Noise,morality,and resistance: Punk,DIY ethos,and repression in the São Paulo metropolitan scene (1977–1985)

Introduction

This article aims to examine how the punk scene in São Paulo metropolitan region (1977–1985) constructed “do-it-yourself” (DIY) practices as forms of cultural resistance and political identity under conditions of censorship, moral regulation, and authoritarian repression during the Brazilian military dictatorship. Specifically, it situates punk within the sociopolitical context of the regime's phase, analyzing how DIY practices forged subcultural belonging amid material precarity and political surveillance. Engaging Brazilian cultural historiography and international punk studies, and drawing on primary sources such as fanzines, censorship records, and manifestos, the article advances a reinterpretation of Brazilian punk by foregrounding empirical analysis of internal conflicts, identity disputes, and the intersection between censorship, moralism, and oppositional politics. Three key concepts structure the analysis. Censorship, whether formally exercised by the Division of Censorship of Public Entertainment (DCDP) or informally through surveillance by the National Information Service (SNI), is understood not merely as the prohibition of cultural content, but as a regime of control, legally and administratively grounded, that mobilized moral condemnation to suppress political dissent. Moralism refers to the ideological and institutional use of moral discourse by the dictatorship and conservative sectors of society to delegitimize punk culture, converting esthetic provocation, bodily difference, and cultural autonomy into signs of social danger and immorality. Resistance is employed in a cultural and political sense, encompassing not only explicit acts of opposition to the regime, but also everyday practices of identity formation, cultural production, and collective action that challenged the social, symbolic, and moral order of authoritarian Brazil, even when marked by contradiction, fragmentation, and internal dispute.

The emergence of punk in Brazil from 1977 must be understood within the broader context of the civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985), particularly its final phase marked by a slow and controlled political liberalization designed by the regime itself. Under conditions of repression, authoritarian control, and economic decline, youth from São Paulo's metropolitan peripheries and the industrial belt of the ABC adopted punk as both esthetic and political expression, articulating social discontent, denouncing inequality, and creating insurgent identities.

From 1977 to 1985, Brazil underwent a gradual transition toward redemocratization. Despite General Ernesto Geisel's discourse of “political distension,” censorship and repression persisted even after the revocation of Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) in 1978. ¹ Economic crisis, unemployment, and the erosion of labor protections deepened structural inequalities and social marginalization. As Hobsbawm (1995: 245) notes, Brazil's dependent modernization produced a “subclass” excluded from formal citizenship, a condition that fostered alternative forms of cultural resistance outside institutional politics.

Punk reached Brazil through transnational countercultural flows but was quickly redefined by local realities. In São Paulo's peripheries, scarcity became creation and subcultural belonging turned into political affirmation. More than an imported style, punk in Brazil constituted a specific practice of resistance, shaped by censorship, repression, and identity disputes. Peripheral neighborhoods, marked by infrastructural deficits and restricted access to cultural goods, concentrated displaced populations who turned necessity into creativity. Within this context, the do-it-yourself ethic filled gaps in identity formation, structuring punk sociability and functioning, as Guerra (2013: 131) suggests, as an ethical and political matrix.

The DIY principle was not merely esthetic or economic but a political stance forged under authoritarianism. Producing their own records, fanzines, and visuals, punks contested both the cultural industry and the dictatorship's moral order, which used moralism as a means of repression by equating dissent with immorality. Punk's provocative gestures were therefore political acts that challenged hegemonic codes and expressed a radical desire for rupture. Yet these identities were never homogeneous: tensions between autonomy and commercialization, radicalism and depoliticization, turned punk into a site of conflict and negotiation amid the disintegration of the regime's modernizing project.

Amidst this plurality of contested representations, this article aims to problematize the following question: How did the São Paulo punk scene construct and develop DIY practices as forms of resistance and identity under the conditions of censorship and repression during the final years of the dictatorship?

This research draws on historiography and primary sources to examine punk in the São Paulo metropolitan region, focusing on how DIY practices, developed amid precarious conditions, forged an ethos of belonging and contributed to the emergence of the “punk war” in a context still marked by repression and censorship.

Bittencourt and Vieira (2022: 11) note that studies on Brazilian punk have over four decades of tradition. Building on this legacy, the article surveys key authors who have approached the São Paulo scene from plural and nonessentialist perspectives, including Bivar (1982), Caiafa (1985), Costa (1992), Oliveira (2006), Teixeira (2007), Moraes (2010), Renan Souza (2017), Andrade (2020), and Pires (2023). This body of scholarship provides the theoretical foundation for the present analysis.

