Communism and anticommunism in the Lithuanian newspaper Musu Lietuva (SP, 1948-1953)

• Grant number: 23/02933-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2023
• End date: December 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Valéria dos Santos Guimarães
• Grantee: Lucca Ninni Indriunas
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The Lithuanian newspaper Musu Lietuva (Our Lithuania), released in São Paulo in 1948, was confiscated by the Department of Political and Social Order of the State of São Paulo (DEOPS/SP) on suspicion of subversion and attached to the Protocol 51 of the Social Order Police, opening act that marked the destinations of the newspaper. A long-lived publication, it was only closed in 2015, constituting an important corpus of the Lithuanian colony in Brazil. The goal of this project is to investigate what led to the suspicion raised by the DEOPS investigation of those responsible for the Musu Lietuva and how these had an impact on the production of the journal during the period between 1948 to 1953. It will be taken into account both the political situation of Lithuania as well as the repressive measures adopted by Brazil in regards to foreigners, especially those of Eastern European origin, and the initial hypothesis is that, guided by xenophobia, the governments under presidents Getúlio Vargas and Eurico Gaspar Dutra associated Lithuanians and the publication to a supposedly subversive attitude, even without concrete evidence, when making an automatic connection between immigrants from this region and communism. To understand the tendencies of the newspaper, a systematic analysis will be made both of the DEOPS protocol and newspaper itself, treating the newspaper both as a source and as a research object for the history of Brazil. The theoretical-methodological approach focuses on the plural character of the allophone press, which must be considered as national press, and the non-isolation of journals in time, giving the constituent elements of the printed matter a historicity character.