São Paulo

Introduction

With almost twelve million inhabitants, São Paulo today ranks among the most populous cities in the world. Its dramatic urbanization over the course of the 20th century has defined not only the city’s history but also scholarship about the city. Long touted by many Paulistanos—the city’s residents—as exceptional within Brazil and as a model for the nation, São Paulo has over the years earned a variety of identities: at the same time that it has been praised as an immigrant city, a working city, a modern city, even an “artistic capital,” São Paulo has also been censured for its chaos, violence, and heightened income inequality. All of these labels have shaped and continue to shape interpretations of the city’s development. Because any attempt to compress the literature about a Brazilian city into a bibliography can make no attempt at comprehensiveness, what follows is an informed but selective guide. We have chosen to organize this guide according to the national periodization widely accepted by historians of Brazil and defined by the country’s political institutions: the colonial era (from the arrival of the Portuguese to independence in 1822), the empire (1822–1889), the Old Republic (1889–1930), the first Vargas era (1930–1945), the democratic era (1945–1964), the military dictatorship (1964–1985), and the New Republic (1985–). From a Jesuit mission to a frontier town, from a sleepy “academic village” to the epicenter of labor and political upheavals, from an entrepôt between coffee plantations and port to an industrial megalopolis and global city, São Paulo has rapidly transformed over the past century and a half in terms of its economy, demographics, built environment, and culture. Along with São Paulo’s skyscrapers and global clout, scholarship on the city has grown considerably in the past three decades. This is especially true within the English-speaking academy, where historians of urban Brazil have historically been more attentive to the national capital, Rio de Janeiro. In this bibliography, we include works from both Brazil and “Brazilianistas” (scholars of Brazil based outside of the country) as evidence of the productive intellectual outcome of an important transnational, public and private, professional network.

General Overviews

São Paulo’s four hundredth anniversary in 1954 was a landmark moment for urban analysis. It was at this time that both Bruno 1954 and Morse 1958 reinterpreted the first histories of the city, which had been grounded in turn-of-the-century regional discourse, using a language of hope and development. The outcome was what are now regarded as the “classic” works on São Paulo’s urban evolution. Since then, few historians have attempted to explain the entirety of São Paulo’s development, although several, as in the case of Andrews 1991 and Alberto 2011, have adopted an extended timeframe for a more focused social analysis and, in Alberto’s case, also a comparative analysis. In 2004, for the city’s 450th anniversary, Porta 2004 and Szmrecsányi 2004 resumed Bruno’s and Morse’s tradition through collective effort, bringing new scholarship to the historiographic forum in the form of edited volumes. The São Paulo Symposium (2013) continued in that vein, gathering together scholars from both the United States and Brazil to offer new perspectives on the city and its history as well as resources for further study. Several resource guides for researching São Paulo have been published in paper form over the last few decades, and Porta 1998 is perhaps the most comprehensive.

Alberto, Paulina L. Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
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Building on Andrews 1991 and Butler 1998 (cited under the City of the Old Republic (1889–1930)), compares the development of a self-identified, politically active black intellectual community in São Paulo with its counterparts in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. By contextualizing each group within its city, explains the distinct ways in which each contributed to ideas of racial democracy and equality.
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Andrews, George Reid. Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1998. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
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Analyzes the place of Afro-Brazilians and race in São Paulo’s post-slavery, industrializing workforce. Most notably examines industrial personnel records, among other records, to argue that extralegal racial barriers––workplace discrimination and a lack of opportunity for skill development––continued to hinder black Brazilians’ social mobility even in the changing economy.
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Bruno, Ernani Silva. História e tradições da cidade de São Paulo. 3 vols. São Paulo, Brazil: Livraria José Olympio, 1954.
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Written by a municipal officer, the three books mix historical data and social analysis. Despite the text’s colloquial tone, the rigorous research conducted for more than forty years by the author transformed the trilogy into a perceptive and frequently cited guide to the city’s history.
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Morse, Richard. From Community to Metropolis: A Biography of São Paulo, Brazil. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1958.
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Based on his 1947–1948 fieldwork, offers a long-duree analysis of the city’s development through the lens of generations of intellectuals, entrepreneurs, technocrats, and urban planners. Pays particular attention to the relation between urbanization and changing perceptions of São Paulo.
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Porta, Paula, ed. Guia dos Documentos Históricos na Cidade de São Paulo, 1554–1954. São Paulo, Brazil: HUCITEC/NEPS, 1998.
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This book is a research guide for the study of São Paulo City from multiple perspectives and for multiple methodologies. Includes information about archives, libraries, funds, institutions and schools that hold sources for the following topics: economics, politics, religion, culture, arts, and law.
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Porta, Paula, ed. História da cidade de São Paulo. 3 vols. São Paulo, Brazil: Paz e Terra, 2004.
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The interdisciplinary trilogy written by Brazil’s leading researchers is considered an essential reference for understanding the city’s past. The essays collectively span the entirety of São Paulo’s history: the first volume concentrates on the colonial period; the second volume, on the imperial period; and the third, on the 20th century.
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São Paulo Symposium, University of Chicago, 2013.
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Indicative of the growing interest in São Paulo within the US academy, the multidisciplinary conference marked the first time in which scholars from both Brazil and the United States gathered to examine the city and its contributions to broader theories and questions. The website features videos of presentations, among other resources.
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Szmrecsányi, Tamás, ed. História Econômica da Cidade de São Paulo. São Paulo, Brazil: Livros de Valor, Editora Globo, 2004.
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Published to coincide with the 450th anniversary of the foundation of São Paulo, the book, despite its title, offers a broad interpretation of the city from colonial period to 20th century. Social aspects as well as housing, environment, labor, health and education are framed as economic issues.
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Primary Sources