Methodologically, the study follows Jörn Rüsen's (2007) ² substantive-analytical framework, applied to documents from the “Movimento Punk” collection at the Historical Documentation Center of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and the National Archives. The research focuses on punk's oppositional practices under the dictatorship, drawing on digitized materials available at acervopunk.com.br, which hosts over 1100 documents, including fanzines, letters, posters, flyers, and legal cases from censorship and intelligence agencies.

Rather than isolating specific aspects, the study adopts a interpretation of the São Paulo punk scene as a historical and cultural phenomenon, seeking to integrating documentation with critical historiography, it positions punk as a key cultural expression of Brazil's late dictatorship, one that exposed the contradictions of authoritarian modernization and anticipated the ethical, esthetic, and political impulses of redemocratization.

In light of this, the article is organized around four axes: (a) DIY as resistance and necessity in authoritarian Brazil (1977–1985); (b) building the São Paulo scene: between precariousness and creative power; (c) identity disputes and the “Punk War”: violence, authenticity, and representation; and (d) between censorship and the streets: punk, moralism, and political action.

DIY as resistance and necessity in authoritarian Brazil (1977–1985)

In the late 1970s, Brazil began a cautious political opening. The Amnesty Law allowed exiles to return while pardoning those responsible for torture, expanding public freedoms (Fausto, 1995). The New Organic Law of Political Parties ended the MDB–ARENA duality, enabling the formation of new political organizations that would later mobilize for direct presidential elections.

At the same time, the Brazilian economy exposed the limits of the so-called “economic miracle.” Despite an average annual Gross Domestic Product growth of 11% between 1967 and 1973, the military government's policies deepened income concentration: by 1970, the richest 10% of the population held about half of the national income, while the top 1% earned as much as the poorest 50%. Wage suppression and strict union control kept the minimum wage at historically low levels, widening social inequalities and weakening the purchasing power of the working classes (Barone; Bastos; Mattos, 2015).

Culturally, authoritarian control coexisted with resistance. Artists and intellectuals transformed music, theater, cinema, and alternative media into spaces for political dissent, identity formation, and new forms of sociability, challenging both the regime and the state's cultural hegemony (Napolitano, 2001).

It was in this context of political and economic crisis that punk emerged in Brazil, initially in major cities such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasília. Due to the scarcity of direct references and growing interest in the theme, the punk experience in Brazil underwent a process of reinterpretation and adaptation, were shaped by local conditions and the incorporation of Brazilian social realities. Unlike in the UK, where punk emerged as a symbolic response to the crisis of the welfare state (Hebdige, 2018), its circulation in the Global South was strongly marked by processes of translation and cultural appropriation. As Dines, Gordon and Guerra (2017) note, the Do It Yourself (DIY) ethos became a central driver of punk's global diffusion, defined as an accessible, autonomous practice “music that anyone can make” which encouraged the creation of independent networks for production, recording, distribution, and cultural circulation. The globalization of punk did not erase local particularities; rather, it fostered processes of reterritorialization and hybridization, in which each scene reinterpreted international canons according to its own social and political context. Punk thus constitutes a network of translocal scenes, simultaneously local and global, whose “multiple anchoring,” national and international, macro and micro, is crucial for its vitality and persistence as a culture of resistance (Dines et al., 2017: 17–18).

As Dines et al. (2017) also emphasize, punk spread and consolidated globally as an accessible and autonomous practice, “anyone can do it,” enabling young people to create their own bands, fanzines, labels, and alternative spaces independent of financial resources or the mainstream music market. DIY principle stands as one of the central pillars of global punk. As Stephen Duncombe (2008: 7) observes, by defining themselves against a society grounded in consumption, zinesters and punks privilege the ethic of DIY, make your own culture and stop consuming what is made for you. More than a mere production strategy, DIY constitutes an ethical and political stance grounded in autonomy and cultural self-determination, directly challenging the dominant logics of consumption, production, and circulation.

This way punk resistance under authoritarianism was not limited to Brazilian but emerged across different regions of the Global South. As Muñoz and Marín (2006) in Colombia and Feixa (2006) in Mexico, punk emerged as an esthetic and existential response to local contexts marked by state violence, social exclusion, and authoritarianism, appropriating global repertoires to critique local realities. This perspective aligns with the work of López (2015, 2020) and Dolabani (2021), who highlight the rise of punk in Argentina as a form of opposition to authoritarianism during the final years of the military dictatorship. As Vázquez (1990: 169) observes, punk in that country also took on the task of preventing the suffering experienced under the dictatorship from being forgotten, reinscribing it into collective memory through graffiti and urban inscriptions that daily evoked the traces of repression. This practice echoes what Muñoz and Marín (2006) identified as ‘counter-information’ in Colombian hip-hop and punk, where music and graffiti served as means to document and resist oppression. Similarly, and within the same regional dynamics of cultural resistance, Greene (2016) interprets Peruvian rock underground as an esthetic and political response to the dual forms of authoritarianism, state and revolutionary, that marked the 1980s, showing how punk in Lima embodied resistance and creative dissent amid a landscape of political violence and social collapse.

