Volta Redonda em preto e branco: trabalho, desenvolvimentismo e relações raciais (1946-1988)

Abstract

The dissertation has as its motto the implementation of one of the largest steel companies in Latin America, the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN), since its implementation until the 1980s, when the company's biggest strike occurs and in which three workers are murdered by the army. The construction of power plant began 53 years (1941) after the end of the slave regime in Brazil (1888), at the same time that CSN was built, the Brazilian State associated, to the construction and to the country, a strong discourse of formation of the working class and of a new period for Brazil, based on development and evolution. The dissertation is dedicated to analyzing how much of the developmental period was permeated by the discourse of racial democracy, therefore, the use of sources aimed to understand the disparities between an inclusive discourse made for the working class and the structural inequalities based on the race-color that came as inheritance of the disadvantages of the slave period. The analysis efforts conceived CSN in addition to its steel plant, as industrial complex, since iron ore came from Minas Gerais, mineral coal from Santa Catarina and Rio de Janeiro (city of Volta Redonda) happened the production of steel. The construction of the dissertation followed the strangeness of the author in relation to the sources within a chronological order: in the first chapter there are analyzes based on a strong use of images, in the second an analysis of a company journal and how it conceptualized working class and it dealt with the racial issue and in the third, the main theme, was the construction of black movements in Volta Redonda and, for that, the interviews conducted by the author and other researchers were the basic source.