XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

(Re)Setting race: migration, politics and trade in the Syria-Lebanese community in São Paulo

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

Abstract

Between the years 1881 to 1915, approximately 31 million immigrants arrived in America during the period classified as the "Great Migrations". These displacements gave rise to encounters between people with different cultural backgrounds, which made the construction of identities a recurrent characteristic throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. What factors contributed to the decision of these immigrants to leave their places of origin and go through a process of rebuilding their identity roots? What strategies did they adopt in their new homes to facilitate their integration and to maintain their identity as a group? These interactions also implied a paradox for the host societies, which sometimes understood immigration as a symbol of progress due to the contact between different cultures and sometimes as a "problem" resulting from the ills that arose with the disordered population growth and the difficulty of quickly assimilating this large contingent of people with different worldviews at a time of the emergence of national identity in these countries. Immigration and race were central debates in several countries, with intellectuals and politicians exchanging information that impacted the daily lives of cities.
In the 1920s, analyses emerged that dealt with the insertion of the other in urban space, with Oliveira Vianna and Nina Rodrigues demonstrating that this was a recurring theme. In the years 1935, researchers linked to the Divisão de Estatística e Documentação Histórica e Social do Departamento de Cultura de São Paulo of São Paulo, demonstrated that the origin, composition, and distribution of urban populations, trends of miscegenation, acculturation, assimilation, contact, and survival of ethnic and national groups in cities were issues that deserved the attention of the public administration, which, through statistical methods, sought to know the population that inhabited the city.
We will seek to trace the historicity of terms attributed to immigrants, for example, alien as antagonistic to indigenous, and how these notions expressed the creation of a national project and the fear of an imbalance in the racial composition of countries. Were prejudice and exclusion the same for all immigrant groups? How ethnicity and class can contribute to understanding those trajectories? Based on the analysis of the Jafet family we intend to answer these questions.

Author

• Renata Geraissati Castro de Almeida, Universidade Estadual de Campinas