The dance of politics: Workers, recreational associativism and elections in the Rio de Janeiro of the First Republic

Abstract

In january 1925 was held at the headquarters of the Reinado de Siva dance and Carnival Society, in the neighborhood of Cidade Nova, the foundation of an “Independent Political Center of the Workers of the Federal district”. With clearly electoral objectives, it intended to promote candidacies related to the world of the workers for the approaching municipal elections. Faced with a historiographical production that points to the supposed distancing of Brazilian workers from the First Republic in relation to political and electoral issues, the meeting held at the Reinado de Siva appears as a means of investigating the political sense of creation and functioning of dozens of similar recreational clubs, in order to analyze the forms and logics that guided the struggle for rights of its components.