In Brazil, the material precariousness and social exclusion of the urban peripheries found in punk both a form of expression and a strategy of resistance. Bittencourt and Vieira (2022), reviewing historiography on Brazilian punk, highlight the argument that suburbanity, combined with material scarcity, constitutes the core specificity of the Brazilian punk scene. Caiafa (1985) similarly emphasized that the punk esthetic in Brazil was intrinsically linked to the material conditions of young people's existence, functioning not merely as an esthetic choice but as a creative response to resource scarcity, a thesis widely echoed in studies on punk in Brazil during the 1980s and 1990s. Focusing on suburbanity as a defining feature also perpetuates a foundational myth of punk in southeastern Brazil, particularly São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as popularized by Bivar (1982). However, as Pires and Vieira (2024) note, this perspective tends to overlook young middle-class punks from Brasília, highlighting ongoing debates over “authentic” versus “false” punks, as exemplified in the documentary Botinada (2006).

Early studies by Bivar (1982), Pedroso and Souza (1983), Caiafa (1985), and Costa (1992) also identified the DIY ethos as both a practical necessity and an ideological choice, converting precariousness into creative potential. Although punk did not constitute a hegemonic phenomenon, experiences in São Paulo were particularly inscribed in the precariousness and exclusion experienced by peripheral youth. The “assembly” of punk was thus based on the possibilities afforded by that social reality, functioning as both a strategy for survival and a form of expression in a context of scarcity.

In light of these dynamics, the DIY ethos in São Paulo took shape amid conditions of material scarcity and social exclusion, transforming constraint into a catalyst for creativity and collective organization. To grasp how these practices and meanings coalesced locally, it is essential to consider the relational and spatial dimensions of punk as a scene. The concept of scene is particularly useful for understanding the fluid, contested, and territorially grounded character of São Paulo's punk networks, a perspective emphasized in post-subcultural studies. Following Straw (1991, 2006, 2014) and Bennett and Peterson (2004), this article employs scene as a “system of articulation” shaped by the intense circulation of people, sounds, and signs. Such circulation assumes specific contours in distinct contexts, reflecting local particularities such as those found in the São Paulo metropolitan area. The scene, therefore, constitutes a dynamic cultural space marked by shifting alliances, shared practices, and internal disputes over legitimacy and authenticity. As Straw (2014) observes, scenes are not merely social gatherings but also environments of work and transformation, ethical spaces that enable mediation and interaction.

In the following section, the analysis turns to the concrete configurations of the punk scene in the São Paulo metropolitan region, examining how these dynamics materialized in everyday practices, sociability, and resistance.

Building the São Paulo scene: Between precariousness and creative power

To understand the São Paulo punk scene, it is essential to consider the city's urban foundations. Maricato (1996) highlights a duality between the “real city” and the “hegemonic city,” shaped by twentieth-century industrialization and unplanned urban expansion. Migratory flows and the lack of inclusive housing policies forced the working class into peripheral and vulnerable areas, producing material precarity, political invisibility, and reinforcing racial and class inequalities (Fernandes, 1965).

Job opportunities were concentrated in the city center, where most punks worked as clerks, factory workers, street vendors, and other urban proletariat roles (Bivar, 1982: 97). The center also functioned as a space of encounter and sociability, where young workers forged networks that symbolically transcended peripheral marginalization.

Thus, inevitably, the first contacts with punk were mediated through urban sociability in the city center, especially at Galeria do Rock, as well as through rare imported records and magazines, such as the compilation A Revista Pop Apresenta o Punk Rock, 1977, including tracks by Sex Pistols, Ramones, The Jam, Ultravox, Eddie and the Hot Rods, The Runaways, and London and Stinky Toys.

As Rafael Sousa (2009: 74) observes, the relationship between youth and music throughout the twentieth century fostered identities grounded in individuality and in networks of affinity, often marked by a conscious refusal to conform to collective norms. In São Paulo, punk initially emerged in the city center through access to Anglophone recordings but quickly assumed a peripheral and anticapitalist character. While the center served as a site of sociability and record exchange, the social bases of punk were located in the peripheries, where most young people lived, studied, and forged their sense of belonging.

