ONE COLD MORNING in June 2017, I received a message from Professor Celso Thomas Castilho, of Vanderbilt University, inquiring if I would be interested in scheduling a Skype conversation about a possible translation of my book, which had just been released in Brazil by the University of São Paulo Press. Celso had no idea how happy that message made me, so I would like to begin by thanking him for his hard work, without which the reader might not be holding this book in their hands. In this regard, I would also like to thank my editors for their support throughout the entire process, which involved submitting the original proposal and its approval and publication: Carla Fontana, from the University of São Paulo Press, and Zachary Gresham, from the Vanderbilt University Press. Through them, I extend my thanks to all the workers involved in the production of this book, from the copyeditors to the printers.
The maps that illustrate the book were produced and kindly ceded by my friend, the geographer and professor Tiago Pires. I owe Professor Bruno Guimarães Martins, who also studies the life and work of Paula Brito, a debt of thanks for his generosity in sharing the prints of the publisher’s family that he found in the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute.
I would like to thank the British Brazilianist and historian Sabrina Gledhill for her superb translation. I cannot say how much I have learned from seeing the solutions she proposed for the English edition. I am therefore grateful to the São Paulo Research Foundation for its grant for the translation (FAPESP Process no. 2018/11281-4), recognizing the central role which that agency has played in promoting scientific research in the state of São Paulo and Brazil. In addition to the translation, FAPESP financed both my original research and the publication of this book in Portuguese. This edition was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001.
Many thanks to my colleagues at the Department of History and the Research Center on the Social History of Culture (CECULT) at the University of Campinas for their warm welcome. Despite the protests of Silvia Hunold Lara, I can once again affirm that she and Jefferson Cano, Robert Slenes, and Sidney Chalhoub are the mentors who have enabled me to improve as a historian, and who continue to do so. I am also immensely grateful to Flavia Peral, who is responsible for technical and administrative support at CECULT. Without her, our work would be impossible.
At the time I was researching this book, Brazil was a different place. I belong to the generation of historians born between the end of the dictatorship and the beginning of the process of redemocratization—a generation that grew up during what was perhaps the most extensive expansion program for higher education ever seen in Brazilian history. I remember our enthusiasm well, as many, like me, were the first in our families from all parts of Brazil’s interior and low-income urban peripheries to have access to university and teaching careers. I would like to see that enthusiasm once again in my students, whom I thank for the daily lessons of perseverance in these difficult times.
Campinas, October 17, 2019