Although various institutions in São Paulo have preserved and catalogued an abundance of primary sources, few of these have been published as anthologies and circulated. With the exception of a limited number of literary works, even fewer historical documents have been translated into English. A few exemplary and easily accessible published sources are Bosi 1979, Penteado 1962, and Pinto 1900, all of which are in the form of retrospective accounts. Translated accounts of the city produced by creative writers are offered in Andrade 1968 and Galvão 1993, while Pinto 1903 and Pestana 1923 are representative of the “scientific” interpretations adopted and lauded by political leaders of their time.

Andrade, Mário de. Hallucinated City. Paulicea Desvairada. Translated by Jack E. Tomlins. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.
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One of Brazil’s most famous modernists was also one of São Paulo’s most astute observers. This anthology, originally published in 1922, includes a few of Andrade’s best-known poems. Essential reading for anyone interested in Brazilian modernism, São Paulo, or the link between a city and its arts.
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Bosi, Ecléa. Memória e Sociedade: Lembranças de Velhos. São Paulo, Brazil: T.A., 1979.
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The book is based on interviews with a variety of elderly social actors who lived and worked in São Paulo. Many of the memories evoked significantly contrast with those of elites, capturing the vivid dimensions of the growing city during the 20th century and contributing to the perception of the existence of multiple São Paulos.
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Galvão, Patrícia. Industrial Park: A Proletarian Novel. Translated by Elizabeth and K. David Jackson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
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This short novel, written by one of Brazilian modernists’ muses in 1933, tells the story of working-class women in the city of São Paulo. Despite its unconventional style, the book is accessible, engrossing, and taught in many undergraduate classrooms.
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Penteado, Jacob. Belenzinho, 1910: Retrato de uma época. São Paulo, Brazil: Martins, 1962.
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This memoir by a journalist is prized for its colorful insights into working-class life on the city’s fringes. Largely synchronic chapters document the private and public activities of the residents of Belenzinho and the spaces in which these took place, including the neighborhood streets, schools, theaters, dance halls, and churches.
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Pestana, Paulo Rangel. A expansão economica do estado de S. Paulo num século (1822–1922). São Paulo, Brazil: Secretaria da agricultura, commercio e obras publicas do estado de São Paulo, 1923.
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The author was head of the Division of Industry and Commerce when the State of São Paulo published these kinds of catalogues. The text illuminates not only the economical improvements of Old Republic São Paulo but also the ways in which contemporary leaders marketed their region’s advancements.
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Pinto, Alfredo Moreira. A Cidade de São Paulo em 1900–Impressões de viagem. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Imprensa Nacional, 1900.
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An astute comparison between São Paulo’s society and institutions in the 1860s and 1900. A teacher in Rio de Janeiro’s Military Academy, the author had studied at the Law School in São Paulo during the 1860s. After revisiting the city thirty years later, the author’s shock at São Paulo’s transformations inspired his vertiginous descriptions, emblematic of a generation’s awe.
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Pinto, Adolpho Augusto. História da viação pública de São Paulo. São Paulo, Brazil: Type Papelaria de Vanorden, 1903.
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A classic study written by an important engineer and graduate of the Polytechnic School of São Paulo. The book presents transportation data from the 19th and the early 20th centuries, offering insight into the business and politics of transportation in São Paulo.
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Online Collections

In recent years, Brazilian archives and libraries have taken the initiative to digitize their collections, enabling greater access to a wealth of primary sources. These are generally searchable online by time period, title, author, and source type. In a few cases, textual sources are word searchable. A variety of government records can be accessed on the websites of the State Archive, the Historical Archive of São Paulo, the National Library, and the Center for Research Libraries. These institutions’ digital collections, along with the University of São Paulo’s Biblioteca Brasiliana, also collectively offer a wide range of periodicals and images from the city of São Paulo.

Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin. University of São Paulo.
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While not exclusive to the history of the city of São Paulo, this digital collection spans the entire length of Brazilian history and includes key works of literature, periodicals, and maps.
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Brazilian Government Documents. Center for Research Libraries.
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This platform offers access to Provincial Presidential Reports of the state of São Paulo as well as others from 1830 to 1930.
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Digital Brasil. Biblioteca Nacional.
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The National Library’s digitized collection includes periodicals, maps, images, manuscripts, and sound recordings from across the country and history of Brazil. An extensive set of periodicals specific to São Paulo can be accessed in the Hemeroteca Digital by filtering the search according to location.
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Digital Repository. Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo.
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The website of the Public Archive of the State of São Paulo offers a wide range of digitized primary sources, the number of which continues to grow. Among the collection are significant periodicals, government records, photographs, and films about the city and state of São Paulo.
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Projeto Sirca—Sistema de Registro, Controle e Acesso ao Acervo Arquivo Histórico de São Paulo and Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo.
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This database was developed by the Historical Archive of São Paulo (São Paulo’s municipal archive) and the University of São Paulo to allow access to thousands of documents addressing the sprawl of the city. Includes permit and license requests, architectural plans, and other official documents and data produced by the municipality until 1915.
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Salas de Cinema em São Paulo: 1895–1929. Arquivo Histórico de São Paulo and Cinemateca Brasileira.
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Comprehensive database of the city’s spaces for screening films in the early 20th century. Researched under the leadership of film historian José Inácio de Melo Souza, the collection offers maps, photographs, architectural plans, newspaper clippings, and brief essays about each site.
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The Colonial City (From Encounter to 1822)