The northern neighborhood of Vila Carolina became the pioneering locus of this process. As Andrade (2020: 44–50) shows, the area developed with the settlement of low-income populations displaced from central districts such as Barra Funda, Perdizes, and Pompeia, and from smaller towns in the countryside, who found there an affordable housing alternative. Its precarious housing structures, including the tenement known as “Navio Negreiro,” reflected the material conditions of peripheral life and a strong tradition of Black sociability and culture.

This environment of self-construction, infrastructural deficiency, and exclusion also enabled the emergence of local punk practices. According to Moreira (2006), interviews with punks from the region highlight the revolt of peripheral youth against capitalist deprivation and state repression. Renan Souza (2017) notes that the EETAL School (Escola Estadual Tarcísio Álvares Lobo) played a key role by offering music classes where students began forming bands such as AI-5, Condutores de Cadáver, and Restos de Nada, considered the first punk groups in São Paulo.

The convergence between material precariousness and the musical simplicity of punk facilitated its spread beyond Vila Carolina, reaching other areas of the São Paulo metropolitan region. In this expansion, the ABC Paulista, comprising Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano do Sul, was fundamental. As one of Brazil's main industrial centers since the 1950s with the establishment of the automotive industry, the region became a symbolic space of working-class identity and an important axis for the diffusion of punk culture throughout the peripheries.

Cultural life in the ABC Paulista region between the 1950s and 1970s reflected its rapid industrialization and the rise of a modern urban culture. According to Leandro de Souza (2022: 408–410), local cinemas, clubs, and radio stations became central spaces of sociability, expressing the region's aspiration for modernization and connection with global cultural trends. This circuit established the symbolic and material foundations that later supported early punk expressions in the region, where cultural modernization overlapped with persistent social marginality, making the ABC both similar to and distinct from São Paulo.

Building on this background, the ABC Paulista became a central nucleus for punk bands in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Groups such as Passeatas, Ulster, Corte Marcial, DZK, and Garotos Podres reflected the area's socioeconomic precarity and rebellious energy, contributing to a distinct ABC sound and identity within the broader São Paulo punk scene.

The formation of punk identities in São Paulo was shaped by tensions between individuality and collectivity, political radicalism and depoliticization, autonomy, and commodification. As Oliveira (2006: 29) argues, the movement initially revolved around music, esthetics, and behavior rather than systematic political awareness. For many adolescents, anarchist ideas were first encountered through fanzines, while representations of Nazism came from television. In this early stage, marked by misinformation and cultural hybridity, acts of provocation and violence were often less ideological than expressions of belonging.

In this context, João Pires (2023) notes that the diffusion of punk culture in São Paulo's metropolitan peripheries introduced new ideological and emotional dynamics, especially in the ABC region. The Oi! movement reasserted punk's working-class roots and street connections but soon became a contested field of meanings. For many youths, Oi! represented collective rebellion and class pride; for others, it assumed exclusionary and violent forms, showing how frustration could be redirected into aggression rather than solidarity. These tensions culminated in the so-called “punk war,” understood not as mere juvenile disorder but as a material expression of disputes over authenticity, autonomy, and rebellion during Brazil's democratic transition.

Identity disputes and the “punk war”: Violence, authenticity, and representation

Before examining the Punk War, it is important to note that punk identities in São Paulo were relational and marked by tensions between individuality and collectivity, symbol appropriation and rejection, political radicalism and depoliticization, autonomy, and commodification. These tensions manifested in urban spaces through the formation of punk gangs in São Paulo and the ABC region, which served as collectives of identity, territorial, and symbolic affirmation.

Testimonies from the period indicate that the first punk gangs were influenced by global cultural references, particularly the film The Warriors (1979), whose depiction of urban gangs, territorial disputes, and visual codes resonated with working-class youth, shaping the organization and imagination of early punk collectives (Moreira, 2006).

As Teixeira (2007) notes, the territorialization of these gangs was crucial for the development of the Punk War, reflecting differences in social composition and political practice. City punks, concentrated downtown, received greater media attention, which sensationalized their aggressive esthetics and associated them with violence and drug use. ABC region punks, active in industrial municipalities such as Santo André, São Bernardo, and São Caetano, were more involved in social movements between 1979 and 1983.

