The Artistic Union: specialized workers, identity of class and claim of rights; Recife, in the late decades of the 19th century

• Grant number: 09/17164-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: April 01, 2010
• End date: May 31, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Claudio Henrique de Moraes Batalha
• Grantee: Marcelo Mac Cord
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 06/57297-1 - Workers in Brazil: identities, rights and politics (17th to the 20th Century), AP.TEM

Abstract

The research project I propose aims to study the "Artistic Union", an association which was in operation in Recife in the late decades of the 19th century. The scope of that entity of Pernambuco, which gathered qualified handicraftsmen, was to protect the "class of artists" and fight so that all those it represented had the right to vote directly and could be elected for the legislative. The history on similar themes is scarce, since for decades, the traditional labor work despised or underestimated all those objects supposedly linked to the "pre-history of the worker class". The sources I shall use to track the activities of the "Artistic Union" are various. Among these, newspapers of large and small circulation, reports from Presidents of Pernambuco, provincial laws, petitions to the House of Representatives, minutes by mutualists and processes from different judicial instances. Within the scope of the Thematic Project, my research project sets a dialogue between its two investigation axes: the construction of identities between workers and their claim for rights. (AU)