The Workers' Party in the voice of its founders: oral history, collective memory and institutionalization

Abstract

This article presents the preliminary results from the Workers’ Party oral history project, a partnership between Centro Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (Fundação Perseu Abramo) and CPDOC (Fundação Getúlio Vargas). It analyzes the many initiatives taken by the Workers’ Party in what regards to its history and the context in which the oral history project itself developed, as part of the memory policies implemented by the party in its new institutional configuration. It draws on the testimonies of three veteran left-wing activists that took part in the Workers’ Party foundational processes (Apolônio de Carvalho, Antonio Candido e Manoel da Conceição) to point out to the potentials of those sources as tools for the renewal of historiographical analyses about the party and the context from which it emerged.