In this well-conceived, thoroughly researched, and engagingly written study, the product of a master's thesis at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Thiago Moratelli gives us both a penetrating analysis of the system of contract labor deployed to build a railroad across the wilds of western São Paulo and southern Minas Gerais in the decade before World War I and an often poignant account of the high human toll it took on its thousands of workers.The Noroeste do Brasil was the biggest railroad project of its day, and one of the biggest economic undertakings: an ambitious plan to lay 1,600 kilometers of track through a wilderness of dense forest and fever-ridden swampland, home to jaguars, snakes, swarms of disease-bearing mosquitoes, and a hostile indigenous population. Designed to open this wilderness, not to export lucrative products, it could expect no profits on operation and so sought to squeeze the maximum from construction. It was completed in record time thanks to its rapaciously exploitative contract labor system. Layer upon layer of speculators, contractors, and subcontractors subdivided the tasks, each in turn subcontracting others and squeezing them to make a profit. One of the study's strengths is its careful elucidation of the career paths of chief contractors, the rise of well-connected engineers who secured capital and placed shares in France and Belgium, and the avenues of mobility the system offered a wide variety of subcontractors and middlemen.The cost of freeing the company from operating its own construction crews was maximum exploitation of the workers at the bottom of the system. For the line's thousands of unskilled male laborers, working and living conditions were hellish. They were lured to the job by often fraudulent labor recruiters, first from Rio, then São Paulo, and later, as news of conditions made recruitment more difficult, from other parts of Brazil, as well as Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Paraguay. As voluntary recruitment fell short and became more expensive, workers were rounded up by police from the streets and jails of Rio and São Paulo. This coercive recruitment conveniently complemented well-known contemporary campaigns to cleanse Brazil's cities of beggars, thieves, vagrants, and “agitators” — the last Brazilian-born counterparts of the foreigners deported at the time. Subdivided by their origins and kept in debt servitude to company stores, workers labored in small crews of eight to ten, pressured to complete contracted tasks on time, exhausted by long hours, ill-fed and ill-paid, their pay often delayed. Nor was the company averse to the use of violence: it organized hunts to eliminate the indigenous population, while it took advantage of the threat of its presence to arm overseers and call in police and soldiers to intimidate workers. Often without medical services in a region of endemic disease, many sickened or died. Many others fled, the desperate doing so even on foot across the uncharted wilds. High turnover constantly threatened to put work behind schedule and fueled pressure for new recruits. Tales told by those who fled forced recruiters to search ever farther afield and to pay above the averages offered for work in the cities.The anarchist labor press in São Paulo took up the workers' cause in 1909 and declared a boycott on hiring, while the mainstream press came to the company's defense. The paulista labor federation backed the boycott, and after 1912 stoppages and strikes slowed progress. By 1913 the company was racing to complete the railroad in the face of a widespread strike by workers who had gone six months without pay. The strike stretched into 1914 before workers were finally paid, and it won support from some merchants and federal government agents looking to nullify the company's contract.Moratelli makes effective use of archives in São Paulo and Mato Grosso, drawing on memoirs, company and government documents, labor and mainstream press, and court records. The book is topically organized, with chapters on the contract labor system, labor recruitment, work and living conditions, the labor press, and crime and daily life, yet the story of the company's struggles to secure finances and labor as well as its interaction with workers' efforts to survive emerges clearly. We have many studies of railroad workers, but few focus on those who constructed the lines, and this one adds to our scant knowledge of the internal circulation of workers in Brazil. It is a welcome contribution to research on the social history of work in Brazil, on the settlement of the frontier, and on economic development and social mobility.
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
May 1, 2023
Eileen Boris 
Open Access