Grassroots Archives: Memory, Dictatorship, and the City

Abstract

Frontis: Memorial of the death of Santo Dias, October 30, 2018. Ana Dias (center) addresses the assembled. The painted phrase, “Here the Christian worker Santo Dias da Silva was murdered on October 30, 1979 by the military dictatorship,” can be seen in the foreground. Photo by author.

Open in new tabDownload slide

On October 30, 2018, longtime activists of the Santo Dias Committee staged an act of remembrance in São Paulo, the most populous city in Brazil. A crowd of thirty or so people—labor and neighborhood activists, their families, Catholic clergy, and me, an American academic—took turns painting a defiant phrase in bright red paint on the street: “Here the Christian worker Santo Dias da Silva was murdered on October 30, 1979 by the military dictatorship.” Nearly forty years prior, amid Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964–85), military police murdered Santo when they fired on a picket line of striking metalworkers in front of the Sylvânia factory. An Afro-Brazilian migrant from western São Paulo state, Santo was a prominent Catholic labor leader and a neighborhood activist in the city’s urban peripheries, the vast ring of working-class neighborhoods around the city center.¹ His wife, Ana Maria do Carmo Silva, widely known as Ana Dias and a prominent activist in her own right, set up the committee initially to seek justice for his murder. She watched as one by one each of us took a roller and painted until the words took up the street. The factory was mostly gone, replaced by high-rise condos.

The memorialization reflected a multifaceted grassroots effort against two overlapping forces militating against memory: the city itself and Brazil’s postdictatorship culture of silence. The painting of the phrase underscored the challenge of memorializing everyday people’s struggles during the dictatorship amid an ever-changing urban landscape that erased physical references like the Sylvânia factory.

Alongside acts like this one, activists also fought to preserve movement archives. In our interview, Ana Dias lamented how social movements had to destroy their records for fear “that we would be killed and disappeared like the others.”² In the 2000s, Sister Cecilia Hanson, a nun who had organized with these movements, donated a surviving repository to a university archive that subsequently digitized them. She hoped that the archive would inspire further activism, stating, “Whomever values history places importance on memory that can animate us.”³

Two days prior to the memorialization, Jair Bolsonaro, a former army officer and supporter of the military regime, had won the presidential election in the second round. As a relatively obscure backbencher in the Chamber of Deputies from 1991 to 2018, Bolsonaro had a long history of outlandish, offensive, and provocative statements. Historian Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta traced how Bolsonaro peddled false narratives during the campaign about the dictatorship, such as echoing the military’s characterization of the 1964 coup as a “revolution” to save democracy from a supposed communist threat. When pressed on the matter by a journalist, Bolsonaro exclaimed, “Leave the historians out [of this]!”⁴

As I began my then dissertation research, I confronted this question: Should I as a historian remain aloof from these struggles over memory? I wrestled with this question even as I became involved with a grassroots archiving effort that promised not only to preserve endangered historical materials—a laudable goal in and of itself—but to become a collective act of archive making that might democratize the means and ends of historical practice. Here, the “archive” can refer to either the institution or a collection of materials, to paraphrase Achille Mbembe’s dual conception, but in this case, the project included both senses of the term.⁵ A lengthy campaign by Brazilian academics, longtime activists, and community movements to win a public university with an archive center for São Paulo’s periphery had reached a critical juncture just as I arrived in Brazil. After years of advocacy, the coalition had successfully pressured the federal government to install a university in a shuttered steel factory, a silent memorial to the periphery’s fading industrial heritage.

A dedicated group of those activists believed that an archive center would preserve the periphery’s history of popular organizing as the government implemented the new university. Creating the archive was a multifaceted group effort. As a discrete part of that larger network, I cataloged and digitized the historical materials donated by urban grassroots movements from the dictatorship era. This corpus would form the initial collection of that nascent archive and memory center.⁶ The records that I encountered evidenced decades of neighborhood and labor organizing that drew on Catholic liberation theology, leftist political thought, and human rights discourse to shape the city while restoring democracy.

By acting in solidarity with community efforts, I hoped to help incorporate new actors into the practice of history while breaking down barriers between the academy and the public. Over the course of my work with these movements, I came to believe that grassroots archives could serve as collective spaces in which to rethink knowledge production as a kind of community “laboratory,” to invoke the laboratory turn cited by the AHR’s History Lab section.⁷ Given that this project would enhance local capacity for future archival work, I hoped it might also democratize historical knowledge in the long run.⁸

Even still, my involvement raised further questions: How should a historian conceptualize collaborative archiving with social movements? What kinds of challenges might historians confront? And what are the potential benefits and limitations? While every project differs in its particulars, I found that supporting popular memory-making through collaborative archiving required me to think carefully about the politics of knowledge production, questions of power, and community relations.

