Fractured Memories and Photographs: Black Workers, Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional, and the Myth of Racial Democracy (1964-2005)

Abstract

Abstract: This article analyzes manifestations of structural racism within the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) and in the city of Volta Redonda between the 1940s and the 2000s, with particular emphasis on the period of the business–military dictatorship. Drawing on interviews conducted between 2008 and 2023, oral history, the analysis of photographs using racial hetero-identification criteria, and the cross-referencing of institutional documentation and labor court cases, the study investigates the tension between the oficial discourse of the “steelworker family” and the myth of racial democracy, on the one hand, and the concrete experiences lived by Black workers, on the other. It argues that these discourses operated as mechanisms that normalized memory and working-class experience, masking racial inequalities and specific forms of institutional violence. The article is structured around two central empirical axes: the creation of the Palmares Club of Volta Redonda, founded in 1965 by Black workers following their exclusion from CSN-affiliated social clubs; and leukopenia (benzenism), an occupational disease that disproportionately affected Black workers concentrated in unhealthy and hazardous sectors of production, revealing a racial division of labor and the racialization of disease as a strategy for the denial of rights. By articulating memory, images, and life trajectories, the study demonstrates how workers’ narratives and visual records fracture the oficial discourse, exposing practices of institutional racism, processes of resistance, and forms of Black identity afirmation within the context of developmentalism and dictatorship.