The colonial city of São Paulo (1554–1822) inspired local historians to pen pioneering descriptive works, beginning with the celebratory accounts published after the 1894 founding of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo (Historic and Geographic Institute of São Paulo). At the same time, the persistent memory of colonial São Paulo as a backwater has resulted in a lack of narratives about the town, a lacuna that Marcílio 2014 began to fill with the author’s groundbreaking demographic work. Especially absent is a history that explains and gives agency to the area’s indigenous people, for whom the Jesuit mission had been built; an exception here is Monteiro 1985. Another gap in the colonial history of São Paulo that only in recent years has begun to be filled, as exemplified by Torrao Filho 2007 and Vilardaga 2014, is an understanding of Portuguese administrative structures. The colonial relationship is examined by Toledo 1981 through a different lens: the frontier town’s changing architecture.

Marcílio, Maria Luiza. A cidade de São Paulo: Povoamento e população, 1750–1850. 2d ed. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora da Universidade de Sâo Paulo, 2014.
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Developed as a PhD dissertation at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, the text analyzes the demographic dynamics of São Paulo. Relying on an impressive collection of parish documents, this monograph helped establish the study of population movement in the city as a field of knowledge. First published 1974.
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Monteiro, John Manuel. “São Paulo in the Seventeenth Century: Economy and Society.” PhD diss., Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985.
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Through sources such as inventories and religious data, John Monteiro offers a narrative that mixes social history and economic history as well as anthropology. One of the goals of the thesis is to present another face of São Paulo, depicting the indigenous population as a proactive member of a nascent colonial society.
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Toledo, Benedito Lima de. São Paulo: Três cidades em um século. São Paulo, Brazil: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1981.
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Portrays the metamorphosis of Paulistano society through its architecture. Demonstrates through photographs and drawings how, in the course of a century, the colonial village with its austere, taipa constructions transformed into a Europeanized, brick and concrete metropolis.
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Torrao Filho, Amilcar. Paradigma do caos ou cidade da conversão? São Paulo na administração do Morgado de Mateus (1765–1775). São Paulo, Brazil: Annablume, 2007.
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Analyzes the period between 1765 and 1775, when Luis Antonio de Sousa Botelho Mourão, the Morgado of Mateus, governed the Captaincy of São Paulo. Argues that Botelho Mourão transformed the captaincy, especially its capital, from a space dedicated to conversion––as envisioned by its Jesuit founders––to a space of civility and submission to Crown and Church authority.
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Vilardaga, José Carlos. São Paulo no Império dos Felipes: Conexões na América Meridional (1580–1640). São Paulo, Brazil: Intermeios/FAPESP, 2014.
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This recent book was written to explain how an isolated place within the Portuguese empire reflected ideas about urban form, administration, and the law promulgated by the metropole during the period known as the Iberian Union (1580–1640). The result is an innovative narrative about São Paulo and its foreign connections during the colonial period.
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The Provincial Capital in the Empire (1822–1889)

After Brazilian independence in 1822 and the 1827 establishment of São Paulo’s law school, one of the first academic institutions in Brazil, the city began to develop its own cultural profile. That profile took another turn around 1870 as the regional coffee boom transformed the “academic village” into a buzzing metropolis. These transitions lie at the center of historical analyses of the imperial capital of the province of São Paulo. Monbeig 1953 dubs this period São Paulo’s belle époque, stressing the connection between city and coffee-growing hinterland in explaining the former’s development. That same emphasis is found in Hanley 2005, Holloway 1980, and Levi 1987, with the latter two more explicitly explaining the institutions and networks that linked the prospering city to its countryside. Oliveira 2005 more specifically hones in on the networks that served as the foundations of a new, urban middle class, while Dias 1995 explains the social relations of the city’s impoverished women. Marins 2001 and Oliveira 2004, by contrast, move away from the city-hinterland lens to examine material culture and memory in a provincial city at once isolated from national projects but also deeply embedded in the nation’s history.

