The city of São Paulo in the Antônio de Alcântara Machado's chronicles

• Grant number: 13/19684-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2014
• End date: December 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Fernanda Arêas Peixoto
• Grantee: Diogo Barbosa Maciel
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The city of São Paulo's modernization in the beginning of 20th century brought new characters and new cultural and artistic elements, which contributed to change the urban visage, the sociability and the social imaginary about the period. Many of these aspects were approached in Antônio de Alcântara Machado's production, whose work range goes from the immigrant contribution to change urban space and the acquaintanceship among Brazilian and foreign people on public space, rich and poor, to the city's cultural and artistic life that following the massive importation of European culture, had its height at this time. The author's work offers an original perspective to widen the knowledge about those phenomena, lighting both socializing process and immigrant adaptation to the city's districts, their pathways and trajectories until their definitive fixation in the city's landscape and the formation of a cultural and artistic conscience within São Paulo's bourgeoisie, which was strongly intertwined with the modernist movement. Calling upon his art criticism, fictional and journalistic texts, this research aims to follow how São Paulo modernization, in its multiple dimensions, can be known symbolically and materially by this author's work, who involved with modernist leaders and political and economic elites that guided the direction of the city, offers an original and fertile source to know the social and cultural changes brought off in that decades.