Paulo Fontes

‘With a cardboard suitcase in my hand and a pannier on my back’: workers and Northeastern migrations in the 1950s in São Paulo, Brazil

The little village of Caem, municipality of Jacobina, in the interior of the state of Bahia, 1947, and an anxious Artur Pinto de Oliveira says farewell to his family and leaves behind the house and the smallholding where he has spent the first seventeen years of his life. The youngster, full of hopes for a better life and with the ‘dream of studying’ in his mind, had been infected by the ‘fever of the age’: São Paulo. ‘At that time everyone in the Northeast dreamed of coming to São Paulo. São Paulo had become heaven, it was Paradise,’ he remembers fifty years later. Artur was following in the footsteps of his elder brother who had moved there some months before and was already engaged as a worker in the Nitro Quı́mica Brasileira company. A flurried exchange of correspondence between him and the family had broken down their father’s reluctance to allow his other son to follow him to São Paulo. On that day in the late 1940s Artur put all his scant belongings together and set out on a long journey. The journey was long indeed and exhausting. From the municipal centre, Jacobina, he caught a train to Juazeiro. There he crossed the river to the neighbouring city of Petrolina in the state of Pernambuco, bought the cheapest ticket there was and boarded the steamship that went up the São Francisco River as far as the city of Pirapora in the state of Minas Gerais. It was a voyage of fifteen long days. This was the dry season in the Northeast, which meant that the ship had to travel slowly so as not to run aground on the sandbanks in the river. Together with hundreds of other migrants, Artur squeezed himself into the second-class section in the hold. He compared that with ‘being in a slave ship carrying African slaves. You couldn’t see anything. Full of people, mixed together any old how, darkness, bad smells . . . ’ The journey would have been even worse had Artur not made friends with ‘a gentleman from Goiás, a well-educated person, very polite and communicative’ and spent the days discussing with him ‘why the Northeast was so terribly poor and people from all over it migrated to other