History Brazil is the third-largest country in the Americas in terms of the number of Italian immigrants received in the period 1876-1990; the migratory flow peaked in the period 1886-1895, with 503,599 expatriates; the influx of Italians remained substantial in the period prior to
World War I (expatriates were 450,423 and 196, respectively. 699 in the decades 1896-1905 and 1906-1915); the period between the two wars saw a gradual reduction of Italian emigration to Brazil; after the interruption of the migratory flow during
World War II, which saw Italy and Brazil on opposite sides, there was a new, rather substantial wave in the postwar period (there were 133,231 expatriates in the period 1946-1990). The total number of Italians who emigrated to Brazil between 1876 and 1990 is 1,447,356. Italian immigration particularly affected the
south of the country; even today, the population of Italian origin reaches 65 percent in the southern states of
Rio Grande do Sul,
Santa Catarina, and
Espirito Santo (half of which is of Venetian origin). The city of
São Paulo is estimated to be the largest Italian urban hub in the world, with about 15 million inhabitants of Italian origin. In the northeastern part of Rio Grande do Sul an authentic
Região Colonial Italiana was born. Alongside Italian immigration, the region attracted to itself numerous immigrants from
Germany; in addition to Brazilian Portuguese, Italian was thus exposed to contact with German, itself a language of immigration. The different waves of migration were characterized by different regional origins: emigrants of northern origin (from
Veneto,
Trentino,
Friuli) were prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, while with the new century, arrivals from
southern Italy (particularly
Campania) prevailed. The literacy rate of emigrants also varied greatly. Illiteracy was frequent in the first period of emigration, which was predominantly dialect-speaking. After
World War II, on the other hand, the migratory flow was marked by a higher level of education, to which corresponded with a greater mastery of Italian. This condition was also brought about by the strong connection established between Italian emigration to Brazil and the presence in the country of large Italian industrial groups, particularly in the automotive and telecommunications sectors; this has led to seeing in the Italian language and culture a root capable of bringing an extra layer of value to entrepreneurial processes.
Characteristics of Italian communities Italian emigration to Brazil was favored by the welcoming policies adopted by the South American country, which was willing to advance the ticket for the journey in order to receive labor for the colonization of its immense territory, still largely unexplored. It was therefore the most impoverished social strata that undertook the journey, thus becoming settlers who gradually replaced slaves in the
fazendas (dating to 1888 the abolition of slavery through the
Lei Áurea). The rural context favored the creation of self-sufficient Italian communities that were relatively isolated from the linguistic context of the country of arrival. Colonization of territories entrusted by the Brazilian government, concentrated mainly in the states of
Paraná,
Santa Catarina and
Rio Grande do Sul, was the main choice by the Venetians and northern Italians in general. The rural settlements thus tended to be linguistically conservative, in parallel with what is observed in the more conservative areas of Italian territory. Contributing to the preservation of the languages of origin was the isolation in
enclaves, often characterized by
endogamy and poor schooling, and also the establishment of much larger family groups than in the motherland, which reached as many as 170 members. As a result, numerous towns with Italian names were founded in the rural areas: in
Rio Grande do Sul,
Nova Bassano,
Nova Pádua,
Nova Treviso, Nova Vicenza (later to become
Farroupilha) and Nova Trento (later to become
Flores da Cunha) were founded; in the state of
Espírito Santo,
Nova Venécia was born; in the state of
Santa Catarina one finds
Nova Veneza and another
Nova Trento, founded by immigrants of
Trentino origin who still retain part of their native language. More exposed to the pressure of Brazilian Portuguese were the urban contexts, which attracted Italian immigrants only later; rather than direct immigration, it was often the urbanization of settlers from the
fazendas, attracted by the prospects of wealth offered by the modernization of large cities. The other major hub of urban settlement of Italian immigrants was
Porto Alegre, where there were 41 Italian families as early as 1850; The Italian presence in the city resulted in 1877 in the founding of the Vittorio Emanuele II Society, which remained in operation until its dissolution decreed by the Brazilian government at the time of
World War II. Deeply rooted in the city was from the end of the nineteenth century the
Calabrian presence, with the predominance of immigrants from the
province of Cosenza and in particular from the town of
Morano Calabro; the Morano community long maintained its own well-characterized identity, strengthened by endogamous marriages and catalyzed by the cult of
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Morano's patron saint.