Dias, Maria Odila Leite da Silva. Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Translated by Ann Frost. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
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Originally published as Quotidiano e poder em São Paulo no século XIX: Anna Gertrudes de Jesus (São Paulo, Brazil: Brasiliense, 1984). Offers a social history of marginalized women, including slaves, to argue for the importance of social networks and other informal structures during São Paulo’s early urbanization. Helped blaze the trail for later histories of women, slavery, and informality in the city.
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Hanley, Anne G. Native Capital: Financial Institutions and Economic Development in São Paulo, Brazil, 1850–1920. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
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Essential for understanding why and how industry and an agro-export economy developed simultaneously and co-dependently in the state. Builds on Warren Dean’s work to argue that both sectors were nurtured by increasingly formal and local, rather than foreign, capital markets.
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Holloway, Thomas H. Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–1934. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
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Investigates the causes and consequences of gradual abolition and, in slavery’s place, the introduction of European and Japanese labor on coffee plantations. Explains the impact of both slavery and free labor on the making of 20th-century Paulista and Paulistano society.
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Levi, Darrell E. The Prados of São Paulo, Brazil: An Elite Family and Social Change, 1840–1930. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
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Originally published as A família Prado (São Paulo, Brazil: Cultura 70, 1977). Helped rewrite the history of the family in Brazil through the lens of one of São Paulo’s most influential stock: the Prados. Levi not only shows the inadequacy of “patriarchy” as a descriptor for the Brazilian family but also sheds light on the city’s changing social, political, and economic networks.
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Marins, Paulo César Garcez Marins. Através da rótula: Sociedade e arquitetura no Brasil, séculos XVII a XX. São Paulo, Brazil: Humanitas, FFLCH, USP, 2001.
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Why was the city of São Paulo aesthetically so different from other Brazilian cities during the Imperial period? Answers this question by focusing on the city’s architecture, in the process shedding light on the relationship between Portugal, Brazil, and former Spanish colonies.
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Monbeig, Pierre. La croissance de la ville de São Paulo. Grenoble, France: Institut et Revue de Géographie Alpine, 1953.
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Seminal for the study of human geography not only in Brazil but throughout Latin America. Written by a French geographer who taught at the University of São Paulo beginning in 1935, the text positions the city of São Paulo as the result of human action that transformed the natural landscape and social relations pari passu with the development of the hinterland.
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Oliveira, Cecília Helena. “São Paulo e a Independência: liames entre história e memória.” In São Paulo: Uma longa história. Edited by Ana Maria de A. Camargo. São Paulo, Brazil: Centro de Integração Empresa-Escola, 2004.
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Through an analysis of the painting Independencia ou Morte, the author demonstrates the political, ideological, and cultural representations of the city between 1822 and the first years of the Republic. Shows that the colonial city already began to produce a social memory of independence in the 1870s, despite its official celebration only beginning in 1922.
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Oliveira, Maria Luiza Ferreira de. Entre a Casa e o Armazém: Relações sociais e experiência da urbanização. São Paulo, 1850–1900. São Paulo, Brazil: Alameda, 2005.
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One of the most important studies about the constitution of the middle class in São Paulo, this book reconstructs credit networks, informing how enterprises, buildings, and urban business were formulated, clarifying important aspects of the city’s transformation in the last decades of the 19th century.
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The City of the Old Republic (1889–1930)

During the turn of the 20th century, the city’s frantic transformations made the built environment the main focus of photographs, which, along with a host of memoirs and travelers’ records, created the historical visual memory found in most of the works presented here. It was also at this moment that Paulistanos began to write fluently about their city, among them not only modernists such as Andrade 1968 but also the humorists featured in Saliba 2002 and the journalists and chroniclers showcased in Sevcenko 1992. If Saliba’s and Sevcenko’s São Paulo is a dynamic, chaotic place, the city is also remembered for its pivotal and seemingly stabilizing role in national politics: after the proclamation of the Republic in 1889, Brazil’s first three civilian presidents were Paulistas, and the growing state boasted considerable legislative control in what became known as the era’s “coffee with milk” (café com leite) politics. The local networks and negotiations that constituted this politics are traced in Love 1980 and further unpacked in Woodard 2009. The majority of scholarship on the period, however, focuses on São Paulo’s social policies, that is, on the ways in which state and municipal leaders tackled what they perceived to be the inevitable problems of a growing city. Rago 1991 and Ribeiro 1993 show how many Paulistanos were eager to temper a changing society through public health initiatives and discourses about hygiene, gender, and the family. Rolnik 1997, meanwhile, highlights the failure, at times intentional, of reformist discourses to transform into enforceable laws. Finally, in tune with the Latin Americanist turn toward granting agency to previously silenced groups, Butler 1998 explains the law’s shortcomings from the angle of Afro-Brazilians, emphasizing how Afro-Paulistanos in particular thought about and sought to alter racial inequality through political action.

