By WALNICE NOGUEIRA GALVÃO*

The Faculty of Philosophy of Rio Preto was the most affected by the coup: when I was going to take office as a professor, I got off the train and went straight to the jail to visit my colleagues.

1.

Anyone who thinks that Florestan Fernandes' involvement with agrarian reform dates back to his time as a federal deputy is mistaken. The involvement was long-standing and had been going on since the professor, a militant intellectual like few others, devoted himself to the Public School Campaign. Many other illustrious figures, from various political backgrounds, went on conference tours throughout the country.

The campaign opposed the infamous Law of Guidelines and Bases of Education that was being processed in Parliament, with Carlos Lacerda as its champion. The new law sought to privatize public education, which the dictatorship would later take charge of implementing. And the excellence of public education would see its end.

A vague memory of a certain photo of the professor piqued my curiosity. It showed Florestan Fernandes speaking at a round table at the Faculty of Philosophy in São José do Rio Preto, while agrarian reform activists, the so-called “squatters” from nearby Santa Fé do Sul, stood behind the table, holding movement flags.

The memory was reactivated when the Florestan Fernandes National School, of the MST, was named, with another life-size photo of him serving as a trigger for the memory, right at the entrance.

I started asking everyone who had seen the old photo with the squatters. I asked their relatives, the image researcher Vladimir Saccheta, people from the Faculty of Philosophy at USP, the Workers' Party and the media. To no avail.

Little is known about the fact that the Faculty of Philosophy of Rio Preto was the hardest hit by the 1964 coup, with the highest number of arrests among professors, students and staff, as well as the highest number of dismissed and expelled students in all of Brazil. It was invaded and the arrests were made on April 1st. Other schools, at various levels, would be harder hit by the AI-5 of 1968, but immediately after the coup, this one was the one. So much so that it survived the AI-5 unscathed: there was nothing left to purge.

Its faculty consisted of graduates from the Faculty of Philosophy of USP, located in Maria Antonia. The recruitment process had brought to Rio Preto all the teachers from the student union's preparatory course, whose positions were filled by competitive examination. I was a student at the preparatory course and I can attest to its high quality.

And they had created a cutting-edge school with cutting-edge projects that put the city on the cultural map. Among them, a branch of the CPC and a theater called GRUTA modeled after the Arena, which provided assistance and made visits to the young. The new group performed in neighboring cities. A region-wide poetry competition was called Poetic Spawning, An adult literacy campaign was launched using the Paulo Freire method.

A University Reform was even discussed, which included equal representation of students and staff, a future demand everywhere, in 1968. The political and cultural flourishing was in tune with the rest of the country, during the Jango government,

It was there that I made my debut as a teacher. When I arrived to take office, I got off the train and went straight to the prison to visit my colleagues, the ones who had invited me. Only then did I report to the College, where I would teach for two years, and which was no longer the one I had committed to. It was desolation…

Half a century later, researchers began to rescue this saga from oblivion, producing works that I sought out when other avenues were exhausted.

Several have begun to emerge, and continue to emerge. Caroline Maria Florido's master's dissertation, defended at Unicamp in 2013, was very useful. Its title gives a good idea of ​​what the flourishing and the repression that suffocated it were: “From cultural effervescence to dictatorial obscurantism: the history of the FFCL of São José do Rio Preto under the gaze of the 1964 intervention”. In an article in which the author summarizes her thesis, entitled “The intervention in the FFCL of São José do Rio Preto in 1964”, there is an allusion to Florestan Fernandes and squatters from Santa Fé do Sul together on the same day in the city (p. 16 and 17), at the headquarters of the Faculty of Philosophy. I was on the right track…

2.

Among the various works that deal with the 1964 purge, I even found a thesis on the history of Unesp that, in the chapter dedicated to the Rio Preto unit, ignores and does not even mention the brutal repression it was subjected to, which has marked its trajectory to this day! A great service to History… But there are other works, and good ones.

One of them is the result of a monumental collective feat. Organized by Zuleika Aum Attab, a student and teacher at the house, it is entitled Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of São José do Rio Preto: A history of achievements and disagreements (2016), In addition to reconstructing the chronicle of the intervention launched at the school in 1964, it contains numerous testimonies and testimonies from those affected. A commission was responsible for conducting around 60 interviews.

From these readings, the figure of Wilson Cantoni, a graduate in Social Sciences from FFCL-USP, and Maria Antonia, a sociologist and professor at the institution since its founding in 1957, stood out. After being impeached and hunted, he went into exile in Chile. He would have a distinguished international career, teaching at FLACSO until the fall of Salvador Allende, working at the International Labor Organization, in Costa Rica and in the United States. He would return to Rio Preto, where his wife Marli was born, to die prematurely of cancer in 1977.

It was Wilson Cantoni who made contact with the squatters of Santa Fé do Sul and Porto Epitácio, even bringing about 40 of them to Rio Preto and hosting them on the College's premises. And this was after a parade through the city, led by Jofre Correa: one can imagine the uproar of the natives, who hallucinated, fantasizing about a revolution on their doorstep. Wilson Cantoni was also an active member of the Public School Campaign, which was expanding throughout the country.

That was how, when Florestan Fernandes offered to give a conference in which he warned about the threat of privatization contained in the Law of Guidelines and Bases of Education, the squatters staying in the Faculty building showed up, just as I remembered seeing in the photo.

The Peasant League movement was growing nationwide. They were created throughout the country and Francisco Julião's leadership was established. Numerous in São Paulo, the best-known and most combative were those in Pernambuco and Paraíba. They demanded agrarian reform (one of the “basic reforms” of the Jango government) and the distribution of unproductive large estate lands.

The whole of Brazil followed the reports that Antonio Callado made for the Morning mail, and which, collected in a book, can still be read today. Much later, Goat marked for death – documentary by Eduardo Coutinho that records the assassination of one of the leaders and the dismantling of everything. Both the report and the film are precious documents about the period.

As Wilson Cantoni was very well-liked at his home school at USP, he was one of those responsible for the participation of the Rio Preto College in the Public School Campaign and for the presence of his former professor Florestan Fernandes (whom he called “Efe-Efe” familiarly, but only behind his back). He was also responsible for a large number of hirings, as attested, among others, in interviews and testimonies, by Maurício Tragtenberg and Michel Löwy, whom he recruited, in the words of the latter, “as his assistant”.

In honor of the most influential professor the school has ever had, after his death, and as soon as possible given the dictatorship, the Wilson Cantoni Academic Center was named after him. The Center includes the “Action Center for Agrarian Reform,” which in 2024 is holding a University Conference in Defense of Agrarian Reform. As you can see, it keeps the flame of its eponymous hero alive, today named after a street in Rio Preto and São Paulo.

João Pedro Stédile became interested in the case and arranged for me to contact historian Clif A. Welch, who sent me his book with the biography of Jofre Correa, leader of the squatters' movement, and also a recommendation for a 30-minute video on YouTube.

O Regional Diary, from Rio Preto, has published many articles and reports about the saga of the Faculty of Philosophy, which traumatized the history of the city and the country. All that's left is to find the photo.

*Walnice Nogueira Galvão Professor Emeritus at FFLCH at USP. She is the author, among other books, of reading and rereading (Sesc\Ouro over Blue). [amzn.to/3ZboOZj]

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