Italian immigration in Rio Grande do Sul was a process in which Italians emigrated to the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, through both private and government initiatives.
Overview Immigration began is a smaller scale and spontaneously between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, gaining intensity in the period from 1875 to 1914, when, through a colonizing program of the Brazilian government, eighty to one hundred thousand Italian immigrants entered the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Most were fleeing famine, epidemics, and wars in Italy, and lived as farmers. The program aimed to populate demographic voids, whiten the population, and establish a productive system based on small farms, with a free and landowning labor force that could supply the internal market with agricultural products.
The project faced many difficulties and periods of tension and social turbulence but was generally successful. The immigrants founded several cities and significantly increased rural production, making the Italian colonial zone economically the second most important in the state by the beginning of the 20th century. Meanwhile, they created a new culture, adapting their millenary traditions to a new environment. In the cities, the economy was widely diversified. A wealthy elite was formed, which promoted an erudite culture, founded associations and clubs, and lived in urban palaces, supported by a mass of marginalized proletarians, many of them coming from the countryside.
Despite the inequalities that soon manifested themselves in colonial society, since the early twentieth century the signs of progress became evident, a "work ethic" guided customs, and an apologetic discourse was articulated around the alleged qualities of the Italian, presenting them as civilizing heroes, creators of wealth, and models of virtue. This enthusiasm, supported and encouraged by the native officialdom, was interrupted during the Vargas Era, due to a nationalizing program and the state of war with Italy, situations that cast a pall of repression over the Italian language and culture of the region. In this period the emphasis on production also changed, industry and commerce assumed primacy, and those who had remained in the countryside suffered the consequences of the decline of the agricultural sector, starting a great exodus to the city, to other colonies, and other states.
In the 1950s, after the repression, a process of reconciliation of the Italians and their descendants with the Brazilians began as well as a wide transition, not only to a new economic model but also regarding customs. A phase of rapid loss of traditions and systematic destruction of evidence of the past, such as documents, monuments, vernacular architecture, and sacred art, was beginning. If until the 1940s Italians rarely considered themselves Brazilians, and everything that referred to their rural roots and the old distant homeland was a source of pride, it was now necessary to create a new identity, one that would be fully integrated into "Brazilianness". This "official" Brazilianness prescribed for the colonial region being Lusophone, urban, bourgeois, and adept at innovation, as long as morality remained unshaken.
The practical reflex of the modernizing program was the intense growth of the industrial sector, with the development of a pole concentrated in Caxias do Sul, a city that, due to a privileged location, placed itself since the 19th century at the forefront of most of the advances. Today, the former Italian colonial region is densely populated and one of the richest, most dynamic and populous in the state. However, this accentuated and accelerated growth has not occurred without issues such as urban violence, inequality and exclusion of the poor, environmental devastation, inefficient policies, economic and real estate speculation, the lack of popular housing, sanitation, and the precariousness of basic services.
Predecessors
The presence of Italians in the area today, defined by the limits of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, is attested at least since the 17th century when several Jesuit missionaries of such nationality went to the region to catechize the natives and organize reductions. But they were often ephemeral presences, itinerating through different American regions. Their presence remained extremely reduced until the beginning of the 19th century, when the population of newcomers began to increase, settling mainly in the capital Porto Alegre, but also reaching several other cities, such as Livramento, Bagé, and Pelotas. They were mainly engaged in commerce, but journalists, politicians, artists, teachers, industrialists, and other professionals also arrived. Many of these founded families which are still flourishing.
In this period Italian immigration was still spontaneous, as the official interests were focused elsewhere. Soon after the transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil in 1808, the government began to encourage the immigration of German and Swiss settlers to Rio de Janeiro. In 1824, Germans became the preferred population in a program to create colonies in Rio Grande do Sul. The project was revolutionary: At a time when a system of large-scale monocultures for export or extensive cattle raising still prevailed, with a slave labor force, the goal was to create a stable rural population of free men who owned small plots of land, settled on unclaimed land, which could improve the usually precarious internal supply of basic consumer products, and help "whiten" the Brazilian population, at the time largely made up of black and indigenous people. In addition, this population would constitute a military reserve force for use in eventual border conflicts.
