XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Re-mapping Italy in São Paulo: Zélia Gattai’s memoir Anarquistas, graça a Deus

• In Event: Rethinking Racial Hierarchies: Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Built Environment in São Paulo (SESSION II)

Abstract

In Anarquistas, graças a Deus (1979), Zélia Gattai, a first generation Italian immigrant and renowned Brazilian author, recounts the story of her Italian family in São Paulo, Brazil. The book takes place roughly between the two decades of 1910-1930, a prosperous moment for the state of São Paulo and for the almost 2 million Italians inhabiting this area of Brazil. In this paper I discuss how Gattai’s temporally-disjointed vignettes which reconstruct her childhood in Alameda de Santos offer a literary map of the Italian presence in the city of São Paulo. Gattai’s memoir reveals that upon arrival in what will become the largest city in Latin America, Italian immigrants reinstituted both cultural and geographical borders between Northern and Southern Italy by relocating to separate neighborhoods of the city according to their regions of origin. For example, at a certain moment in the book, Gattai’s mother prohibits her from going to areas of the city predominantly occupied by Sicilian and Neapolitan immigrants, deeming them too violent and thus passing down her regionalist prejudices to her Brazilian daughter. At the same time, Gattai’s memoir also shows how the border between Northern and Southern Italy exists independently from the geographical separation that living in different areas of the city provided. In another scene, Gattai recounts how her Neapolitan neighbor threatens to murder her brother simply because he steals a glance at the southerner's daughters, who, Gattai writes, spend most of their time sequestered inside their house. By showing how geographical and cultural borders between Northern and Southern Italy are re-imagined on the other side of the Atlantic and how they influence the cityscape of São Paulo, Anarquistas, graças a Deus challenges monolithic and generalizing ideas about Italian immigrants and the concept of italianness altogether.

Author

• Giulia Riccò, University of Michigan