The Italian immigration in Minas Gerais was the migratory movement of Italians to the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais that occurred between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. It was one of the states that received the most Italian immigrants in Brazil, only behind São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul.
At the end of the 19th century, the economic situation in Italy was not favorable, with a decline in agricultural and industrial activities, and thousands of Italians began to migrate to other countries, including Brazil.
The Italian immigrants entered the Minas Gerais society predominantly as a labor force destined for the coffee activity. However, as time went by, their participation expanded to other activities, especially in the urban environment, where they actively participated in the development of commerce and industry. The assimilation of Italians in Minas Gerais was quick and peaceful. In this state, no closed Italian communities were formed, and the immigrants were dispersed throughout an extensive territory, where they were a minority in what was then the most populous Brazilian state.
History The Italian immigration to Minas Gerais, from the end of the 19th century, was closely linked to the end of the slave trade (Eusébio de Queirós Law, of 1850) and the abolition of slavery (Golden Law, of 1888). Since the middle of the 19th century, with the prohibition of the entry of new enslaved Africans, the lack of labor that began to install itself in the country encouraged the arrival of an increasing number of European immigrants. Italian population in Minas GeraisYearNumber of Italians1872145189625,000190055,000191050,000192042,943194018,819195011,70419705,227
Italy was going through great social difficulties: poverty and unemployment, an industrial process that led to the marginalization of labor, and, above all, a crisis in the countryside due to overpopulation and lack of land. Soon after the Italian Unification of 1871, the country entered a migratory process. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE):"In the specific case of Italy, after a long period of more than 20 years of fighting for the unification of the country, its population, particularly the rural and poorer one, found it difficult to survive either on the small farms they owned or where they simply worked, or in the cities, to which they moved in search of work. Under these conditions, therefore, emigration was not only stimulated by the Italian government but was also a survival solution for the families. Thus, it is possible to understand the departure of about 7 million Italians in the period between 1860 and 1920." Between 1880 and 1969, about 1.5 million Italians immigrated to Brazil; about 70% of them went to the state of São Paulo. Until 1902, subsidized immigration from Northern Italy predominated, in which the Brazilian government paid for the immigrants' transportation by ship, sending them mainly to the colonial nuclei or the coffee plantations (where they replaced slave labor). However, in 1902, the Italian government issued the Prinetti Decree, which prohibited subsidized immigration to Brazil, as a result of increasingly frequent reports that Italian immigrants were being subjected to conditions of semi-slavery on Brazilian coffee farms. From then on, Italians who wanted to immigrate to Brazil would have to pay for their ship tickets. Immigration did not end, but it decreased considerably. Immigration from southern Italy also became predominant, with a significant part going to urban centers.
The Italians were the main group of immigrants to enter Brazil at the end of the 19th century. According to an estimate, in 1900 there were 540,000 Italians living in Brazil, that is, 3.1% of the country's population was born in Italy. For the year 1902, the number of Italians jumped to 600 thousand. The 1920 national census counted 558,405 Italians (52% of the foreigners in Brazil, 71% concentrated in the state of São Paulo). The census did not count the children, grandchildren, and descendants of Italians, because anyone born in Brazil was counted as Brazilian, regardless of being the child of foreigners. The 1940 census innovated by asking Brazilians if they were the children of foreigners. In this census, 1,260,931 Brazilians said they had an Italian father, while 1,069,862 said they had an Italian mother. But this data is limited, because grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and other descendants of foreigners were not asked about their family origin, only their children.
Entry of Italians in Brazil, between 1884 and 1959.Source: Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE)Period1884-18931894-19031904-19131914-19231924-19331934-19441945-19491950-19541955-1959TotalNumbers510,533537,784196,52186,32070,177not available15,31259,78531,2631,507,695
Italians in Minas Gerais
Predecessors
Coffee production helped recover Minas Gerais' public finances, which had been in decline since the end of the gold cycle. In 1818/19, coffee represented only 3% of Minas Gerais exports. In the 1850s, it was already the main export product, and the tax from coffee represented 49% of the total exported. In the 1885/89 period, this tax percentage rose to 80%. Minas Gerais became the second-largest coffee producer in the country from the last decade of the Empire until 1930. In the 19th century, labor on the coffee plantations was heavily based on slavery. However, in the second half of the century, slavery entered a gradual process of decline. In 1850, the Brazilian Parliament abolished the slave trade, through the Eusébio de Queirós Law. In 1888, the Golden Law was passed, which definitively abolished slavery on Brazilian territory.