The first stage of German colonization was considered a success, and there was a desire to repeat the mobilization. However, the social, political, and economic context of the nation changed and frustrated the plans. The Germans began to experience difficulties as early as 1830 when funding for the settlers was cut, and the plots allocated to them were reduced in size and no longer free of charge. With the prohibition of the slave trade in 1850, the slave system faced a labor crisis, and several government attempts to create mechanisms that favored the hiring of free employees achieved little or no results, mainly due to the abusive demands that the landowners included in the contracts, whose terms in many cases differed little from a regime of slavery. Several revolts and protests of settlers were registered due to mistreatment and poor working and living conditions. This news reached Europe, causing a wave of indignation. The result was that the Germans and Swiss could no longer easily be persuaded to immigrate, and by mid-century only about 30,000 new immigrants arrived.
The Immigration Wave
In 1867, in face of the poor results of the colonizing program, the government legislated again, restoring some of the initial advantages and creating others. Now the rural lot could be paid off in ten years, with a two-year grace period; travel within the country to the final destination would be paid for by the government; the settler would receive help for the construction of his first house and for their first crops, with seeds, basic equipment, and some materials, as well as a cash. Medical and religious care was also planned. The government desired to attract up to 350,000 German, Swiss, and English settlers, but this did not happen. By 1875 only 19,000 new settlers arrived in the state.
At this time Italy was going through a crisis, and a consideralbe part of the population, very poor and ravaged by famine, epidemics, as well as a long series of wars, was beginning its flight to the American continent. They came mostly from the countryside, where their families had generally never been property owners having a long history of servitude. They ended up piled up in the cities in generally subhuman conditions and even those who were mostly property owners had been impoverished by steeply rising taxes and competition with the large landowners, getting into debt and needing to sell their land. Those who were still in the countryside had their harsh condition hardened. The depression did not only affect Italy, but many other European countries. According to Zuleika Alvin, "for some expelling countries, such as Italy and Spain, for example, the descriptions of the places where immigrants lived and the promiscuity in which they were forced to live due to poverty are good examples of the repercussion of the economic crisis on the bucolic landscape of the countryside". The researcher continues:
In Europe, between 1830 and 1930, more than 50 million people left their homes in search of the American dream. Texts from diplomats and politicians of the time show that the Italian population was lost within the newly unified and still unstable nation, "they were not citizens to help and defend, but impertinent peasants who with their misery and ignorance offend the Fatherland," so that protectionist measures were few, hesitant, late and had little effect. The role of the Italian authorities consisted of advising the emigrants, acting most vigorously in a few problematic individual cases, and leaving in practice all recruitment, transfer and settlement to the international shipowners and Brazilian imperial agents.
Most of those who went to Brazil were not only looking for the chance to prosper but were mainly driven by the idea of becoming landowners. Legends about fantastic creatures and immeasurable riches were taken as fact by the simplest people, who became the target of recruiting agents, who fed the old stories about Cocanha, a land of fabulous wealth, located it in Brazil, where there would be an easy fortune, where they would realize their dream of being free, rich, and, finally, also masters.
However, most of the Italians never materialized their wishes, having been directed to the coffee plantations of São Paulo, finding poor survival conditions, and without having, for the most part, their own land, which reproduced the same situation from which they had wanted to flee. Reports from the time bear witness to the discouragement and despair of the newcomers to the coffee plantations, deprived of their own initiative, immobilized by the terms of contracts, unable to rebuild the landscape in a way that resembled their homeland, cooped up in small houses of wattle and daub lent by the bosses, and constrained to a submission that had to be expressed with gratitude, for the "kindness of the bosses in getting them out of their misery and giving them work". Many rebelled against such conditions of exploitation and oppression or abandoned the countryside seeking the cities and swelling the marginalized mass.
In Rio Grande do Sul, the original idea of creating productive small farms for free men was maintained. After creating four new German colonies, in 1869, the provincial government requested from the Empire the concession of more vacant lands for another two. The following year, 32 square leagues were granted in the northeast of the province, where the colonies Conde d'Eu (currently the city of Garibaldi) and Dona Isabel (currently Bento Gonçalves) were founded. It was intended to introduce 40,000 German settlers in ten years, but fewer than 4,000 candidates were enrolled, a large part was not German, but Portuguese and the project went into recess.