Forty years ago, rather accidentally, John D. French became a historian of the ABC Paulista, the heavily industrialized region southeast of the state capital São Paulo. These were the days of the military regime, accelerating inflation, and the political rise of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who gained national prominence as the public face of several major strikes between 1978 and 1980. French entered the PhD program at Yale in 1979, set to study nineteenth-century Mexico, until his doctoral adviser, Emília Viotti da Costa, encouraged him to learn more about the events transpiring in the ABC at the time and inspired him to become a Brazilianist.
Lula and His Politics of Cunning is the fruit of French's lifelong commitment to studying and understanding the metalworkers of the ABC region whom he first encountered during field research for his PhD. Lula was on his mind then and has remained on his...