These gangs were not merely youth groups but concrete expressions of disputes over punk legitimacy. Some included up to 200 members, forming networks with distinct codes of conduct, esthetics, and morality, which reinforced the distinction between “true” and “false” punks. Pedroso and Souza (1983) highlight that punk emerged without a defined ideology, generating multiple interpretations of punk identity. In this context, the movement was often perceived as dirty, violent, antibourgeois, and antisystem, uniting opposition to authority without a cohesive ideology (Caiafa, 1985).

In São Paulo, representations of what it meant to be punk circulated widely. Fanzines, music, and manifestos served as vehicles to reaffirm punk identity, establishing what was and was not considered punk while allowing for diverse and sometimes divergent ideological expressions, as exemplified in the fanzine Lixo Cultural (1983) (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Fanzine “Lixo Cultural,”1983.

When we talk about ideology, we immediately think in political terms, labeling things as right-wing, left-wing, centrist, center-left, center-right, with a more or less defined position … whereas PUNK stands out by staying outside any label that doesn’t fit us. Hierarchies are always organized from the top down, and we’re at the bottom … we reject any form of authority. The principle of anarchy is something very old, which we are trying to revive … the absolute absence of leaders, authority, policing, government, right or left, center, none of them work for us. Everyone can think for themselves and take responsibility for their own actions. Any conscious person is capable of doing that; they don’t even need to be PUNK. Any given order, no matter where it comes from, society, family, every human being has, or should have, enough autonomy … (Fanzine “Lixo Cultural,” 1983. Available: Historical Documentation Center of the PUC, São Paulo. “Punk Movement” Collection, Box 37, file 18.)

The fanzine Lixo Cultural (1983) illustrates the ambivalent nature of punk identity in São Paulo. While its text promotes an explicitly anarchist ethos, rejecting hierarchies, authorities, and ideological labels, its iconography displays two swastikas and an Iron Cross, symbols historically associated with totalitarian regimes. This juxtaposition exemplifies early punk's esthetics of provocation, where transgression blurred critique and the reproduction of power symbols.

Caiafa (1985) interprets such symbolic appropriation as resignification, akin to Foucault's notion of separating signifier from meaning. Among 1980s punks, the swastika was not an endorsement of Nazism but a sign of negation, carrying extreme symbolic weight that resisted commercialization. Unlike hippie visuals absorbed by the market, the swastika remained unassimilable. A practical example is the poster for the concert of Inocentes, Ulster, and Passeatas on August 28, 1982, which prominently features a swastika reminiscent of Vivienne Westwood's mid-1970s Destroy T-shirt, reinforcing esthetic provocation while paradoxically asserting a rejection of established social and political norms. As shown in (Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Concert featuring the bands “Inocentes, Ulster and Passeatas.”

The ambivalence of punk representations extended beyond esthetics to ideological tensions, as shown in the fanzine Anti Sistema 4 (cover illustrated in Figure 3). Its cover evokes the Carecas do Subúrbio gang, later recognized as the first Brazilian skinhead group, reflecting possible convergence with nationalist and violent views (Costa, 1992). The fanzine's content also reveals contradictions. An article on S.P.H.C. (São Paulo Hard Core) presents the band's aim to produce a “raw sound” and oppose war and violence, but concludes with a racial statement: “We are against war and any type of violence, we also honor our color (white)” (Anti Sistema, 1985: 9). The full transcription of the excerpt highlights this contradiction:

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Fanzine “Anti Sistema,” No. 4, 1985.

The coexistence in a single fanzine of violent-group esthetics with antiwar statements and veiled racism, honoring “whiteness” in a country shaped by slavery and discrimination, illustrates the punk scene's internal disputes. It shows how autonomy and confrontation could enable anarchist critique while also permitting racist and exclusionary ideas. This ambivalence, in which opposition to the status quo did not ensure a unified or progressive political stance, was a defining feature of the scene, creating fertile yet unstable ground for identity and political experimentation on the periphery during the democratic transition.

The formation of the gang Carecas do Subúrbio illustrates these contradictions. According to Pires (2023), some members adopted nationalist and racist discourses, while others rejected neo-fascism, emphasizing discipline, strength, and proletarian identity. This shows that punk and Oi! in the ABC region were arenas of political and affective production, where struggles for recognition coexisted with authoritarian impulses.

Symbolic and physical violence was used to police identity boundaries, threatened by media stigmatization and internal heterogeneity. Tensions between ABC punks and city punks, more visible in sensationalist media, intensified rivalries and led to recurrent clashes during the “punk war,” peaking in 1982. Paradoxically, the conflict both united gangs against perceived threats and deepened divisions within the metropolitan scene. The escalation of violence culminated in the death of a young punk, highlighting the extreme stakes of authenticity and belonging (Moreira, 2006). The punk war should thus be understood not as juvenile disorder but as a concrete manifestation of political, symbolic, and territorial struggles that shaped punk identity in São Paulo.