With the abolition of slavery, there was a great exodus of former slaves. On most of the farms, the former slaves refused to continue in their jobs. According to Emília Viotti da Costa, for the freedmen, freedom consisted "above all, in the right to leave, to move freely, to leave the plantation, to work where, how and when they wanted". The province and later the state of Minas Gerais had the largest population in Brazil and supposedly had enough labor force to substitute the former slaves. With the end of slavery, coffee growers could no longer force people to work for them; they would have to offer minimally advantageous conditions to attract free workers. However, the work conditions on the coffee plantations, in general, were terrible: one worked hard and earned little, and sometimes was treated badly by the farmer or their henchmen. Vestiges of slavery still existed. The conditions on the coffee farms in Minas Gerais were even worse than those in São Paulo since the latter provided better salaries, as well as guarantees through contracts or partnership agreements.
Contrary to what happened in São Paulo, where immigrants, after 1886, were the main labor force in the coffee plantations, in Minas Gerais the Brazilian workers were the ones who sustained the coffee production, despite being labeled as "lazy" by the farmers. The "instability" attributed to the Brazilian worker, however, was not greater than that found in the European worker. Proof of this is that in São Paulo, the behavior of the European worker also generated general crises in the plantation. The Europeans were resistant to submit to the terrible work conditions offered by the coffee growers and reacted through strikes and other manifestations, besides being able to count on the consulate's help. For the Brazilian worker, the only form of defense was to abandon the farm and move to another one. The problem, then, was not in the "Brazilian worker," but in the terrible work conditions offered.
Subsidized immigration for agriculture In the 19th century, subsidized immigration had two aspects: the first consisted in settling European peasant families in the so-called colonial nuclei, where they were converted into small rural landowners, and the second consisted in increasing the number of people in the coffee plantations, to face the problem posed by the process of transition from slave to wage labor.Almada, Vilma Paraíso Ferreira de (1984). Escravismo e transição: o Espírito Santo (1850-1888) (in Brazilian Portuguese). Rio de Janeiro: Graal.
Among the reasons why the Minas Gerais government encouraged immigration, especially Italian immigration, were:
Although Minas Gerais had the largest free population in Brazil, which could, in theory, make up for the labor shortage with the abolition of slavery, the population of Minas Gerais was relatively sparse. As a result, many free workers could count on relatively abundant land to develop subsistence agriculture, without having to work for the large landowners to survive. In Brazilian culture, manual labor was despised and seen as "slave labor". Many free Brazilians or former slaves refused to work as wage earners on the coffee plantations, as this caused prejudice. The Minas Gerais government saw immigration not only as a solution to the labor problem in coffee but also as a means to develop local agriculture, due to the unfamiliarity or resistance of Brazilians to use more efficient land exploitation techniques. Many of the Italian immigrants in Minas Gerais were farmers from Northern Italy with great experience in land management, a strategic resource that helped modernize the state's economy. The neighboring state of São Paulo was growing rich thanks to coffee exports largely based on Italian labor. The Minas Gerais government, then, used the same strategy. Besides economic factors, European immigration was also inserted in a context of the "whitening" of Brazilian society, defended by intellectuals and members of the political class of the time, who saw the country's ethnic composition as one of the reasons for Brazil's backwardness.
However, there were several factors that limited immigration to Minas Gerais:
The government did not have the same financial resources to subsidize the transportation of the immigrants, as the São Paulo government did. Subsidized immigration in Minas Gerais lasted around ten years, from 1888 to 1898, due to a financial crisis. Until 1893, the state of Minas Gerais paid for the immigrants' transportation but after arrival in Brazil, the latter had to pay back two-thirds of it, and the farmers themselves were forced to contribute. In contrast, the state of São Paulo paid the full amount. Only in 1894 did Minas Gerais begin to fund the full amount, which coincided with the great increase in the arrival of Italians in the state, but this subsidy was abandoned in 1898 due to the financial crisis. In São Paulo, coffee was expanding westward, where free immigrant labor, predominantly Italian, was introduced. In Minas Gerais, there was no expanding agricultural frontier. Minas Gerais had a large population contingent, which facilitated the replacement of slave labor with the available local labor, composed of freemen and former slaves, without the need to attract a large number of immigrants, unlike what happened in São Paulo, which had a smaller population. What worried the coffee growers in Minas Gerais was not the lack of labor, but the little stability of the Brazilian Man, who tended not to stay working on the same farm for a long time, thus creating uncertainties about the availability of national labor. The immigration policy in Minas Gerais was quite decentralized, delegating to the municipal councils the initiative to promote immigration, but few were interested in doing it. In the coffee farms of the state, the system of "sharecropping" predominated, which was less economically advantageous for the immigrants than the systems of "leasing of services" and "colonato" (process of importing foreign labor), which predominated in São Paulo. Therefore, it was more advantageous to immigrate to São Paulo.