Colonization in Brazil
The story of colonization in Brazil is unique in the annals of the human movement across the world that has been going on ever since man began to multiply and…
From: 1817 C.E. To: 1917 C.E.
Location: Brazil
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Brazil Today and Tomorrow by L. E. Elliott, 1917.
The story of colonization in Brazil is unique in the annals of the human movement across the world that has been going on ever since man began to multiply and to seek elbow-room; it is one of the phenomena of exodus.
Arrival upon the shores of Brazil of an extraordinary variety of races was not a voluntary immigration in most instances. It was the result of a studied policy, inaugurated by the Emperors of Brazil, and carried on to the present day by the Federal Government and certain of the separate States; experiments in various kinds of people were made on a concerted plan, the colonies were grouped, in many cases isolated, retained their language and customs, still produce the food to which they were accustomed in the home land, and only become assimilated as their populations leave them or touch in time the fringe of others. The official mothering which they received tended rather to keep them grouped than to spread them in the earlier years.
The first official, deliberate importation of colonists of blood foreign to Brazil or Portugal began in 1817, when Dom João brought in Swiss settlers. Agents of the Brazilian Government recruited no less than five thousand in Bern, although owing to delays and accidents only about two thousand sailed from Amsterdam and Rotterdam: landing on a hot coastal belt after a trying voyage, fever took the mountaineers, and but a sparse seventeen hundred reached the foot of the Serra do Mar. Climbing to the pretty nook where the town of their founding, Nova Friburgo, stands today in a shelter of green mountains, sickness still followed them, and only the hardiest or most resistant clung to the colony, survived and left their name to another generation. Many dispersed to other localities. Nova Friburgo, now reached by the Leopoldina railway, and a thriving city, fresh, flowery, producer of cereals and peaches, owns few Swiss inhabitants today.
Agriculture in Sao Paulo State. Cutting Sugar Cane, Rice Cultivation, Coffee Gathering. Images from text, by L. E. Elliott.
A second batch of immigrants, three hundred and forty-two Germans, filled some gaps in the ranks: their readiness for labour may have been heightened by memories of the difficulties of transit to Europe, for the journey had taken one hundred and eighty days in a sailing ship. Germany at this period had not begun the industrial expansion which later kept all her people at home; economic conditions were severe on the ambitious worker, laws and social customs were irksome, and enterprising men looked across the seas for free lands. Germany became for about twenty-five years the very best recruiting ground for Brazil.
The second official colony was founded in Rio Grande do Sul, and consisted entirely of Germans—one hundred and twenty-six persons originally—who came in 1825. The colony was named Sao Leopoldo, used the water highway of the Rio dos Sinos until a railway line was built connecting it with Porto Alegre and with new colonies to the north, and has developed into one of the chief towns of the state, with forty thousand inhabitants. Its establishment was followed rapidly by that of Tres Forquilhas and S. Pedro de Alcantara, both in Rio Grande and both German, 1826; by another S. Pedro de Alcantara, also German, in Santa Catharina, 1826; Rio Negro, in Parana, 1828, formed by disbanded German soldiers. Petropolis, the model city in the hills above Rio, owed its inception to Dom Pedro and was founded with Germans and Swiss, but not until 1848, for more than ten years of civil war down south in Rio Grande, when the “Republica de Piritinim” was proclaimed, checked colonizing projects in the Empire.
With the suppression of trouble German colonizing was resumed in the south, Santa Catharina creating the Santa Isabel colony in 1845, while Rio Grande started five new centres between 1849 and 1850. The latter year is also memorable for the foundation of Blumenau, in Santa Catharina, by the good Herr Blumenau of Brunswick. At the same point on the lovely river Itajahy a little nucleus had existed precariously since 1827, added to by a group of one hundred and twenty-two Belgians in 1844; Herr Blumenau brought in Germans gradually at his own expense, supervising the colony in the role of a kind of paternal burgomaster, and in 1864 was able to count two thousand five hundred people; his efforts had, however, cost him about twelve thousand dollars. The Brazilian Government repaid him his outlay and made him official Director. Today Blumenau, once a small self-contained nucleo, is a bustling city with fifty thousand people, a lively exporting business and a railroad line.
