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

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

Lecture by Daniela Moraes 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 and how they survived after the mid-1940s pushed for by women. In the 1930s, Integralistas 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 Integralistas 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 Integralista recipe of God, Fatherland, 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.

Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.