Butler, Kim. Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
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This commonly taught text is among the first major works to explain Afro-Brazilians’ role in shaping their post-emancipation experience. Butler elucidates their agency and ideas by situating Afro-Brazilians within two distinct urban contexts: São Paulo and Salvador.
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Love, Joseph. São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation 1889–1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980.
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In Portuguese, this book received the elucidative title Locomotiva (locomotive), a term that reveals the book’s aim: a discussion of the region’s integration into the nation through the city’s and state’s newfound political and economic dominance. This notion that the state of São Paulo pulled Brazil into modernity continues to be defended by Paulista intellectuals and politicians.
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Rago, Margareth. Os prazeres da noite: Prostituição e códigos da sexualidade feminina em São Paulo, 1890–1930. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Paz e Terra, 1991.
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Explains how prostitution was identified and addressed as a social problem by doctors, lawmakers, criminologists, and writers in Old Republic São Paulo. Follows Foucault in drawing historians’ attention to the place of discourse and sexuality in the study of the city.
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Ribeiro, Maria Alice Rosa. História sem fim . . . Inventário da saúde pública: São Paulo, 1880–1930. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora da Unesp, 1993.
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Connects the rise of capitalism with the changing ideas and political management of the city’s public health. An impressive contribution to understanding the construction of modernity in São Paulo and specifically through lawmakers’ prioritization of hygiene and medical issues.
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Rolnik, Raquel. A Cidade e a lei: Legislação, política urbana e territórios na cidade de São Paulo. São Paulo, Brazil: Studio Nobel, FAPESP, 1997.
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Explains the organization of urban legislation in São Paulo from the late 19th century. The author shows that the law was conceived to accommodate the different interests of the elite and that the resulting gap between regulation and practice was essential to São Paulo’s rapid expansion. Originally presented as PhD dissertation at New York University, with the title “The City and the Law: Legislation, Urban Policy and Territories in the City of São Paulo (1886–1936).”
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Saliba, Elias Thomé. Raízes do riso: A representação humorística na história brasileira: Da Belle Époque aos primeiros tempos do rádio. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 2002.
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Through the lens of humor writing and cartoons, Saliba unearths popular ideas about the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro at the start of the 20th century. Through this comparison, the author illustrates the unique social criticisms that São Paulo generated at a moment of rapid cultural and social change.
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Sevcenko, Nicolau. Orfeu extático na metrópole: São Paulo, sociedade e cultura nos frementes anos 20. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1992.
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Describes the 1920s as a decade of chaotic cultural, technological, and social change that signified the city’s maturation into and awareness of its status as a modern metropolis. This was a metropolis ripe for inspiring modernism, the first such movement in Brazil and most visibly marked by the 1922 Week of Modern Art.
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Woodard, James. A Place in Politics. São Paulo, Brazil, from Seigneurial Republicanism to Regionalist Revolt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
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Woodard perceptively positions events and people within a socio-political regional and national setting to affirm that São Paulo was not only a place but the place of early 20th-century politics in Brazil. Focusing on how reformist movements challenged the republican seigneurial system, Woodard attentively draws a detailed account of the mechanisms behind the Republican machine in the state and capital.
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Economy

São Paulo’s rapid transformation within the context of a regional coffee boom has led a large portion of scholars of the Old Republic city to adopt an economic approach. Historically, that approach has sought to answer two questions. The first, exemplified by Dean 1969 and Cano 1977, asks how an agrarian entrepôt developed into an industrial hub. The second, represented here by Saes 1981 and Font 1990, asks how the regional economy changed and what consequences these changes posed on the politics and economy of the state’s capital city. All four address São Paulo’s place within a global economy, stressing the region’s attraction to foreign planners, immigrants, investors, and businesses. Ultimately, the authors seek to explain how Old Republic São Paulo became Brazil’s economic powerhouse.

Cano, Wilson. Raízes da concentração industrial em São Paulo. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: DIFEL, 1977.
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Argues that São Paulo’s industrialization cannot be explained in the same terms as that of Europe and United States. Analyzes the particularities of São Paulo, especially the closer relationship between city and hinterland, to present the historical roots of São Paulo’s industrial development.
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Dean, Warren. The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969.
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Dean reveals that the industrialization of São Paulo was constituted by a somatory of many processes and with a variety of agents than the crystallized historiography pointed out. The First World War and the crisis of the coffee system in 1929 were important milestones, but industrialization, Dean argues, started decades earlier, in part to solve the problems associated with the surplus of capital from the agricultural sector and the introduction of immigrants and new production techniques.
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Font, Mauricio. Coffee, Contention, and Change in the Making of Modern Brazil. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.
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This title presents one interesting vision about the conflicts within the coffee elite, especially the dispute between medium and small producers and owners of large plantations. From this premise, Font offers a reflection on political leadership in Brazil in the 1910s.
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Saes, Flavio Azevedo Marques. As ferrovias de São Paulo, 1870–1940. São Paulo, Brazil: HUCITEC/Instituto Nacional do Livro/MEC, 1981.
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An important analysis of the railways in the province of São Paulo. The railways produced great transformations in the city and in the city’s businesses. Innovative in its attention to the railway as business, the text relativizes the classical dependency of railroads’ sprawl on the coffee sector.
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Urban Planning

Urban studies is one of the most vivacious areas of knowledge within Brazilian universities, a field that encompasses urban planning, urban history, and urban development (what is referred to in the Brazilian academy as “urbanism”). A large number of historical analyses from this field have focused on the Old Republic, a period during which construction and public works projects dominated municipal and state debates. For many influential Paulistanos of the time, the turn-of-the-20th-century city was a drawing board, a blank slate on which to design a new landscape emblematic of the region’s wealth and progress. Langenbuch 1968 offers a geographer’s classic perspective, situating the city’s built environment within a changing landscape, while Campos 2002 and Simões 2005 point to the complicated politics and motivations behind the city’s early attempts at urban planning. Both, along with McDowall 1988, demonstrate the significant role of the private sector in São Paulo’s infrastructural advancements.

