Candangos

Brasília was hacked out of the scrub brush of the altiplano, or high plains, in Brazil’s interior state of Goiás. When construction began in 1956 the capital was Rio de Janeiro, and most of the population lived along the country’s coast. The project was bold and unprecedented, and president Juscelino Kubitschek fielded criticism from many quarters. The first problem to be solved was: who would do the construction work? Architects and engineers were not an issue, but the day-to-day manual labor and skilled trades people needed to be recruited, deployed, and housed.

There was a ready supply of workers in the country’s Northeast, where employment was scarce, and decades of severe drought made subsistence farming impossible. Nordestinos, people from the area closer to the equator, primarily men, had since the 1870s migrated south to the cities of Rio and São Paulo seeking opportunities to survive and support their families. The pain of this diaspora became part of the culture of the Northeast, in examples such as Luiz Gonzaga’s song Asa Branca and the poetry of Juvenal Galeno:

Vou deixar a minha terra,

Vou para os matos d’além. . .

Que aqui não acho serviço

Para ganhar meu vintém

And my translation, for the sense of it and not word for word:

I will leave my land

Go to the bush down there

Because I can’t find work

To earn my small change

Prejudice against Nordestinos was common, and they were regarded by many in the upper classes as uneducated and slow. These construction workers, the first inhabitants of Brasília, came to be called candangos, a derogatory term of African linguistic derivation, originally used by enslaved people to refer to the Portuguese overlords. Groups of men who migrated south for work were also referred to as pau de arara, or macaw’s perch, because they were transported in the backs of trucks on wooden benches.

Construction of the new capital couldn’t happen without the candangos, but the engineering classes felt the workers should finish building the capital and go home. At first the candangos were housed in tent cities, built by the construction companies who recruited them and paid their way to travel to the Brasília site. The candangos were not allowed housing in the city center, and thus several “satellite cities” sprung up; first the Cidade Livre, later called Núcleo Bandeirante. Then Taguatinga, Samambaia, Cruzeiro, Guará. Workers continued to be needed, and the candangos had no intention of returning to the drought and lack of opportunity in the Northeast.

With time the name candango lost its pejorative sense and became a term of pride. I first learned the word when I met my in-laws, and I was told they were candangos. What does that mean, I asked? It means they built the capital; I was told. Now anyone who is a citizen of Brasília may call themselves a candango, and it has become synonymous with Brasiliense, a resident of Brasília.

The sacrifice and contribution of the candangos made an architectural “wonder of the world” come to life, and they should never be forgotten.