This article joins the persistent (and still current) effort to decipher the riddle of Brazil's equally persistent inequality. Resuming the interpretation of modern Brazil proposed by Juarez Brandão Lopes in the 1960s, the article proposes to revisit the "Vargas Era" and its historical meaning and scope, in light of the reproduction of inequalities over time. The author contends that "regulated citizenship" generated the expectation of social protection among Brazilian workers, feeding the promise of citizens' integration, which was not fulfilled, while performing the task of finally (but not definitively) incorporating workers as artifices in the Brazilian state-building process.