Campos, Candido Malta. Os rumos da cidade: Urbanismo e modernização em São Paulo. São Paulo, Brazil: Senac, 2002.
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Presents an overview of São Paulo´s changing built environment from the 1880s to the mid-1940s. Traces the interactions and fluid crossings between public sector and private sector that constitutes a mosaic of conflicts, negotiations, and regulations of the city’s construction during the period of effervescent urbanization.
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Langenbuch, Juergen Richard. “A estruturação da grande São Paulo: Estudo de geografia urbana.” Tese de doutoramento. Rio Claro, Brazil: Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, Universidade de Campinas, 1968.
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This widely read doctoral thesis explains the making of a metropolitan identity during the late 19th century. Using a wide range of sources, Langenbuch unearthed new information concerning routes, railways, and suburban growth in São Paulo and its environs.
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McDowall, Duncan. The Light: Brazilian Traction, Light, and Power Company Limited, 1899–1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
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The Light was important for the insertion of electricity and different types of transportation in São Paulo. The company was also a protagonist of economic and social scandals since late 19th century. This book focuses in the constitution of this company, providing important information about the economic liberalism in São Paulo.
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Simões, José Geraldo, Jr. Anhangabaú: História e Urbanismo. 1st ed. São Paulo, Brazil: SENAC/ Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, 2005.
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Discusses the improvements made in downtown São Paulo in the early 20th century. Explains why and how the municipality decided to “invert” the polarity of its growth from the east to west axis. Assesses the introduction of urbanism as a discipline in São Paulo as well as the urban politics––and politicians––that spurred real estate speculation.
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The City of the 1930s and the 1940s

After the Great Depression began in 1929, coffee exports to the United States and Europe were critically affected, encouraging wealthy coffee farmers and local entrepreneurs to invest in industrial activities that turned São Paulo into the nation’s largest industrial center. The ways in which this shifting economy played out in everyday practices is addressed in Weinstein 1996, which examines the relationship between industrialists and workers. The expanding job market continued to attract a significant number of migrants from other regions of the country as well as immigrants from around the world, especially those of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Arab, and Japanese roots. It is these new masses and the consequent transformations of the city’s built environment and policies that have captured the attention of most historians of 1930s–1940s São Paulo—among them, Atique 2010, Mehrtens 2010, and Bonduki and Koury 2014, the latter of which researched the relationship between labor and housing in São Paulo for over two decades. Recent historians, such as Owensby 1999, also focus on São Paulo’s masses in terms of the formation of new class and cultural identities, including the spaces, consumption patterns, and communication media that made such identities possible. The period between the 1929 crash and the end of the Second World War also coincided with the years that Getúlio Vargas was in power. The friction between the state of São Paulo and the nation during the Vargas years marks the second focal point for scholars of the era. Their work has moved from an examination of political tensions, exemplified by Silva 1976, toward that of cultural tensions, including questions of historical memory, as examined in Borges 1997, and racial identity, as pursued in Weinstein 2015.

Atique, Fernando. Arquitetando a “Boa Vizinhança”: Arquitetura, cidade e cultura nas relações Brasil—Estados Unidos (1876–1945). Campinas, Brazil: Pontes/FAPESP, 2010.
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Adopts a transnational approach to explain some of the foundations of the good neighbor policy. Examines the professionals, books, buildings, and policies that tied Brazil to the United States beginning with the former’s centennial exhibition and ending with the Second World War. The city of São Paulo is taken as a privileged space for this discussion.
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Bonduki, Nabil, and Ana Paula Koury. Pioneiros da Habitação Social no Brasil. 3 vols. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora da UNESP/FAPESP, 2014.
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This three-volume set analyzes the activities of the Institute of Funds for Retirement and Pensions, the entity charged with constructing social housing during the Vargas regime and until 1964. Contributes to the understanding of the multiplicity of actions and the controversial politics within the Vargas government, particularly within the city of São Paulo.
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Borges, Vavy Pacheco. Memória Paulista. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo/EDUSP, 1997.
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Borges explains that more than 60 percent of the memoirs and essays about the 1932 revolution, written between 1932 and 1937, seemed to have been “more felt than known,” and delves into an original historiographical work on the event.
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Mehrtens, Cristina Peixoto. Urban Space and National Identity in Early Twentieth Century São Paulo, Brazil: Crafting Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230114036Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The book intends to clarify the emergence of middle class as consumers and requester of a typical urban space of modern times. Also it discusses the controversial links between the public sector and the middle class. The publication also reveals the interactions and negotiations through the territory and the construction of the metropolis.
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Owensby, Brian Philip. Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
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Owensby studied middle-class people, mostly in Rio de Janeiro, according to their experiences of markets, homes, and politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Owensby based his study mainly on polls, literary works, and magazines, and highlighted the importance of US society in guiding Brazilian notions of economic and intellectual consumption
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Silva, Hélio. 1932: A Guerra Paulista. 2d ed. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Civilização brasileira, 1976.
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Considered one of the most important books about 1932, the year in which Paulistas revolted against Getúlio Vargas, the non-elected president of the country. The author was a journalist persecuted by Vargas regime, and the book is therefore a mixture of testimonial and historical narrative.
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Weinstein, Barbara. For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
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This book explores the ideology of a generation of Brazilian industrialists who developed and applied the notion of efficiency, derived from scientific management theories, to all dimensions of Paulistano society. Exploring the role of the SENAI and SESI, both founded in the 1940s, the book offers insight into São Paulo’s new elite.
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Weinstein, Barbara. The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
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Uses the examples of the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and the city’s quadricentennial celebrations in 1954 to explain how São Paulo’s regional identity was constructed. Argues that this identity was grounded in whiteness, a racialization that was perceived to be a more modern vision for the nation at the same time that it reinforced regional inequality.
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The City of the Postwar Period (1946–1964)

