on the verge of genuine political representativeness. Lula lost the 1989 election but remained a resounding popular and symbolical political force.
Letters to a (Future) President Lula draws on a collection of previously unexamined letters sent by ordinary citizens to Lula during his first presidential campaign, to which I had privileged access. Penned in colloquial Portuguese, these one hundred and twenty personal and grassroots documents are precious ‘ephemera’ collected by the journalist Ricardo Kotscho, Lula’s press secretary in the 1989 and three other presidential elections. These documents not only afford us the opportunity for recovery and establishment of an archive of significant historical value but also compels us to contemplate the prospect of expanding the interpretative framework applied to such correspondence beyond the boundaries of the epistolary genre. By articulating them within the sphere of ‘insurgent writings,’ a term I have been employing to appraise cultural expressions emanating from peripheral authors in literature and music, it recontextualizes these letters as potent agents of cultural insurgency, offering new perspectives on marginalized voices within the broader historical narrative.

Author

• Rodrigo Simon de Moraes, Princeton University