This book recasts conventional narratives of the Cold War in Brazil and the 1964 coup through its examination of revolutionary social and cultural movements in the Northeastern region in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, hundreds of thousands of rural men and women protested in the streets, on the plantations, and in the courtrooms for land, labor, and citizenship rights. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the strength of the rural social movements raised hopes and fears about the potential for social revolution in Brazil. Rural social movements, Conservative landowners, politicians, ... More

This book recasts conventional narratives of the Cold War in Brazil and the 1964 coup through its examination of revolutionary social and cultural movements in the Northeastern region in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, hundreds of thousands of rural men and women protested in the streets, on the plantations, and in the courtrooms for land, labor, and citizenship rights. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the strength of the rural social movements raised hopes and fears about the potential for social revolution in Brazil. Rural social movements, Conservative landowners, politicians, and filmmakers debated agrarian reform in a language of regional historical symbols and themes. The repetition of such symbols and themes in popular culture and political discourse drew from the trope of o Nordeste, defining the region and its people as the backwards, impoverished, fatalistic, violent, traditional Other in contrast to the modern, urban Brazilian nation. Even if rural social movements and radical filmmakers attempted to rework and assert new meanings of o Nordeste, often the images they produced served to further entrench assumptions and stereotypes of the region and its people. This book shows how such narratives and stereotypes were deliberately deployed as political tools to empower certain groups in Brazilian society while disenfranchising others. It reveals how discriminatory assumptions about rural Northeasterners as impoverished, non-modern victims and violent fanatics legitimized the state persecution of rural social movements, provided a rationale for the military coup and shaped the way Cold War history has been told.