Brazil today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

Seeking these settlements, I visited Villa Americana in São Paulo state but found it long since turned into a villa Italiana, with only one family of American origin which seemed to have thriven; forty miles or so across country, at Piracicaba, however, I found an American school, admirably conducted by a little old lady who told me that she had come with the original settlers of Santa Barbara, founded in the parish of Piracicaba, but now a shadow. Her school was a delightful one, with the stocky girl pupils going through gymnastic exercises in unwonted rational clothes, but they were all Brazilians; the Americans had melted, the ones who remained not being able to keep up in the struggle.

There seem to have been at least four definite attempts at settlement besides individual selection of dwelling places: these were at Santarem, on the Amazon’s junction with the Tapajoz river; Cannavieiras, on the coast of southern Bahia; Juquiá, or Cananea, below Iguape in southern São Paulo; and the Santa Barbara-Villa Americana group in central São Paulo. Some of the immigrants had money, but in many cases the war had swallowed it; former owners of slaves, they were often less fitted to make a living from the soil than the negroes they had left behind. The one crop that they understood thoroughly was cotton, and it seems to have been tried at each of the four spots named, but in at least two regions success was nullified by climate. In São Paulo’s interior lands a fair measure of reward was obtained and an impulse to cotton growing dates from this time. The Cananea colony, where some English were introduced about the same time, was a notable scene of discontent; both groups of colonists hurried back to Rio and made so many complaints that the consuls went through sieges. The fact was that the site for the settlement was unsuited to Anglo-Saxon modes of life and that insufficient preparation had been made: a few years ago a colony of Japanese was given land a few miles from the ill-fated spot, at Iguape, and, settling down to grow rice, have made a striking success. But the points of view of the two nationalities, as well as colonization methods pursued by the organizers in the different cases, had nothing in common. At Cannavieiras there is today a thriving series of cacao plantations and a Brazilian population: these people keep in order, carefully weeded, a grave. There is a fence of hard Brazilian massaranduba about it, perennial flowers blossom above; under the soil lie the three little children of the leader of the American colony, and of it there is no other trace.

Of the Santa Barbara colony there is a story told which is comedy instead of tragedy. The colonists grew, besides cotton, watermelons: one year just as the crop ripened, cholera broke out in S. Paulo, the sale of melons was forbidden, and the growers faced ruin. At this time President Cleveland had come into office in the United States, and had just appointed a new consul at Santos: he must, then, be a good Democrat. The settlers, who on landing in Brazil had ceremonially torn up the Constitution of the United States and offered thanks to heaven for having permitted them to reach a land where the sacred Biblical institution of slavery was still in force, remembered that they were American citizens. They wrote to the consul a letter of congratulation on his arrival and at the same time detailed their grievances with regard to watermelon sales. The consul replied cordially, suggested that he should visit them, and received post haste a warm welcome. The afternoon of his arrival at the colony found the entire population drawn up on the platform, a southern Colonel at the head of the deputation. The train rolls up, a first-class compartment door opens, a gentleman steps out with a suitcase, and walks up to the Colonel with outstretched hand. It was the consul—but a consul as black as the ace of spades.

It is said that the Colonel, rising nobly to the occasion, gasped once, shook the hand of the consul, and that he and the other southerners gave the official the time of his life; but when he departed they vowed that never, never again would they trust a Democratic administration....

There are a few descendants of this group who have attained true distinction in Brazil and genuinely work for the land of their adoption.

It was after the dwindling of the flow of German incomers about 1860 that a steady stream of Italians was directed towards Brazil. Their wooing was in a great measure due to the systematized efforts of the coffee-growers of S. Paulo state, and, after the establishment of the republic in 1889, of the state authorities. Workers from North Italy were found to be those who best suited the needs of conditions of the coffee industry, and to this part of Europe were directed the attentions of recruiting agents. Laborious, serious, economical, bent upon acquiring a little fortune, the Italians came with their wives and families, accepted their position as colonos upon the great estates, never very ardently attached to one particular piece of soil, and ready to pick up and move on wherever advantageous conditions beckoned.

Agriculture in S. Paulo State.
Cutting sugar cane.
Rice cultivation.
Coffee gathering.

From the year 1820 to the end of 1919, a total of one million, three hundred and seventy-eight thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six Italians have officially entered Brazil as immigrants. With their children born in Brazil they total well over two millions today, greatly out-numbering any other entering race. Their colonization has been a marked success, due not only to their personal characteristics, but to the just treatment given them by the authorities. There was a time, soon after the abolition of slavery, when the colonos brought in to fill labour gaps complained of the relations between themselves and the fazendeiros; realizing that the existence of friction and subsequent scandals would defeat their object, the São Paulo Government put machinery into working order, known as the Patronato Agricola which adjusted differences, looked into social conditions, and took in hand the work of giving medical care and schooling to immigrants. The Italian has remained upon coffee fazendas, acquired land and coffee trees of his own or taken up commercial work in the towns, rather than remained in nucleos; he has identified himself with the modern progress of South Brazil, taken up manufacturing, built himself some of the most splendid and extravagant houses in São Paulo city, famed as it is for luxurious dwellings; the Avenida Paulista, pride of São Paulo, was “built on coffee,” and much of the wealth displayed there is Italian wealth, created during the last twenty-five years. The year of greatest immigration in Brazil is said to have been that of 1891 when out of a total of nearly two hundred and seventy-six thousand, about one hundred and sixteen thousand were Italians; their influence upon prosperity in São Paulo may be estimated by the fact that more than one million out of the State’s three million population are of Italian blood. No other state has so systematized immigration, perhaps because none had the pressing need and the immediate rewards to offer, as has São Paulo; she no longer pays passages on steamships, but she maintains free hotels in Santos and São Paulo city, where five meals a day are given, good airy rooms, baths, etc., and where immigrants are lodged for a week or until work is found.

Preponderant as are the numbers of Italians, they are by no means the only southern settlers of the last fifty years; Poles and Russians came in notable quantities in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, settling in the Paraná uplands as well as in nucleos in São Paulo. At the end of the century there were two thousand Russo-Germans from the Volga, farming land on methods of their own in the neighbourhood of Curityba; an obstinate folk, they insisted upon tilling prairies like their own steppes instead of choosing forestal land, shared all goods on the Russian communistic plan, and gave the Brazilian authorities so much trouble that there must have been sighs of relief when bodies of them deserted the nucleos and demanded to be sent back to Russia. From those who stayed has grown up the tribe of Russian carters who do the road-transportation work of the high Paraná plateau; there are groups of farmers, too, both Russians and Poles, who share land in common and are raisers of wheat, their favourite rye, and other cereals; some have taken up the business of gathering and curing matte, the “tea” which South Brazil grows and exports to the Argentine.