The 1950s witnessed two seemingly opposing shifts in the city of São Paulo. At the same time that São Paulo was garnering international acclaim as a center for innovative art and architecture, the influx of poorer migrants from the Brazilian north and northeast was questioning the city’s claims to modernity in terms of its ability to accommodate and integrate these new workers. The result of these polar pulls was not only the privileging by contemporary urban planners and sociologists of the city’s economic functions at the cost of its inhabitants, but also a bifurcated body of scholarship about the mid-20th century. Gitahy and Pereira 2002 Mindlin 1956, and Moses 1950 are concerned with alterations in São Paulo’s built environment, albeit the former two are more celebratory than the latter. French 1992, Fontes 2008, and Lesser 1999, by contrast, are more interested in teasing out the rifts that divided Paulistano society. Whereas French is representative of the earlier prominence of class in analyses of São Paulo, Lesser and Fontes reframe working Paulistanos in terms of communities and the construction of group identities.

Fontes, Paulo. Um nordeste em São Paulo: Trabalhadores migrantes em São Miguel Paulista (1945–66). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora Getúlio Vargas, 2008.
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One of the first major studies of the massive migration from north and northeast Brazil to São Paulo, the book is a significant contribution to the understanding of mid-20th century Paulistano society, culture, and inequalities. Examines migrants and their work to explain how the city transformed into the biggest “northeastern city” outside the northeast.
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French, John. The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
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Underscores electoral behavior and specific moments in the political fight for workers’ rights.
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Gitahy, Maria Lucia Caira, and Paulo César Xavier Pereira, eds. O Complexo Industrial da Construção e a Habitação Econômica Moderna. São Carlos, Brazil: RiMa/FAPESP, 2002.
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This book is devoted to the history of São Paulo’s civil construction industry, a monolith that modified the city’s landscape, built environment, and politics. Through this lens, the collection presents a variety of reflections on social history as well as the histories of labor, housing, and technology in São Paulo.
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Lesser, Jeffrey. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
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Demonstrates that Brazilian society cannot be encapsulated by clichés such as white, Catholic, and poor. Reveals how certain groups of immigrants, including São Paulo’s previously understudied Japanese, Syrian, and Lebanese communities, recreated their identities so as to partake in the nation.
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Mindlin, Henrique Ephim. Modern Architecture in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Colibris, 1956.
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Mindlin’s classic work offers the best contemporaneous documentation of modernist architecture in the form of a catalogue for an exhibit on modern architecture in Brazil since the 1930s. It is significant as a marker of the status of São Paulo City within the national context.
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Moses, Robert. Programa de melhoramentos públicos para a cidade de São Paulo: Program of Public Improvements. New York: International Basic Economic Corporation Technical Services Corporation, 1950.
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In 1950, the International Basic Economy Corporation, managed by the Rockefeller family, was hired by the municipality of São Paulo to develop a general plan for the city. This publication, developed by New York City’s most famous (and controversial) town planner, is a bilingual compilation of the corporation’s suggestions
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The City of the Military Dictatorship (1964–1985)

The city under the military regime was marked by a variety of urban interventions, expressive architecture, and economic growth that was dubbed, on the national level, the “Brazilian Miracle.” São Paulo’s industrial growth, however, was largely unchecked by urban planning and environmental regulation. Air pollution and crime rates were high, especially in the numerous slums and peripheral neighborhoods. The resulting visible inequality between the enrichment of a few concentrated areas and the sprawling poverty of much of the city is the driving force behind Jesus 1999 and Lovell 2006. After the oil price shocks of the 1970s, Brazil entered a cycle of economic recessions in the 1980s, part of the so-called lost decade throughout Latin America. The city became a territory of many constructions sites, including those of the new subway and of public housing in the periphery, alterations addressed in Segawa 2013. Campos 2014 moves the study of the built environment toward that of the era’s politics, connecting the construction industry to the military regime. Joffily 2014, emblematic of more recent historiographic developments, tackles the dictatorship head on, using new sources to offer a closer peek at the dynamics of the regime’s torture, discipline, and discourse within the context of São Paulo.

