XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Celebrating São Paulo: Inclusions and Exclusions in the 1954 IV Centenário Commemorations

• In Event: Rethinking Racial Hierarchies: Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Built Environment in São Paulo (SESSION II)

Abstract

By the early 1950s, the state of São Paulo had firmly established its status as Brazil’s economic
engine, expanding its dominant role in the most “modern” sectors of the Brazilian economy
despite efforts by the federal government to address stark geographic inequalities. Eager to
celebrate their region’s prosperity and modernity (and implicitly, its whiteness), segments of the
paulista political and economic elites began planning an elaborate set of festivities and
installations to commemorate the 400 th anniversary of the founding of the city of São Paulo in
1954. Aside from numerous ephemeral events, such as a nocturnal shower of “silver” triangles
on the 9 th of July (the date to commemorate São Paulo’s failed uprising against the Vargas
regime in 1932), the organizing commission sponsored or collaborated with several projects that
would have a lasting impact on the contours of the city of São Paulo, and would install
monuments that, then as now, often provoked considerable controversy. In this paper, I will
address the impact of the IV Centenário on São Paulo’s built environment, and in what ways
these projects reveal assumptions and tensions around the question of who could be considered a
genuine “paulistano.” In particular, I will discuss the efforts by various immigrant-ethnic groups
to be incorporated into the festivities, the marginalization of paulistanos of African descent
(specifically with regard to the inauguration of the monument to the “Black Mother/Mãe Preta”),
and the near-complete invisibility of the hundreds of thousands of nordestino migrants who had
recently made São Paulo their adopted regional home.

Author

• Barbara Weinstein, New York University