I understood as well that the creation of this archive was deeply important to these communities. In 1980, thousands attended the funeral of Santo Dias presided over by archbishop Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns in São Paulo’s towering neo-Gothic cathedral. The funeral march (Fig. 1) also became a protest against the dictatorship. Since then, the Santo Dias Committee has kept alive his memory and that of popular social struggle during the dictatorship. Every year, after painting the street, Ana Dias leads the procession from the site of Santo’s death to the cemetery where he is buried.⁹ The preservation of movement archives by Sister Cecilia Hanson, who had organized alongside Ana and Santo Dias, was not incidental to their larger effort to shape memory in the present. While the larger collections that I digitized belonged to different, but related movements in the city, they shared this history of struggle against silence about the dictatorship years.

I felt that I should not shy away from this kind of collaboration because of its “political” nature. Indeed, archives can become “instruments of empowerment and liberation, salvation and freedom,” as Eric Ketelaar writes of the records of repression by Latin America’s Cold War dictatorships.¹⁰ In 2009, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–10, 2023–) published digitized declassified records of the dictatorship’s security forces. While Brazil was the last country in the Southern Cone to hold a truth commission, only doing so in 2012–14, these records supported the commission’s efforts.¹¹ The transformation of archives into instruments of transitional justice in the present underscore the role of archives in not only shaping memory but constituting a part of present political and social struggles. Indeed, activist networks can employ such archives to further mobilizations, as Luciana Heymann and Alexandre Moreli write in “Lula’s Prison Letters and the Brazilian Presidential Papers” of the letters written by sympathetic Brazilians to the president during his imprisonment on corruption charges based on flimsy evidence.¹²

Figure 1.

March on the first anniversary of Santo Dias’s death, São Paulo, 1980. Photo courtesy of the Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo.

Open in new tabDownload slide

Figure 2.

March on the thirty-ninth anniversary of Santo Dias’s death, October 30, 2018. Photo by author.

Open in new tabDownload slide

In my case, I became involved in archive creation as part of a larger campaign that aimed to expand access to higher education while also continuing a tradition of urban activism. That coalition united longtime grassroots activists and clergy with their contemporary counterparts and allied academics to fight for a public university in the city’s eastern periphery. For many of these figures, this struggle had begun when they built improvised schools, demanded teachers to staff them, and frequented or taught adult literacy courses during the dictatorship period. After decades of organizing, they won a new campus of Brazil’s federal university system dedicated to urban studies that they hoped would continue the periphery’s history of grassroots mobilization around urban issues. They also secured an abandoned steel factory in the eastern periphery as the new campus site.¹³ When I first visited the site, I noticed a sign outside the factory that made this history of struggle clear: “This campus is the fruit of the struggle of the workers of the East Zone” (Fig. 3).

Figure 3.

Sign at the campus gate depicting an earlier protest at that same spot, December 8, 2017. Photo by author.

Open in new tabDownload slide

Creating the center, however, underscored the often precarious nature of archiving amid institutional fragility and shoestring budgets. Against these challenges, a dedicated group of activists and scholars insisted that the new campus contain a memory-and-outreach center that would preserve the history of the periphery. Led by historian Janes Jorge, students conducted a preliminary survey in 2013 of essential collections related to urban organizing. While activists had undertaken extraordinary efforts to maintain these collections, the survey noted that they were “at risk of being lost or being inaccessible indefinitely.”¹⁴ Implementation of the campus, however, was slow. The surveyed collections remained in place as Jorge and others feared that the memory center would be forgotten.

As I looked for archives while developing my dissertation prospectus, I discovered an internet blurb about Jorge’s preliminary survey and reached out. Jorge was eager to move forward with the project. I had experience conducting large-scale digitization projects from Opening the Archives, a sprawling initiative focused on US intelligence and diplomatic archives about Brazil’s dictatorship directed by James Green, who donated a scanner to this new project. With Jorge’s support, I applied for and received funding from a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship to dedicate time to and acquire equipment for a digitization initiative in support of the new center.¹⁵

At the time, the new campus lacked dedicated staff or students who could immediately take on this work. I was available and experienced and working on the archive’s major thematic focus. My religious and political background further facilitated collaboration. Most of the community partners involved were progressive or liberationist Catholics; I had been raised Catholic. Movements in the periphery had a long history of working with students and foreign clergy, making my profession and nationality more of a curiosity than impediment. During the dictatorship, many Brazilian students came to work in the periphery through contacts with clergy there. I traveled a similar path in making initial contacts. My involvement in Opening the Archives perhaps assured some activists that I took the legacies of the dictatorship seriously. But ultimately, I believe the personal connections forged through visits to activists’ homes, oral history interviews, and more formal meetings with community partners made this collaboration successful.