Campos, Pedro Henrique Pedreira. Estranhas Catedrais: As empreiteiras brasileiras e a ditadura civil-militar, 1964–1988. Niterói, Brazil: Editora da Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2014.
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This recent book touches on an important dimension of Brazilian contemporary life: the role of the civil construction industry within the dictatorship regime. Investigating a variety of sources from the period, the book reveals important insights into São Paulo City, the birthplace of many businesses from this economical sector.
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Jesus, Carolina Maria de. The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Edited by Robert M. Levine and Jose Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy. Translated by Nancy P. S. Naro and Cristina Mehrtens. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
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The editors explore the way Carolina, an Afro-Brazilian woman from the 1950 Canindé slum of São Paulo, became a strong voice against the system that made favelas possible and a critique of the 1960s urban context. The diaries themselves continue to be commonly found in US college course syllabi.
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Joffily, Mariana. No Centro da Engrenagem: Os Interrogatórios na Operação Bandeirante e no DOI de São Paulo (1969–1975). São Paulo, Brazil: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, Arquivo Nacional, 2014.
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Given the difficulties of researching the Brazilian dictatorship, this book is a significant contribution. It tackles new documents and recreates the logics of interrogation of political militants by Operação Bandeirante and DOI-CODI, both from São Paulo. Gives voice to dozens of persecuted politicians and civilians that experienced spaces within the city never before revealed.
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Lovell, Peggy A. “Race, Gender, and Work in São Paulo, Brazil, 1960–2000.” Latin American Research Review 41.3 (2006): 63–87.
DOI: 10.1353/lar.2006.0043Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Lovell relies on census data to analyze long-term trends in racial and gender wage disparities in Sao Paulo’s labor market. She explores the elaborate system of multiracial classification, which resulted from Brazil’s long history of widespread miscegenation. Lovell focuses on how racial inequality, prejudice, and discrimination were features of everyday life in Sao Paulo.
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Segawa, Hugo. Architecture of Brazil: 1900–1990. New York: Springer, 2013.
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-5431-1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Traces the “modernities” of Brazilian architecture and their cultural contexts alongside broader historical processes. In exploring the projects for a “Great Nation” promulgated by the military regime, explains the vertiginous transformation of the city of São Paulo in the last decades of the 20th century.
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The City of the New Republic (1985–)

As Brazil’s most populous city, São Paulo since the end of the military regime has served as a case study for the nation’s shaky transition to democracy. The shortcomings of the country’s democratization in terms of civil and social rights are examined in Holston 2008 and Kowarick 2009 through the lens of peripheral São Paulo’s inhabitants. The precariousness of rights and income is examined from the other end of the social spectrum in Caldeira 2000 and O’Dougherty 2002, both of which also illustrates how citizenship in post-military São Paulo became intertwined with aesthetics and consumption. The significance of aesthetics in the late capitalist city is also highlighted in Frúgoli 2000, Gough 2015, and Rufinoni 2014, which assess the interventions in public space and life by a variety of leading groups. All of the texts below ultimately explain how, despite São Paulo’s dramatic shift in the last three decades from industrial center to megacity, to a global hub for finance, service, research, and technology, visible economic inequalities, exclusionary political practices, and high crime rates have continued to persist.

Arantes, Antonio Augusto. “The War of Places: Symbolic Boundaries and Liminalities in Urban Space.” Theory, Culture, and Society 13.4 (1996): 81–92.
DOI: 10.1177/0263276496013004004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Antonio Augusto Arantes fuses Victor Turner’s concept of liminality with other categories, such as the field of extended transition (champs de transit prolongé) emphasized by Marc Augé and the symbolic constitution of place put forth by Sharon Zukin.
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Caldeira, Teresa Pires do Rio. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
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In analyzing the discursive link between violence and urban space, Caldeira traces the emergence of fortified enclaves in São Paulo’s wealthiest as well as poorest neighborhoods. Argues for the challenge that such segregating discourse and practices pose not only to the city’s survival but also to Brazil’s new democracy.
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Frúgoli, Heitor, Jr. Centralidade em São Paulo: Trajetórias, conflitos e negociações na metrópole. São Paulo, Brazil: Cortez Editora, 2000.
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Written by a leading sociologist of the city, the monograph explains São Paulo’s decentralization and its social consequences by comparing the private and public development of three of São Paulo’s cores: the historic center, Av. Paulista, and Av. Luiz Carlos Berrini.
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Gough, Daniel Joseph. “Listening in the Megacity: Music in Sao Paulo’s Cultural Policy Worlds.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015.
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Based on cutting-edge ethnographic and archival research of public musical events between 2009 and 2013, the dissertation exemplifies the growing literature on São Paulo’s sonic landscape. Explains how music has become an essential (and problematic) tool for municipal leaders seeking to shape public life and identity in the neoliberal, segregated city.
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Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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Uses the case of land conflicts in São Paulo’s autoconstructed peripheries to posit the concept of insurgent democratic citizenships. Emphasizes how the recent process of democratization has entailed a national sense of belonging alongside new and old forms of violence, illegality, and exclusion, a paradoxical blend that Holston labels “differentiated citizenship.”
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Kowarick, Lúcio. Viver em risco: Sobre a vulnerabilidade socioeconômica e civil. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora 34, 2009.
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Combines ethnography and theory to analyze popular housing and its forms and terms: favelas, slums (cortiços), and autoconstruction. An insightful reflection by a leading sociologist on poverty and marginalization in the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo at the start of the 21st century.
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O’Dougherty, Maureen. Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822383628Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This ethnography follows middle-class Paulistanos between 1981 and 1994 as they faced one of their nation’s most significant economic crises. Explains how, as incomes and job security disappeared, “middle class” was ironically redefined among its members and in popular culture according to consumption.
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Rufinoni, Manoela Rossinetti. Preservação e Restauro Urbanos: Intervenções em sítios históricos industriais. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2014.
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Presents the concept of industrial urban heritage and argues for its significance in São Paulo. Analyzes nonfunctional factory buildings, warehouses, production spaces, workers’ villages, and railroads and the imprint that they have left on the urban landscape.
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