The racism in job advertisements in the 20th century

Abstract In this article, we verified the ways in which phenotypical and behavioral criteria have contributed to worsen social and economic inequality between white and non-white people in the State of São Paulo, in the beginning of the 20th century. Our corpus comprises 20 advertisements, offer and demand for jobs in the newspapers Correio Paulistano and O Estado de S.Paulo, both of great influence in São Paulo's society. This choice may be justified in terms of the documental characteristics inherent to this discursive genre. In our analysis, we have used as our theoretical presuppositions Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis - CDA (2003; 2008), as well as Van Dijk's studies (2010) on racism. In this perspective, genre is considered as a mode of action, one of the representations that Fairclough confers to discourse. It was comprehended as an element of social practices, and analyzed in a sociopolitical and ideological context in which the texts were produced.