The education of immigrants Brazil's school network suffered for a long time from a serious inefficiency, determined in part by the enormous size of the national territory, and in part by the tendency of disinterest shown since the origins of the Federal Republic for the education of the entire country. The education of
Italian-Brazilians was therefore for a long time imparted by the immigrants themselves. The initiative of improvised institutors was soon associated with the foundation of Italian elementary schools, supported by associations, religious and private teachers as well as by irregular funding from the Italian government. Particularly relevant was the role of the numerous Italian associations that were formed with patriotic, religious, cultural, and above all charitable and mutual aid purposes (there were 98 in 1896, 277 in 1908, and still 192 in 1923); These associations constantly maintained ties with the consular authorities, who were interested in maintaining the Italian language among the emigrants. Less linked to the preservation of national identity were the rural schools, on the other hand, whose purpose was more pragmatically to teach reading, writing and counting. It is uncertain whether Italian or a dialect prevailed in the teaching there; probably a mixture of the two languages was in use, not without some influence from Portuguese. The use of bilingual Italian-Portuguese texts, provided to emigrants by the Italian government, is also documented. The success of the Italian schools depended essentially on being for a long time the only option available. In 1908 232 institutions were surveyed, rising to 396 in 1913; their number then fell to 329 in 1924 and 167 in 1930. This decrease was determined by the gradual strengthening of the network of public schools; the granting of funding to community schools (i.e., those run by non-state associations) was also tied to the teaching in Portuguese of history, geography and some other subjects. It was, moreover, the Italian settlers themselves, by then rooted in Portuguese soil, who were eager to learn the national language. In the period of
Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship (1930-1945), a campaign of forced nationalization began, hitting hard at ethnically based schools (Italian, German, etc.), kept alive only by the support of the respective European governments and religious bodies; with
World War II, the study of Italian was banned (along with that of German and Japanese). After World War II, with funding from the Italian government having largely disappeared compared to the
fascist era, public or religious Portuguese-language schools replaced ethnically based ones, leading to numerous protests and a high rate of school evasion; it was only from 1985 onward that space was given in public schools to languages other than Portuguese and English, so that Italian-Brazilians and other immigrant groups could learn to read and write the language of use in their community.
The emigration press Italian immigrant communities gave rise to a large number of periodical publications; between 1875 and 1960 more than 500 newspapers (daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, and single issues) were surveyed, of which about 360 were concentrated in
São Paulo State. These were either news sheets, abounding in news about the motherland and crime or society news, as well as humorous, literary, sports, and fashion newspapers, often with modest circulations and lasting less than a year. Their sustenance, rather than sales, relied on advertisements by compatriots. There were also a few newspapers with larger circulations, most notably the "
Fanfulla" of São Paulo, which was born in 1893 and soon became the "unofficial mouthpiece of the Italian community in Brazil"; the paper was also read by Brazilians and with its 15,000 copies represented the city's second largest newspaper at the beginning of the 1910s. Today it survives as a bilingual weekly, the only significant exponent of the Italian press in the state of São Paulo. Also still in operation is the "
Correio Riograndense," founded in 1909 in
Caxias do Sul under the title "
La Libertà"; the following year the paper was transferred to
Garibaldi, where it took the name "
Il Colono"; in 1917 it was purchased by the
Capuchins and became the "
Staffetta Riograndense," to assume its current title in 1941. Until that date, the newspaper was edited in Italian, with a section in Portuguese and a column in a
Venetian "enriched with Lombard expressions." It was on the very columns of the "
Staffetta Riograndense" that the successful
Vita e stória de Nanetto Pipetta nassuo in Itália e vegnudo in Mérica per catare la cucagna by the Capuchin friar Aquiles Bernardi saw the light between January 23, 1924 and February 18, 1925; the text is written in
Talian, a Venetian
koiné with influences from the
Lombard and
Portuguese languages. Even today the newspaper still represents the "voice of the so-called Taliàn identity." The juxtaposition between writing in Italian and writing in dialect was not without political significance; writing in Italian was often related to the propaganda of patriotic and nationalistic ideals, while the use of dialect did not arise as a spontaneous initiative of dialect speakers (moreover, not at all accustomed to putting in writing their language of use), but rather by the initiative of some members of the clergy, who often used their works to spread anti-socialist ideas.
Nanetto Pipetta's language reflected more Bernardi's native Vicentino than the variety spoken by Italo-Brazilians of the time.
