The cover letter to a pamphlet on immigration from 1908 shows the focus on European immigration and the state government’s support for this project. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Once abolition took hold in Brazil, planters and others who had previously owned slaves had to look elsewhere for their labor. This stimulated a remarkable surge in immigration, especially from the southern European countries Portugal, Spain, and Italy. These immigrants were skilled at a variety of crafts; they spoke Portuguese or a language that was similar enough to allow them to communicate; they were perceived as racially superior to the vast population of unemployed Afro-Brazilians; and as foreigners in desperate need of work they were seen as easy to control.
Immigration, which grew throughout the late nineteenth century as coffee planters began to prefer free labor to slavery, spiked with slavery’s legislative abolition in the late 1880’s, before falling again. As the country finally moved toward industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century, local and urban labor was more commonly used and the number of immigrants fell. The demographics of immigration changed as well. Despite its original purpose of increasing the European population of Brazil, the immigrant population in the twentieth century included large numbers of Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants, complicating the country’s racial identity.
Changing Immigration Rates
- What might the influx in immigrants as a source of labor say about the planter class of Brazil and the race and equality relations of that time period?
- Why did planters elect to recruit workers from Europe rather than pull from the large body of essentially free, available labor in Brazil?
Race and Immigration
A frequent theme in the debates over immigration, beginning before abolition, was the desirability of certain immigrant groups. It was common practice to rely on conflicting stereotypes to support arguments both for and against immigration. The whitening thesis called for an influx of white, preferably northern-European, blood in order for Brazilian society to achieve its goals to become an advanced nation. To the chagrin of the thesis’ supporters, “nonwhite” immigrants started arriving on Brazilian shores, too.
Anticipating the impending abolition of slavery, plantation owners had launched a discussion on other potential sources of labor in the years leading up to 1888. This particular discussion had it much earlier roots during the reign of Dom João VI, when it was proposed that temporary Chinese workers would fill the labor shortage.
The proposal resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and fueled a rancorous debate about the future of the country. Both sides of the debate played on stereotypes of the Chinese: as hardworking, persevering, and controllable, but also as opium-addicted, lazy, animal-like, and resistant to assimilation. These workers were to be brought to Brazil at a cost of less than 20 U.S. dollars per person, which seemed incredible even to sources sympathetic to the use of this new labor source:
O Cruzeiro, Rio de Janeiro, March 11, 1883: “Indeed it is not a little astonishing [said The South American Journal on June 7, 1883] that human beings can be carried from China to Brazil, and provided with food during the voyage, for so small a sum. The dietary will not, we may safely assume, include any articles of luxury, and cannot be liberal in the distribution of those absolutely necessary to ‘keep body and soul together.’ Most decidedly the poor ‘Heathen Chinese’ will not grow fat on such meager fare as is likely to be exhibited to him on board the ships of this ‘China Merchants Company.’
Later immigrants-in-question would face similar prejudices. Advocates for Chinese immigration argued that the immigrants would spur economic growth. These immigrants were useful because they would provide a form of labor similar to African slavery but, in the view of proponents, would not be assimilated into Brazilian culture. They would provide a solution to the impending labor shortage but would not pollute Brazil’s racial composition.
Many opponents of the proposal had similar ideas about Chinese racial inferiority, but they viewed the effects of immigration differently. Proponents of the whitening solution, such as famous abolitionist writer Joaquim Nabuco, argued that the proposal would merely end in “Asiatic slavery,” and that the Chinese immigrants would also trigger racial conflict and “degrade” Brazil’s population. Moreover, they would not fill the labor void and would bring their vices with them (Lesser 21?26).
The engineer, economist, and reformer Andre Rebouças put the problem in the following terms:
We believe that the cry, falta de bracos, really implies a backward aspiration for the deplorable times when it was possible to buy a man for 200 or 300 milreis ? The true meaning of the official phrase “shortage of hands” (carencia de bracos) is that the Empire most urgently requires social, economic, and financial reforms which will permit the development of thousands and thousands of persons who vegetate in our backlands, and, at the same time, may attract the spontaneous immigration of the superabundant population of Europe. (Agricultura Nacional 382-4).
Historian Jeffrey Lesser argues that this early debate provided, “the overarching paradigm against which all other non-European groups would struggle” (12).
- How would non-European immigrants, like the Chinese, fit into the already established framework laid out by the whitening solution?
- What did opponents of certain immigration policies fear about immigrants? What would they propose as a new source of labor in the aftermath of abolition?
Composition of the Immigrant Population
Corresponding to the graph near the top of the page, “Immigrants to Brazil, 1872?1910,” this chart shows the dominance and growth of the southern European immigrants, particularly the Italians. The growth and then fall in the numbers of these immigrants is in line with the trend seen in the previous graph.
In the nineteenth century, many landowners were so desperate for immigrant labor that they began actively recruiting workers from Europe, using the services of freelance recruiters. São Paulo President João Alfredo criticized the practice of paying recruiters a fixed sum for each person, citing the need to “weed out the speculators who, thinking only of profits ? try to transport the largest number of immigrants without caring for the quality of the people they import, and who take recourse in the perfidious incentive of impossible promises.” He went on to suggest that an independent company be formed to assume control of the immigration service.
This recommendation became a reality in mid-1886 with the creation of the Sociedade Promotora da Imigração [Promotion of Immigration Society]. The society was similar in concept to the earlier Association to Aid Colonization. Both were made up of private citizens, funded through contracts with the provincial government, to administer a nonprofit agency for the purpose of recruiting, transporting, and distributing immigrant manpower.
