When you drive along the Rodovia dos Imigrantes, you can see how much immigration has changed Brazil today. The highway that winds between Brazil's Atlantic coast and the city of São Paulo follows the path that millions of people took to get there in the 1800s and 1900s. Along the way and in any bar in the country, Brazilians eat kibe as a snack, but not many people know that this croquette made of bulgur and chopped meat came to the country with Middle Eastern refugees. Some people read Japanese manga and follow "New Japanese religions," which shows how the world's biggest Japanese diaspora population affects culture. Between 2 and 3 million people moved to Brazil between 1870 and 1930. Most of them were from Europe, but there were also a lot of people from the Middle East and Asia. During the colonial era, most people living in Portuguese America were African slaves and their children. When immigrants came, they added to the conversation about Blackness and Whiteness that still rules popular and intellectual talk today. When you look at it this way, Brazil is like other American countries, like the US. But in Brazil, words like "White," "Black," "European," "Indian," and "Asian" are not as set.
As different groups moved in and out of these constantly changing groups, Brazilian national identity was often both rigid and flexible
Whiteness was always valued, but it wasn't always clear what that meant. About 736,000 foreigners lived in Brazil in 2017. This made it the third-largest country in South America with a foreign-born population. Millions more are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. They were born in Brazil but usually call themselves Japanese, Portuguese, Arab, German, or Italian, even though they were born there. Also, a lot of people from the Americas come to Brazil, including Bolivians, Venezuelans looking for refuge because of the country's political and economic problems, and Haitians moving for economic and humanitarian reasons. Rapid changes in the number of people coming from around the area, including many illegal immigrants, have put Brazilian local, state, and federal leaders to the test many times.
A New Order for the World
In the early 1600s, Portuguese settlers came to northeast Brazil and set up a sugar plantation economy. They brought with them colonization and slaves. The colonists wanted to use native workers to make sugar, but the people they forced to work for them quickly died of European diseases or ran away to the interior. Over the next four hundred years, Brazil brought in about 4 million African slaves. It kept slaves longer than any other country in the Americas, until 1888, when it ended. When slavery ended, plantation owners called fazendeiros thought that immigrants would make Brazil look like Europe and change the economy from slave work to wage labor. In 1891, the government passed laws that protected religious freedom in order to bring in European Protestants. Whiteness elites thought that these immigrants would help "de-Africanize" Brazil's people. In order to "whiten" (that's the official word for it) the country even more, politicians banned refugees from both Africa and Asia at the same time. The Japanese were a big exception. Many in the Brazilian elite wanted them because they saw Whiteness as a group linked to work and power just as much as skin color. Someone in the Federal Deputy Party said in 1935, "The Japanese colonists are even whiter than the Portuguese ones."
By the late 1800s, rising populations around the world and new technologies were making large-scale movement more likely and easier
In places like Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, where population growth wasn't fully absorbed into the workforce, urbanization and industrialization worked together to create a push, and a pull in the Americas, where economies were growing. Between 1890 and 1919, more than 2.6 million people came to Brazil from other countries. Most of the people who came were from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Japan. Before 1930, people came to Brazil from more than 60 different countries. Argentina was Brazil's main rival for immigrants. Wages were high and it was cheap to get to Argentina because of its booming farming export sector. But because Brazil is bigger than the mainland United States and its economy was growing, more and more people from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and the Middle East wanted to move there. Other things that made it easier for people to move to the Americas were improvements in medicine and technology that made crossing the oceans safer. Wind powered ships were replaced by high-tech steamships. By the early 1900s, the trip from Europe to Brazil took only two weeks instead of three months. 57% of the 5.4 million people who moved to Brazil between 1872 and 1972 chose to live in just one city: São Paulo. Along with large-scale immigration came unhappiness, uprisings, and flight among people who didn't want to put up with harsh conditions on farms and factories. National identities helped people form communities. Many immigrants strengthened the color line by being mean to Afro-Brazilians, and police records are full of cases of violence between white people and black people. To make their lives better, newcomers also got involved in politics. They joined unions, went on strikes, and sometimes took their problems to the streets. Formal and unwritten rules said that all activist workers could lose their jobs or go to jail. In the 1800s and 1900s, officials deported hundreds of labor leaders. Many immigrants stayed loyal to workers' and social rights even though they were being persecuted.
Between the Great Depression and the end of WWII, Brazil went through a lot of changes
As the coffee industry went downhill, fazendas were left empty, split up, or sold to big companies that started growing new export crops like soy. As the industrial economy grew, Brazil made more and more things, from cars to airplanes by the end of the 20th century. As the economy changed, so did immigration laws and patterns. Based on the strict U.S. National Origins Acts of 1924, which were based on race, the Constitution of 1934 set immigration limits by country. During the height of World War II, from 1942 to 1945, most Brazilian ports were closed to passenger trade. This made crossing the oceans more dangerous. Less than 2,000 people came to Brazil each year as immigrants. There was no bloodshed during the coup that overthrew President Getúlio Vargas in 1945. The new, somewhat more open government didn't change its policies on immigration, but it did change how it dealt with refugees around the world. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was signed by Brazil. It is also a member state of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In 1954, Brazil took in about 40,000 Europeans who were looking for safety. In the 1950s, Brazil stopped requiring visas for Portuguese citizens born in Angola and Mozambique. This made it possible for people to move to Brazil again. In 1952, there were a lot more Italian entries, but many of them ended up going back to Europe because they couldn't find work in Brazil.
Comments
Post a Comment