Impacts of the Vargas Era in the countryside: law, rights and memory

Abstract

The Brazilian academic production is considering, almost in consensus, that the peasants has been moved away from the material and symbolical benefits brought by the social rights that belonged to the legislation produced in the “Age Vargas” (1930-1945 and 1951-1954), in special, during the “Estado Novo” (1937-1945). The goal of this article is to relativize this interpretation, collating it to the three sets of evidences: the legislative production for the rural world and the judging processes based on the CLT (Brazilian Labor Law); the administrative processes generated by the mail from agricultural workers sent to the President of the Republic during the “Estado Novo”; and the oral speeches of peasants about this period. This research effort corresponds to two Brazilian agricultural regions - the coffee Southeast with the system of “colonato” and the sugar cane producer Northeast with the system of “morada”.