In 1850 the Dona Thereza colony in Parana was started, while the famous Joinville, first called Dona Francesca, began in 1851 in Santa Catharina; it owed its existence to the fact that an Orleans scion, the Prince de Joinville, married a Brazilian princess who inherited large estates chiefly consisting of matto in Santa Catharina, The family ceded twelve square leagues of this land to the “Colonizing Union” of Hamburg, whence settlers were promptly sent, both the Prince and the Brazilian Government making a protege of the nucleo. The large sums of money spent resulted in a fine town, now numbering some twenty-five thousand people, served by the Brazil Railways.
A little later (1852) the Minas Geraes colony of Mucury was founded, but by this time German colonizing in arranged shipments had come to an end; any additional German colonists came singly. The German Government, both alarmed at the losses in blood—for emigration to North America and other parts of South America was also proceeding, although along different lines—and by reports sent home as the result of investigation which gave a poor account of the condition of the isolated nucleos, passed a law to forbid emigration to Brazil. Dom Pedro had to turn his attention to other countries.
Before the coming of the Germans, South Brazil was almost totally neglected; demand for tropical produce such as sugar and tobacco had kept the attention of Portuguese and their mixed-blood descendants for over three centuries to North Brazil, where negro slaves multiplied on the warm coast; the grassy uplands of the south attracted few Brazilians, and these chiefly bandeirantes whose main business was to keep out Spaniards from the Plate, and whose wild cattle strayed and bred on the natural pastures. So wild and untenanted was the country that up to the middle of the nineteenth century the German colonists had trouble with Indian raiders. But it was the right climate for the north-born Europeans, a wise choice that proved a success while other settlements dwindled out.
During the same period there were several attempts to colonize Espirito Santo, notably at Santa Isabel, and Cachoeiras and Transylvania, six or seven starting between 1847 and 1856. The energy of the settlers was discounted by the hot climate, and many moved south, where the great increase in settlers’ populations is a fair criterion of their success. The official figures of German entries into Brazil from 1820 to the end of 1915 are one hundred and twenty-two thousand eight hundred and thirty, but the people of German blood in Brazil are now reckoned at about 250,000. The southerly towns under their influence are clean, well-kept, live centres, with constantly expanding industries. Rio Grande today is quite one of the best sections of Brazil: the influx of Italians brings them more than equal in numbers to the German element, taking the state as a whole.
With organized German settlement checked, Brazil during the eighteen fifties turned her attention to the mother country, and brought in Portuguese; they were settled in the warmer latitudes. In 1853, such a colony was begun in Maranhao, at Santa Isabel, followed by five more in the same northern and sultry state in 1855; in the same year three Portuguese colonies were established in Para, at Nossa Senhora d’O, at Peganha and at Silva, while Rio de Janeiro was planted with another five. A little later Bahia was given Portuguese colonies at Sinimbu, Engenho Novo and Rio Pardo. These and others were not strikingly successful until or unless joined by other colonists, for the Portuguese, who are artisans rather than agriculturists, melted from the lonely settlements and found jobs in the coast cities.
By this time coffee culture was coming into favour, the slave business was doomed, although the actual abolition of slavery did not occur until 1888, and planters invited immigrants to their developing estates. The work of obtaining immigrants was undertaken by individuals, as the Vergueiro family by Theophilo Ottoni and the Visconde de Baependy, with varying success, as well as by the International Society of Immigration of Rio, with headquarters in Antwerp.
Colonists sent to coffee estates worked on the métayer or parceria system, inherently vicious. The colonist had the satisfaction of considering himself an independent worker, but as he started with a large debt, never owned land and earned no wages, his lot was a poor one if crops failed or the fazendeiro chanced to be unfair. He arrived owing for the passage of himself and family, and was given a house and a quantity of food—of the country; he cultivated a certain number of coffee trees, or allotment of sugarcane, took the harvest to the owner’s mill and received half the result after milling. It is said by J. L. More, in his book Le Bresil en 1852, that the hard-working Bavarians and Holsteiners who worked on this system in Sao Paulo often paid off their debts in four years and then had money in hand; but other investigators spoke adversely on the subject, finding colonists of ten and twelve years’ standing still indebted and living hopelessly. In the end the parceria gave way before a general wages system. The métayer plan still exists in some parts of Minas, Espirito Santo, Sao Paulo and other coffee regions, and can be found in the sugar districts and in the cacao region of Bahia, but large ownership of great scientifically-run estates has driven it from general employment.