Teixeira (2007) highlighted that the division between punks from the ABC region and São Paulo fueled the so-called “punk war,” uniting gangs against common enemies and creating lasting divisions. Pedroso and Souza (1983: 14) noted that disputes over what constituted “true punk” reflect identity as a contested and relational process, shaped by social exclusion and material precariousness. This internal perception of conflict is vividly captured in the fanzine SP Punk (1982), which offered a rare first-hand account of the dynamics surrounding the punk war.

The newspapers and magazines that publicized the punk movement in Brazil, from the beginning, distorted the ideas proposed by the movement. They said that London punks were very violent, that they took to the streets, fought with everyone, and even killed, failing to show Brazilian readers what the punk movement really was. And since São Paulo is a very large city with several neighborhoods and suburbs, gangs began to form, some far from each other, and these gangs were heavily influenced by these newspapers and magazines, as they were the only means of information. Soon, these gangs became violent as well. And as the punk movement grew in São Paulo, these gangs began to meet, with some clashing and others forming alliances to become stronger. But it did not stop there. Because of some punks from São Paulo and the ABC region, a rift developed between these cities, a rift so great that I don't know how no one has died to this day. Some guys, seeing all this violence, infiltrated the movement with the intention of stealing and beating others up. That's what hinders the movement. The police, the newspapers, society, etc., don't see us as a movement.” (Fanzine “SP PUNK,” n. 1, 1982. Available: Historical Documentation Center of the PUC, São Paulo. “Punk Movement” Collection, Box 37, file 12. Also available in https://acervopunk.com.br).

The documents attribute the violent image of punk to the Brazilian press, which contributed to the formation of gangs across São Paulo and the ABC region. As these gangs met, alliances and hostilities emerged, evolving into open conflict between city and ABC punks. The media's portrayal blurred the line between rebellion and aggression, tragically foreshadowing the later death of a young punk, which exemplified the contradictions between representation and reality, provocation and repression, identity and disintegration.

Similar accounts appear in period sources, such as the third issue of the fanzine 1999 (1983), ³ which describes fights at events, sometimes involving knives, revealing how violence became both a recurrent feature and a spectacle that fascinated and disturbed participants. These testimonies illustrate the tension between authenticity and social precarity among youth.

Alongside violence, the movement attempted to articulate collective political consciousness. The I° Manifesto Punk ⁴ (February 1983) denounced unemployment, hunger, and social regression, calling for unity, self-criticism, and ideological clarity. It emphasized the DIY ethos as a political practice, proposing principles of planning, public awareness, and collective action. The manifesto sought to transform revolt into consciousness and punk into a form of social critique. The text concluded by promoting the event Show Punk on February 12, 1983, in São Bernardo do Campo, which included bands from São Paulo and ABC.

However, these efforts at unity did not immediately succeed. The fanzine Alerta Punk (June 1984) ⁵ indicates that regional tensions persisted, requiring meetings among punks from Santo André, São Caetano, Mauá, São Paulo, and surrounding areas to reaffirm that rivalry was unnecessary. References to individuals “worshiping violence” demonstrate the ongoing difficulty in overcoming internal conflicts and achieving cohesion.

The process leading to “peace among punks” unfolded over several years as groups developed clearer ideological definitions. The Carecas do Subúrbio identified openly as a skinhead group (Costa, 1992), while São Paulo punk collectives increasingly converged around anarchism, a transformation Sousa (1997) terms an “ideological mutation,” reflecting intensified political militancy.

Despite fragmentation and violence, many collectives produced fanzines, lyrics, and other DIY materials expressing social realities under dictatorship. These cultural practices functioned as instruments of denunciation and resistance, reflecting marginalization and opposition to the military regime. Several punks also participated in demonstrations for redemocratization, often confronting state authorities and facing censorship and persecution. The following section examines the mechanisms of repression that shaped the movement during this period.