“Selling Brazil”
This map of the state of São Paulo from 1886, in Italian, was a promotional material used to encourage immigration to the state’s coffee farms in the years leading up to abolition. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
After the founding of the Promotion of Immigration Society in 1886, the Province of São Paulo used state funds to support the society’s efforts to recruit European immigrants to Brazil to work as agricultural laborers. By 1895, the state government had fully taken over the responsibilities of the Society, subsidizing passage to São Paulo, constructing an immigrant reception center in the capital, and paying the administrative costs for immigrant job placement.
At the same time, the government enacted policies to dissuade nonwhite groups from immigrating to Brazil. On June 28, 1890, the Provisional Government issued a decree stating that Brazil was open to “free entry by persons healthy and able to work,” who were not criminals or from Asia or Africa. Later, the Constitution of 1934 included an article on immigration quotas that stated the following:
The entry of immigrants in the national territory will be subject to the restrictions necessary to guarantee the ethnic integration and the physical and legal capacity of the immigrant; the immigrant arrivals from any country cannot, however, exceed an annual rate of two percent of the total number of that nationality resident in Brazil during the preceding fifty years.
This quota was to target Japanese immigrants, who were thought to be more resistant to assimilation. In 1945, a formal decree under Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian regime mandated that the flow of immigrants had to conform with “the necessity to preserve and develop, in the ethnic composition of the population, the more desirable characteristics of its ancestry.”
More Non-European Immigrants
A poster used in Japan to attract immigrants to Brazil. It says “Let’s go to South America (Brazil) with the family.” From the Musée historique de l’immigration japonaise.
Between 1908 and 1941, 189,000 Japanese immigrants came to Brazil. Brazilian landowners had sought a more malleable group of immigrants after European immigrant laborers had proven uncontrollable. The two countries brokered immigration contracts, such as the plan to send 781 Japanese immigrants on the Kasato-Maru to Brazil in 1908. Many stereotypes circulated about the Japanese. These impressions resembled the conflicting stereotypes of the Chinese in the nineteenth century. The Japanese were at once hardworking laborers from an economic powerhouse and “ethnic cysts,” obstacles to “the march toward the homogeneity of a national type,” according to Luiz Guimarães, second secretary of the legation in Tokyo. J. Amândio Sobral, São Paulo’s inspector of agriculture, simply described the Japanese as “different, but ? not inferior.”
In the 1930s, a debate erupted over the arrival of Assyrian refugees in Brazil. Many of the Arab immigrants were Christian, a fact that proponents of Arab immigration said would bolster Brazil’s Christian identity. This melded with the aims of the Vargas regime to instill traditional Christian values in Brazilian society. Among other things, opponents argued that the group would not assimilate into Brazilian society.
What Happened Once Immigrants Got to Brazil
The arrival of non-European immigrants in Brazil challenged the whitening project. Unlike Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese immigrants who were recruited to come to Brazil, the existence of Arab immigrants in Brazil surprised elites, challenging their long-held assumptions about unfamiliar ethnicities by actually putting them in contact with those groups. The running joke among Brazilians was that “newly arrived immigrants were ‘Turcos,’ a first steady job transformed them into ‘Syrians,’ and shop or factory ownership remade them into ‘Lebanese’ ” (Lesser 49?50). The ethnicity of immigrants and their descendants could change over time.
This Syrian bazar in São Paulo, pictured in 1940, bears the multi-ethnic name “Sarruf and Stephano, Ltd.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Unlike Japanese or Chinese immigrants, Arabs were able to fit in better to Brazilian society, by virtue their physical appearance, which more closely resembled notions of “white” Europeans. Arab immigrants employed several methods of integrating into Brazilian society, including changing their names to sound more Portuguese. Arabic-language newspapers at once reinforced pre-migratory culture and caused Arabs to acculturate.The children of immigrants often had to navigate a tricky maze of national identity.
Somenikkei, the Brazilian-born descendants of Japanese immigrants, worked to reinforce their hyphenated identity as Japanese-Brazilians through literary journals. World War II would later stop Japanese immigration to Brazil and cause a great amount of anti-Japanese sentiment and backlash from the Japanese-Brazilian community. The “brasilidade” (Brazilianization) campaign of the twentieth century prohibited, among other things, the use of non-Portuguese-language materials in schools. As the campaign became stricter, speaking foreign languages in public and private was prohibited, although immigrants skirted these restrictions.
In the end, Lesser asserts, the whitening solution did not eliminate the non-white elements from Brazilian society, creating a uniform white race:
Mestiçagem, which many scholars have taken to mean the emergence of a new and uniform Brazilian ‘race’ out of the mixing of peoples, was often understood as a joining (rather than mixing) of different identities, as the creation of a multiplicity of hyphenated Brazilians rather than a single, uniform one (5).
Further Reading
- Jeffrey Lesser’s Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil addresses several centuries of immigration and its effect on national racial identity.
Sources
- Lesser, Jeffrey. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.
- Conrad, Robert. “The Planter Class and the Debate over Chinese Immigration to Brazil, 1850?1893” International Migration Review , Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 41?55. //www.jstor.org/stable/3002529.
- Holloway, Thomas. “Immigration and Abolition:The Transition from Slave to Free Labor in the São Paulo Coffee Zone.” Essays Concerning the Socio-Economic History of Brazil and Portuguese India. Gainesville, Fla.: University Presses of Florida, 1977, pp. 150?178.