My dear little friend: letters to the ruler. Childhood and Political Culture, a Transnational Approach to the Iberian Dictatorships and the Brazilian New State (1930-75)

forthcoming

In December 1953, an 11-year-old Portuguese girl wrote a letter to Salazar. Maria asked him to use bombs to defeat Russia and communism. The letter said: “You, Doctor Oliveira, who rules this country so well and loves peace, should put an end to these bad people who are hurting everybody.” Hundreds of letters like Maria’s are at the National Archive of Torre do Tombo. This research proposal follows an inventory of these documents, including two other sets of letters addressed to Spanish and Brazilian dictators Franco and Vargas - archived in their respective countries - whose analysis can be found at the intersection of political and childhood histories. In Europe and America, the first decades of the 20th century were marked by the rise of political regimes which, to spread their ideological values and shape the character of the nation, deployed mass media as political propaganda tools. These regimes collaborated in the construction and consolidation of political cultures in which their rulers seemed to merge with the State. This research will focus on Salazarism, Francoism, and Varguism, from the perspective of Transnational History, and it is based on the articulation between a set of state initiatives, centred on a nationalist ideology, and children’s overlooked participation in this state-building process. In Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, there are several works dedicated to the analysis of epistolary writing in the context of authoritarianism. However, little has been devoted to letters written by children, and none about children's letters to government officials. The originality of these sources thus represents an important innovation in the studies of the authoritarian pasts of those countries through the perspective of children, a marginalised subject in historical narratives, and that will enable us to revisit historiographical debates and open a completely new picture on the relation between the Iberian and Brazilian dictatorships, and their societies.