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God, Fatherland, Family: Integralismo and the Making of the Far-Right in Twentieth-Century Brazil

Lecture by Daniela Traldi

Chaired by Benjamin Steege

In this talk, Daniela Moraes Traldi examines how Integralistas, the Brazilian fascists who purportedly numbered one million members by 1935, created Brazil’s first-ever mass political organization, but particularly how they survived after the mid-1940s pushed for by women. In the 1930s, Integralists envisioned creating what they called a Christian holistic state (Estado Integral), in which corporatism, nationalism, and faith would sustain the country’s very existence in opposition to communism, materialism, and liberalism.

Offering a fresh analytical framework to this history, Traldi argues that Integralists were able to meaningfully re-group after the Era of Fascism and that women emerged as key socio-political agents for the “reinvention” of Brazilian Integralismo from Latin America’s largest fascist movement of the 1930s to an influential far-right Christian nationalist group after the mid-1940s.

Drawing from largely unexplored sources, such as correspondence, iconographic material, private collections, and oral histories, and building from important scholarship of Latin America, Traldi shows how gender, fascism, and religion appeared as intertwined, complex categories of analysis, especially during the Cold War in Latin America. Also, her talk raises an alarm in the present: the Integralist’s recipe of God, Fatherland, and Family lasted much longer than previously thought.

Image credit: Cover art, A. Thompson Filho, Magazine Anauê, May 1936, Anno II, No.10, Arquivo Público e Histórico do Município de Rio Claro (APHRC), Fundo Plínio Salgado (FPS), Box 032.

The Society of Fellows hosts the Thursday Lecture Series (TLS), which runs regularly throughout the academic year. During the Fall Semester TLS, our Fellows present their work, chaired by Columbia faculty.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Time: 12:15-1:45

Free!

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