XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

‘Cada babá pode ser uma subversiva:’ The grammars of race, gender, class in the (in)formalizing politics of domestic service in mid-twentieth century Brazil

• In Event: Classe, Raça e Política no Brasil (décadas de 1920-1970)

Abstract

The study of Black women’s historical activities has, understandably, focused on their subjugation and freedom strategies under slavery and the first decades after Leis Rio Branco (1871) and Áurea (1888). As Petrônio Domingues and Giovana Xavier have stated, histories of Black women unmoored from slavery and post-abolition (after 1930) remain small, beset by organizational logics in national and large state archives that often “disappear” or make illegible Black women’s existence. Since the early 2000s, however, increasing demand for Black centered narratives of Brazil’s history, or what George Reid Andrews has called “the new Black Brazilian history,” has manifested profound changes in access. This is in part due to the creation and wider circulation of Black archives and collections, digitization, oral history, and creative use of non-textual primary sources.

This presentation utilizes the labor history of domestic workers, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, to make legible Black women’s labor organizing and political strategies as a historical process. I explore a period in the Brazilian press where, in the shadow of increasing calls for agrarian reform, journalists dedicated more by-lines to the question of regulating domestic labor. Not only did newspapers highlight Black women at the frontlines of advocacy be it in local arenas or the halls of Planalto, but they also highlighted an increasing hostility from white housewives. By utilizing methodological reading practices from Black Brazilian and Brazilianist feminist scholars alike, my presentation sheds light on approaches for recovering Black women’s protagonism against the weight of slavery’s afterlives.

Author

• Cassie Osei, Bucknell University