Between censorship and the streets: Punk, moralism, and political action

The internal struggles of the so-called punk war revealed deep fractures in the São Paulo scene. However, despite these internal disputes, numerous punk collectives managed to organize themselves politically and channel their creativity into acts of resistance. Operating under the shadow of authoritarianism, their “do-it-yourself” (DIY) mentality transcended mere artistic autonomy and took on an explicitly political dimension

In this context, some punks played a notable role in the broader struggle for redemocratization. Participating in demonstrations, distributing printed materials such as fanzines, manifestos, and posters that challenged the status quo. To understand this political action, it is crucial to consider the control mechanisms that framed cultural production during this period. Censorship, reinstated after the promulgation of Institutional Law No. 5 in 1968, functioned as one of the main instruments of authoritarian governance. All cultural manifestations intended for public circulation, books, plays, films, concerts, and song lyrics, had to be submitted to prior review by the Division of Censorship of Public Entertainment, which operated under the Ministry of Justice. Censors assessed whether artistic works were “morally acceptable” and “politically safe,” routinely prohibiting content that referred to class struggle, social inequality, sexuality, or criticism of the military regime. Parallel to this bureaucratic apparatus, the National Information Service (SNI) monitored artists, journalists, and cultural producers, compiling individual dossiers, intercepting correspondence, and identifying potential “subversive elements.” Within this surveillance network, some young punk groups and collectives became targets of these investigations.

This section examines the punk scene in São Paulo during the final years of the military dictatorship, with censorship as a central indicator. Within the collection Censorship of Public Entertainment at the National Archives, 26 cases involving punk were found: two concerning live performances and 24 related to song lyrics, 17 occurring between 1977 and 1985. Bands such as Lixomania, Inocentes, Cólera, Olho Seco, Desertores, and Ratos de Porão were censored, while some were monitored by the SNI for their “subversive potential.”

In keeping with that repressive apparatus, the cases of Helvécio Gomes Pereira (Desertores), Antônio Carlos Callegari (Inocentes), and Jarbas Alves (Ratos de Porão) exemplify the breadth of the criteria applied to punk production. Helvécio's lyrics, such as Sistema Não, whose refrain declares “Punk who is punk will never die / All united we will win / No, system, no,” were banned for “disseminating the philosophy of the group called punk” and “inciting revolt against the system,” according to opinions issued by the Divisão de Censura de Diversões Públicas (DCDP). The song Retrato Maldito, with lines like “Those who command most / Are those who most fear / These will serve as lunch / For the butchers,” was likewise prohibited for portraying, in the censors’ words, “with sadism a scene of massacre” and for implying a “pretension of vengeance against the leaders.”

Callegari's compositions suffered similar treatment. Não à Religião opened with the forceful lines “No, no to religion / We do not believe in religious teachings / That preach the enslavement of minds and bodies” and was censored as a protest against prevailing moral values. Tortura, Medo e Repressão; which described “Cries of pain echoed / Without anyone being able to act” and proclaimed “Tomorrow we will be strong / And we will have reason on our side,” was banned for explicitly referring to practices of torture and for calling for resistance.

The submissions signed by Jarbas Alves further illustrate the scope of the repression. Of fifteen lyrics submitted for review, eight were vetoed. Among them were Corrupção, which stated “Corruption is destroying the nation / And everyone is pretending to be brothers”; Não Não, which protested economic exploitation with lines such as “This inflation will finish the population / and you remain standing while they steal from the poor fellow”; Devemos Protestar, a direct call to action; “We must protest, we want revolution / We must finish the system”; and Punks Venham Lutar, which bluntly asserted “They are all bastards, they are all idiots / they want to bring us down” and was read as incitement to collective mobilization against the authorities. In the censoring opinions (Nos. 1584/82, 1585/82 and 1586/82), these texts were characterized as “social protest, incitement to violence, political protest,” and thus contrary to “morality and good customs.” The repeated reference to a supposed “punk philosophy” in the files makes clear that the movement's style and cultural identity were themselves treated as intrinsically dangerous.

The legal basis for these rejections followed a recurring pattern: appeals to Decree No. 20.493/1946, Article 41, subsections d and f. Subsection d prohibited contents judged offensive to “morals and good customs,” while f proscribed material that “incited disobedience of laws and constituted authorities.” Originally drafted in another authoritarian context ⁶ , this normative framework was extensively reused during the military regime as an instrument of ideological control, enabling the persecution of artists deemed threats to order. By framing punk lyrics as immoral, censors cloaked a fundamentally political intervention in the language of moral guardianship. Moralism thus functioned not as an autonomous ethical stance but as a mechanism of social and political discipline, aimed at suppressing any discourse that challenged the hierarchies of State, Church, or family, symbolic pillars of Brazil's authoritarian modernization.

Consequently, the moralist posture of the censorial apparatus served a strategic function: it converted dissent into deviance and critique into obscenity. The rhetoric of “defending good customs” operated as a language of ideological containment, turning social claims, such as those voiced in Corrupção or Devemos Protestar, into alleged threats to public morality. The “punk danger” was not limited to abrasive esthetics but lay in the collective enunciation by marginalized youth denouncing poverty, police violence, and state corruption. The true object of censorship was not mere impropriety but the political insurgency emerging from the periphery.

