This edited volume provides comparative and transnational histories of the working people of Brazil and the United States. The international group of historians’ methodologically innovative chapters explore links, resonances, and divergences between US and Brazilian labor history.

Workers in Brazil and the United States have followed parallel and entangled histories for many centuries. Recent experiences with progressive, popular presidents and authoritarian, populist presidents in the two most populous countries in the hemisphere have underscored important similarities. The contributors in this volume focus on the comparative and transnational histories of labor between and across Brazil and the United States. The countries’ histories bear the marks of slavery, racism, transoceanic immigration, and rapid urbanization, as well as strong regional differentiation and inequalities. These features decisively shaped the working classes. Brazilian and US labor history debates have erupted and subsided at different times. This collection synthesizes those debates while adding new topics and new sources from both countries. The international group of historians’ methodologically innovative chapters explore links, resonances, and divergences between US and Brazilian labor history. They widen the scope of analysis for themes and problems that have long been familiar to historians of work and workers in the two countries, but have not provoked close dialogues between scholars in the respective places. Though the histories themselves were often entangled, the debates about them have too rarely intertwined.

Introduction. Connections, Comparisons, Inspirations: Overcoming a Dichotomous View of the History of Labor in the United States and Brazil, Fernando Teixeira da Silva, Alexandre Fortes, Gillian McGillivray, and Thomas D. Rogers

Part I: Immigration, Labor, and Feminism

Chapter 1: Immigration and Militance: Notes on Italians in São Paulo and the United States, Michael M. Hall

Chapter 2: International Feminist Connections in the Making of Labor Rights for Women, 1917–1937, Glaucia Cristina Candian Fraccaro

Part II: New Deal, New State, and World War II

Chapter 3: Labor’s New Deal: Corporatism and Politics in the US and Brazil, Fernando Teixeira da Silva

Chapter 4: Labor, Race, and Politics: US Views of Brazil in the Context of the Second World War, Alexandre Fortes

Chapter 5: Social Peace in a Time of War: Labor Justice and Foreign Policy in World War II Brazil, Rebecca Herman

Part III: The Cold War, Race, and Rural Workers

Chapter 6: An Engagé Intellectual in Brazil: Robert Alexander’s View of Brazilian Unionism during the Cold War, Larissa Rosa Corrêa

Chapter 7: Doormen and the Individualization of Segregation in Brazil, Jerry Dávila

Chapter 8: Real Labor Movements, Imagined Revolutions: The Northeastern Brazilian Sugar Zone Through US Eyes, 1955–1964, Gillian McGillivray and Thomas D. Rogers

Postscript: Entangling Labor Histories, Barbara Weinstein

About the Editors and Contributors