“Inciting others to strike movements”: the presence of political prisoners from the October 1931 Uprising in the Recife Detention House (1931-1933)

Abstract

This article explores the history of prisons in Brazil during the Vargas age. Taking up an event that has been practically forgotten by historiography, we investigate the daily prison life of the participants in the October 1931 uprising in the Recife House of Detention. We seek to demarcate the social diversity of these political prisoners, as well as their contestatory actions in everyday prison life. We will argue that the presence of these individuals fostered, albeit indirectly, political mobilization of ordinary prisoners. To this end, we conducted a critical examination of a heterogeneous corpus of primary sources—including official correspondence, letters, petitions, prison records, and memoirs—whose diversity allowed us to explore aspects of Pernambuco’s prison history that remain underexamined in the historiography.