These cases make evident that the control exercised by the Divisão de Censura de Diversões Públicas extended beyond cultural policing to a regime of surveillance over subjectivities. By labeling punk lyrics morally indecent, the state asserted its authority not only to regulate political discourse but to police modes of feeling and being. Far from being tolerated as marginal entertainment, punk was perceived as a political threat, capable of mobilizing disillusioned youth and articulating an antiauthoritarian ethos.

Two records in the National Archives, from the National Information Service (SNI), document the monitoring of punks. One, Form 001/CISA (20 February 1984), details surveillance of Aparecido de Paula, “Cido Punk,” including his address, physical description, job, studies, and political affiliations with the Workers’ Party (PT) and Socialist Youth (AJS). His punk identity, combined with political ties, made him a target, showing that the state conflated cultural nonconformity with political dissent. This surveillance extended to his workplace, school, and family, reflecting the regime's view that appearance, music, and ethics could constitute acts of defiance demanding repression.

The second document, Periodic Information Report No. 07/CISA/1983, situates the punk movement within national politics alongside the PT, strikes, and opposition governors. The report describes punks as “against everything and everyone,” highlighting a perceived subversive potential. By framing punk ethics as nihilistic rebellion threatening social and political order, the SNI treated the movement as an ideological threat. Monitoring “Cido Punk” thus exemplifies a broader policy: the state regarded the São Paulo punk scene as a site of cultural insurgency as potent as formal political opposition, warranting preventive surveillance and repression.

The cultural productions perceived by the State as threatening were sophisticated instruments of political critique. An example is the cover of the fanzine Manifesto Punk No. 02 (1983), shown below, which satirizes military president João Batista Figueiredo with the acronyms PDS, PDT, and IMF on his lapel. This graphic subversion reflected the widespread view that institutional politics served elite and international interests, echoing the SNI's observation of punk's total rejection of the system (Figure 4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Fanzine “Manifesto Punk,” No. 02, 1983.

This collage illustrates punk's skepticism toward party politics and its use of esthetics as political communication, where irony and provocation critiqued Brazil's slow transition to democracy. Fanzines, produced with scissors, glue, and typewriters, materialized the “do-it-yourself” principle as insurgent authorship, enabling punks to speak outside traditional media (Moraes, 2010). Their raw, collage-based esthetic (Duncombe, 2008: 37) rejected capitalist rationality and state narratives, creating autonomous networks that the surveillance state sought to neutralize. Punks also acted in the streets, participating in demonstrations against unemployment, cost of living, and supporting strikes, blurring the line between cultural and political dissent.

Political alignments were heterogeneous: some punks rejected party politics entirely, while others maintained ties with left-wing groups, including the Workers’ Party (PT), with many voting for it in 1982 (Sousa, 2002). This combination of autonomy and strategic alliances validated SNI fears of punk as an unpredictable force. Between censorship and street activism, São Paulo punks transformed repression into creation, critique, and radical cultural expression, consolidating their legacy in the Brazilian democratic opening.

Considerations

The study revealed that the emergence of punk in Greater São Paulo was not a mere cultural import, but a creative response to authoritarian structures. It demonstrated how the DIY ethos became a political stance, transforming material scarcity into inventive practice and marginality into a platform for political imagination.

The research documented how state repression extended into cultural dissent, with censorship cases showing how moral condemnation was used to neutralize punk's political potency. Paradoxically, this repression amplified the movement's insurgent power.

Analysis of internal conflicts like the “punk war” revealed the scene as a contested field where social hierarchies were simultaneously challenged and reproduced. Despite fragmentation, the study showed how cultural production through fanzines and performances maintained spaces for political experimentation.

The research ultimately characterized the punk scene as an ethical laboratory for redemocratization, whose practices of self-management and artistic rebellion anticipated broader post-dictatorship demands for autonomy, affirming marginalized voices’ right to create and resist from the periphery.

The distinctive contribution of this article lies in its integration of previously underexplored primary sources, including censorship records and fanzine materials from the “Movimento Punk” collection, with historiographical analysis, providing empirical grounding for claims about punk's political and cultural significance that have often remained theoretical. By positioning the São Paulo scene within both the specific conditions of Brazil's late military dictatorship and the transnational framework of punk as a global culture of resistance, the article bridges Brazilian cultural historiography and international punk studies in ways that advance our understanding of how subcultural resistance operates under authoritarian conditions.