Without overstating my own importance within the movement behind the archive, I recognized as well the risk of co-opting the initiative in some way, whatever my intentions. That I had time to consult these archives because of a generous research fellowship from the US government, a stable university affiliation, and the ability to work abroad because of my US passport reflected significant luxuries. I hoped that digitization might help my Brazilian colleagues and anyone without the support to travel to consult the same material more easily. Preserving these documents, moreover, served as a fail-safe against their loss so that others would have the opportunity to write their own accounts. Digitizing materials useful to the movements beyond the purview of my own research helped ensure that the initiative would serve their interests.

Taken together, the potential positive impact of this project seemed significant. Digitization could help address problems of institutional instability that often threatened the survival of physical documents, a particularly pressing issue in Brazil aggravated by Bolsonaro’s presidency. Indeed, the destruction and re-creation of archives and libraries in Latin America is a central problem of the region’s history, one at the core of contemporary struggles over memory and power.¹⁶

I was drawn to the initiative in São Paulo in no small part because I believed it had the potential to model a different kind of archive in this context. As historian Ana Lucia Araujo related in “The Death of Brazil’s National Museum,” the National Museum’s tragic burning in 2018 accentuated the particular precariousness of historical archives related to marginalized groups amid the broader abandonment of archives in Brazil, a trend worsened by Bolsonaro. While the National Museum with its irreplicable collection of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian artifacts certainly reflected the historically colonial nature of such institutions, Araujo highlights its importance to the largely Afro-Brazilian, working-class communities as a space to engage with Brazil’s past, an outcome that the museum’s founders likely did not intend.¹⁷ With digitization as a backstop against permanent loss, the archive center in São Paulo would facilitate engagement by an overwhelmingly working-class population, one that included most of the city’s Afro-Brazilians, with the periphery’s history of social struggle.

In other places, grassroots people’s archives have stepped in to preserve histories of social mobilization across the world in opposition to antidemocratic forces and diverse forms of oppression.¹⁸ In his essay “Archiving the Chilean Revolution,” historian José Ragas recounted how a movement of activists, scholars, artists, and amateur collectors preserved material paraphernalia and diverse markings (rayados) on Santiago’s urban landscape associated with the 2019 wave of protests in that city, an effort that had the unexpected consequence of generating new understandings of sources, archival practice, and engagement beyond the academy.¹⁹ While it could not in and of itself roll back those antidemocratic forces, a memory center in the periphery would, if implemented, create a structured way for students and the community to generate new understandings of history grounded in the periphery’s long history of social mobilization.

If archives of state terror can become tools for “empowerment and liberation” through transitional justice efforts, what impact could this archive on urban communities and activism have? I recall that as I digitized movement flyers, one grabbed my attention. The headline read “Basic Sanitation Now!” and depicted a weeping mother holding her limp child in front of the open-air sewer that had spread disease among her community.²⁰ The image offered a poignant reminder of the stakes of social action in the megacity. The call to protest on the flyer underscored the activist ethos that the movements behind the archive and campus hoped to impart to their future students.

My experience highlights how organizing and digitizing the physical materials composes only one small part of grassroots archive creation. The coalition behind the campus continually mobilized amid delays in implementation by the federal government. While my academic colleagues at other universities fought to ensure that that campus would include an archive center, community leaders helped locate, organize, and donate relevant materials. For nearly two years, between 2017 and 2019, my role focused on the day-to-day work of processing the donated collections while meeting with community members and Brazilian colleagues as the project progressed.

Figure 4.

Documents held in the health movement headquarters, Itaquera, São Paulo, 2013. Photo by Janes Jorge.

Open in new tabDownload slide

Figure 5.

Part of the collection of the Catholic aid center, the Centro Pastoral Vergueiro, at the Centro de Documentação e Pesquisa Vergueiro, Bixiga, São Paulo, June 21, 2017. Photo by author.

Open in new tabDownload slide

As the 2013 survey had indicated, many of the documents were in precarious condition. Those of the eastern periphery’s health movement, the Movimento de Saúde da Zona Leste, were the most endangered. As the health activists recounted, a flood had swamped their headquarters in an occupied public housing commercial center, leading to the complete loss of much of the documentation while much of the rest exhibited extensive mold and water damage. A second collection belonged to a Catholic organization, the Centro Pastoral Vergueiro, that had provided logistical aid to social movements like printing paraphernalia. Kept alive by a few dedicated volunteers, this rich archive was in constant danger of eviction because of a lack of funds and its presence in a rented garage coveted by the building’s residents. The third collection resided in excellent condition and security in the church of a local priest, Father Antônio Luiz Marchioni. We focused our attention on the more endangered collections.

