"Arigós" e "peões" na Cidade do Aço: experiências urbanas e fabris, cultura e identidades de classe (Volta Redonda - RJ, 1970-1980)

Abstract

This work is an attempt to articulate the perspective of labor history and urban history as two complementary fields in social history. We have tried to observe how the dynamic Brazilian economy, in which the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (the most important steel mill in the country) has been an important protagonist, since its creation in the 1940´s, related to the ways in which this company engendered its labor force, in clash with workers mobilizations. The most important landmark in this trajectory, after the democratic years (1945-1964), is the fracture caused by the 1964 state coup in the relationship between workers and company. The changes in CSN social policies, as well as the transformations in the economic policies implemented by the new regime, would be subject to a confrontation between different interpretations formulated by distinct agents involved in this process. In our case study, Volta Redonda, we could identify as important actors involved in the social dynamics of those years for example, the military interpreted the impacts of the coup on the working class. In the other extreme of the process, we have examined the workers experience in the town, in decade of 1970 s, looking for the rearticulation of their identitary references, after those changes in the general context, that indicate the new fractures and amalgamations inside the class occurred from that moment on.