The beginnings of the lodging industry in São Paulo

an analysis of its workforce (1850-1890)

Abstract

This article analyzes the initial conclusions of the project “Hospitality and history of the São Paulo hotel industry”, under development since 2023. The ongoing project seeks to expose interpretative gaps in the history of the São Paulo hotel industry, such as its historicity and cultural ties with the society in question. Here, the characteristics of the labor force used in the sector at its beginning as an economic activity are exposed. This is an exploratory research with a methodology that focuses directly on the documentary collection in newspapers that circulated in the city of São Paulo during the 19th century and associates this method with the triangulation of the texts of the advertisements presented at the historical moment of their publication. In the text produced, we sought to analyze how the advertisements published in daily newspapers with significant circulation at the time reproduced cultural values ​​of the society in which they were inserted. The service sector in Brazil was sustained by a certain contamination of guidelines and values ​​originating from the old slave model, hindering the development and specialization of the sector in a specific enterprise, such as the hotel sector analyzed here. Furthermore, during this period in the history of the city of São Paulo, hotels served as a meeting point for businesses conducted by travelers or even residents who, taking advantage of the circulation of people in these establishments, ran parallel businesses using the hotel base for this purpose. This aspect demonstrates that the public and private sectors maintained close and poorly defined relations, a fact associated with the persistence of values ​​that were much more rural than urban, especially in the aspects of the city of São Paulo.