Many studies of Italian immigrants in Brazil assume the contractual relationship between worker and owner on São Paulo’s coffee plantations is of dominant importance. Zuleika Alvim’s excellent social history takes a justifiably different approach. Based on research in Italian and Brazilian archives, she discusses immigrant life during the transition from slave to wage labor within a cultural context.
Alvim demonstrates that region of origin was critical to the social and economic integration of Italians. Before 1901, Venetians comprised the largest group, while Calabrians and Campagnans predominated after the Prinetti Decree. Italian immigration patterns were “more related to the conditions of expulsion from Italy than from a deliberate preference on the part of the Paulista planters” (p. 63). By examining rates of return to Italy by region, Alvim suggests that many Italians were temporary workers, in spite of the planters’ well-known preference for families.
By highlighting the family and work structures of the immigrants, Alvim ably demonstrates that worker-planter contracts were not the exclusive determinant of work relations. Her superb discussion of Italian immigrant women breaks much new ground on gender-based divisions of labor among immigrants. The importance of women workers was not caused by the production demands of Paulista planters but was a carryover from Italy, where “many women became salaried workers in small domestic industries” (p. 89). The family work unit was so important to the cultural survival of immigrants that even unsalaried elderly family members participated.
Alvim rightly asserts that Italian immigrants should not be treated as objects in Brazilian history. Geographical mobility among Italians was an important form of resistance but return to Italy was not as widespread as has been assumed. Her statistical evaluations of immigration and landholding show that most immigrants who abandoned their contracts stayed in São Paulo. Thus, Alvim argues convincingly that Italian immigrants had a perception of the chance to rise economically in Brazil as urban, not rural, workers. Zuleika Alvim has written a fine social history of São Paulo’s Italian immigrants. Her impressive research and analysis provide a methodological basis not only for a reevaluation of this group, but for studies of other immigrants as well.