Collectively, we determined that the collection of the health movement needed to be moved immediately to the new center. Jorge and I met with activists at their headquarters and loaded into his car what could be salvaged. From there, we drove the documents to the incipient archive center located in the renovated front office of the old factory at the campus. There, I cleaned, organized, and digitized them (Fig. 6). In contrast, I digitized Centro Pastoral Vergueiro documents on-site.²¹

Figure 6.

Author’s digitization setup in the new archive center, May 23, 2019. Photo by author.

Open in new tabDownload slide

Shortly after the transfer, a longtime health activist pulled me aside. She kindly and firmly stressed that the materials were their history and that they hoped that I would not abandon the project. She expressed how previous researchers both foreign and Brazilian had often not meaningfully contributed to the communities there that they studied. I believe that holding me accountable in this instance reflected a conscious effort to shift this dynamic.

My engagement both through and beyond the digitization project amounted to a crash course in community-engaged research. For my part, I felt it important that I participate in events like the Santo Dias memorial and attend Mass with them when invited; I frequently visited activists’ homes and met their families at their request. In other cases, activists asked me to share the results of my research through public talks. Together, we organized that first ever event that featured their personal testimonials at the leading human rights institution in the city. Community leaders provided oversight of the digitization project by meeting with Jorge and me. By following their lead and attending events that they organized, I hoped to demonstrate my respect for them and their work to mutually construct a less extractive and more reciprocal relationship. I remain grateful for the time, knowledge, and public engagement practices that they shared with me as well as for their welcoming me into their communities.

The history contained in those documents did have the potential to, in the words of Sister Cecilia Hanson, “animate us.” The materials reflected decades of activism around issues of everyday life in the megacity: housing, health, urban infrastructure, education, and childcare, to name but a few subjects. A vast array of different groups and ideologies were present, including Catholic groups affiliated with liberation theology, mothers’ clubs, neighborhood associations, favela movements, and the underground communist parties.

Figures 7 and 8.

Inside the Gazarra steel factory assembly building, home to the new university campus, November 25, 2017. Photos by author.

Open in new tabDownload slide

The preservation of these documents in isolation could not offer the education envisioned by dictatorship-era activists. The successful creation of the new archive and memory center makes that possible by sustaining popular memory-making. The faculty who currently oversee the center, now the Centro de Memória Urbana, and affiliated students from the periphery are conducting the organization and digitization of exciting new collections.²² The next generation of students at this campus will have both the institution and its collections to engage in memory-making of their own thanks to their community’s ceaseless pressure and organizing.

This experience highlighted for me how memory-making is collective, continuous work, as evidenced by the painting of the street to mark the murder of Santo Dias. Memory, like paint, fades and decays and must be reapplied. When I first visited the abandoned factory that would become the campus, I was captivated by another painted phrase graffitied onto a wall in the cavernous assembly floor: “For a quality education” (Fig. 8).

This promise stands in stark contrast to the challenges to Brazilian democracy since the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. The expansion of higher education and support for museums and archives, however incomplete, was a major achievement of Brazil’s postdictatorship period. As part of his broader assault on democratic institutions, Jair Bolsonaro, a vocal supporter of the dictatorship, continued devastating cuts to higher education, especially to humanities and social science programs, which have higher enrollments of Afro-Brazilian students than other disciplines, and appointed partisans to sabotage archives and museums.²³ While he lost the 2022 election, the damage wreaked by his budget cuts for museums and archives will take time to reverse.

Bolsonaro likely did not have the movement activists in São Paulo in mind when he demanded that historians stay out of struggles over memory. Nonetheless, I witnessed how the activists’ campaign democratized the practice of history in ways that continue to help empower people to address local problems and create more equitable networks of knowledge production. My experience working on the archive and digitization component reinforced for me the idea that the creation of archives goes well beyond the preservation of documents alone. Rather, as a continuous, community-based process, grassroots archiving constitutes an essential collective mode of memory-making, a way to apply paint year after year when it begins to fade.

Author Biography

Daniel McDonald is a historian of modern Latin America. His work focuses on the histories of citizenship and inequality, cities, and religion as well as on collaborative digital and public projects. At present, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of History and the Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford.

I want to thank the activists, community members, clergy, and my academic colleagues in São Paulo for their work, generosity, and persistence. My thanks to editors Kate Brown and Mark Philip Bradley as well as the four anonymous reviewers for their generative comments and suggestions. This project would not have been possible without the encouragement and examples of Janes Jorge and James Green. I am grateful to the many people who supported this research and offered feedback, including Daniel Rodríguez, Jennifer Lambe, Brodwyn Fischer, Thamyris Almeida, and Felipe Loureiro. Earlier versions of this article further benefited from feedback from presentations at Harvard University and the Rochester Institute of Technology. This research was financially supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and Brown University as well as postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Oxford.