Brazilian government policies In the first period of its history, the government of independent (1822) and later republican (1889) Brazil showed little interest in the linguistic integration of the different components of the country's population; therefore, assimilationist policies were not promoted, unlike what was happening in Argentina; this circumstance favored the preservation of the language of origin by immigrants. The language spoken by the population was not surveyed in the first national censuses (1872, 1890, 1900, 1920); it was not until the 1940 census, the first conducted after the founding of the
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, that indications of Portuguese proficiency and the language spoken in the household were collected. The census showed that Italian was spoken by 458,000 people, among whom the large group was Brazilians of at least three generations (285,000), descendants of the Italians who came with the first wave of immigration; they were followed by second (120,000) and first generation Brazilians (53,000). Italian speakers thus emerged as the country's second largest linguistic minority (not counting Amerindian languages), after German speakers (644,000) and before Japanese (193,000) and Spanish speakers (74,500). The census also ascertained that out of the 24,603 Italo-Brazilians ("
imigrados, nacionais ou ex-nacionais da Itália") in the state of
Rio Grande do Sul, 13,349 (54.26 percent) habitually spoke Italian; much lower is the percentage for the state of
São Paulo, demonstrating the difference between rural and metropolitan contexts (out of 234,550 Italo-Brazilians, 30,259 spoke Italian, corresponding to 12.90 percent). The overall percentage of Italian-Brazilians still preferentially speaking Italian was 16.19 percent: this was the lowest share among the main immigrant communities in Brazil, as shown in the table below: The distribution of the data naturally reflects the greater proximity of Italian and Spanish to Portuguese than to non-
Romance (German, Russian, Polish) or non-
Indo-European (Japanese) languages. The 1940 census is particularly significant because the data were collected before Brazil intervened in
World War II on the side of the
Allies (1942), thus initiating a campaign of forced assimilation of minorities (called
Campanha de Nacionalização). It is believed, therefore, that the responses to the census surveys were largely sincere, in that they were not yet conditioned by the need to conceal their linguistic identity. Things would be different in 1950, when minorities of Italian, German and Japanese descent, following the defeat of their respective countries of origin and the
nationalization campaign, generally preferred to deny knowledge of languages other than Portuguese. The forced assimilation of minorities implemented under the
Estado Novo regime of
Getúlio Vargas went first through the "nationalization of teaching"; thus there was the nationalization of "community" schools (that is, those run by non-state associations) and the prohibition of teaching in languages other than Portuguese. Publication of works in the languages of the enemy was banned on pain of immediate imprisonment; this led to the suppression of numerous newspapers in German and Italian. The concept of "language crime" (
crime idiomático) was born; the persecution of language minorities peaked between 1941 and 1945, leading to the imprisonment of thousands of people caught speaking their mother tongue. Concentration camps, known as "confinement areas," were created in the state of
Santa Catarina, where descendants of immigrants who continued to speak their native language, among others, were imprisoned. In 1942 in the city of
Blumenau, in the same state, 31 percent of prisoners were in jail for speaking a foreign language; this share corresponded to 1.5 percent of the municipality's total population. In the same year, the army intervened in the city, with the aim of "teaching Santa Catarina people to be Brazilian." Attempts were also made to induce children to denounce parents who spoke a language other than Portuguese at home. The consequence of these repressions was the disappearance of much of the cultural production in the Italian language. Only a small part of the suppressed newspapers was in fact printed again after the end of the Vargas regime; many continued their publications in Portuguese. while in the big cities, as already noted, it only came back into use with the new wave of immigration after World War II.
The Italian language of immigrants in Brazilian literature The strong Italian component present in the Brazilian population since the end of the nineteenth century has favored the entry of the figure of the Italian immigrant into the country's cultural production; in particular, the Italian presence still has a strong weight in the definition of the
Paulista identity (the term
ítalo-paulistas is used in this regard). Thus, a literary strand has emerged that has Italians of recent immigration as its undisputed protagonists, often well characterized also linguistically. At the origins of the literary figure of the
ítalo-brasileiro are the short stories of Brás, Bexiga and Barra Funda by the modernist writer
Antônio de Alcântara Machado; the work, first published in 1927, has as its protagonists the so-called
Italianinhos de São Paulo, that is, the Italian immigrants who lived in the
Paulista capital and in particular in the three working-class neighborhoods that give the collection its name. Machado's intent is to make a portrait of the immigrants' daily experience, depicted in their difficult living conditions in a chronicle-like manner; the author writes in the preface: The characteristic of Machado's
novelas paulistanas is the adoption of a linguistic variety heavily influenced by Italian in both grammar and vocabulary, in imitation of the immigrants' language. Sometimes this leads to authentic passages in Italian, as in the following example (this is the reading aloud done by an immigrant of a news item from the "
Fanfulla," the popular newspaper of the Italians of São Paulo): The same procedure was later adopted by
Mário de Andrade in the collection
Belasarte (1934), dedicated precisely to Machado. In both cases, it is not a realistic reproduction, but a linguistic
pastiche in which "the use of the Italian language [...] insinuates itself into the fabric of the narrative in the same way that the immigrants were penetrating the urban fabric: sometimes distinguishing themselves from the context in an obvious way, at other times with interactions of subtle and varied nuances." It is thus a matter of "re-producing (producing again, and not just replicating) the phonetic, lexical, and phraseological adaptation of the
Ítalo-Paulistanos"; this procedure does not respond to a principle of representational fidelity, but of effectiveness vis-à-vis the Brazilian audience, since often "these adaptations, while incorrect from a purely linguistic point of view, nevertheless turn out to be fully responsive to the stylistic intent, and, above all, recognizable to a Portuguese-speaking reader." == Linguistic analysis ==