For a soft revolution in the fields. Meanings of the political vocabulary of Antonio Callado’s reports on the northeast region (1959-1960)

Abstract

This article aims to explore possible relations between the history of press and the history of rural social movements in Brazil. To do so, it will analyze a series of news reporting from Antonio Callado concerning the north-east region and the Peasant Leagues. They were first published in the daily newspaper Correio da Manhã in 1959 and printed together in the book Os industriais da seca e os “galileus” de Pernambuco (“The entrepreneurs of drought and the ‘Galileans’ from Pernambuco”) one year later. Since then, this work has been taken by historians and social scientists as a major source of information to study that period. However, these reportings have not yet received a specific study that might shed light on their conditions of production and their political objectives. Therefore, this analysis intends, by considering the news reportings published originally in the newspaper and the editorials that commented on them, to think through these questions. This approach might assess the role of Callado’s individual choices and the social forces that converged to produce those texts, as well as some of the meanings of their political vocabulary.