Investigations made by J. von Tschudi, sent by the Swiss Government in 1857, and by the German Consul Haupt ten years later, proved the failure of the share system; colonists could be seized and imprisoned if they tried to leave the estate on which they worked, and, unable to support life on the produce of their allotments, would have been even worse off had it not been for the “many acts of benevolence for which the emigrants had to thank the kindness natural to so many Brazilians,” says the author of Brazilian Colonization, a little brochure published under a pseudonym in London in the year 1873.
The same writer, giving a list of nationalities comprising the immigration into Brazilian states up to that time, nearly thirty-five years ago, before the great entry of the Italians had begun, or that of the Poles and Russians with their gift of hardy persistence, names a French colony taken to the banks of the Ivahy river in Parana about 1850, which expired for want of transportation and therefore of markets; this, with the influx of Algerian French in 1868-1869 to a spot near Curityba, also in Parana, is the most important attempt of the Gallic race to found settlements in Brazil; the disturbances of the latter, the first vine-growers of the state, gave the authorities as much trouble as the subsequent adventures of the Russians ten years later in the same region.
“Jacare Assu” also mentions a few Alsatians in Nova-Petropolis (Rio Grande); the Dutch families in Joinville, Rio Novo, Petropolis, and Leopoldina (Espirito Santo); the Tyrolian wanderers; the Danes of Estrella; the Mongolians—five hundred and sixty-six of them, who came by contract in 1856; and the colony of Icelanders who went to Joinville, and were “said to be doing very well.” He also speaks of the “colonies of Brazilians” in Brazil, who were settled in Estrella, at Sinimbu, Iguape and Itajahy; and the North American influx of 1867. This later item was the result neither of population overflow nor invitation, but was the result of the struggle between the North and South of the United States, the disappointed slave-owning southerners seeking a land where their losses could be forgotten. The exodus, of course, was in several directions: groups went into Mexico, some to Canada, to different parts of South America; I have seen an excellent colony of these migrants and their descendants at Toledo in the south of British Honduras, growing sugarcane and prospering. Those who came to Brazil were brought from the port of New York by the “United States and Brazil Mail Ships,” since defunct, the first batch of two hundred leaving in December, 1866. They were followed by some thousands, but today it is difficult to trace them, the groups into which they were originally assembled having long since broken up.
Seeking these settlements, I visited Villa Americana in Sao 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.
The Barra Road, Upper City, Bahia. Resaca along the Avenida Beira Mar, Rio; Morro da Gloria in Background. On the Upper Amazon.
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; Juquia, or Cananea, below Iguape in southern Sao Paulo; and the Santa Barbara- Villa Americana group in central Sao 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 Sao 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 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.
From the year 1820 to the end of 1915, a total of one million, three hundred and sixty-one thousand, two hundred and sixty-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 Sao 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 Sao Paulo city, famed as it is for luxurious dwellings; the Avenida Paulista, pride of Sao 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 Sao 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 Sao Paulo; she no longer pays passages on steamships, but she maintains free hotels in Santos and Sao 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 Parana uplands as well as in nucleos in Sao 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 Parana 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.
There is one specially thriving Russian settlement to be seen in Sao Paulo state, at Nova Odessa; the wooden buildings are Russian in type, the tall churches are like pictures from a traveller’s Russian notebook, and the institution of the samovar and the huge family stove is clung to. These people are great lovers of land, and its possession has contented them; as yet there is little mingling with the social or political life of Brazil.
The system under which land is made over to colonists demands more explanation than space permits; Sao Paulo, briefly, only sanctions the establishment of nucleos near a railway line or navigable river, with an eye to marketing, and has inserted colonization clauses in more than one railroad concession to help develop these settlements along the route; lots are never, originally, of more than fifty hectares, and may be half this size if quite close to rail or river; “urban” lots are granted to settlers with money in hand to start a business, and “rural” lots to intending agriculturists; nobody can obtain a lot unless he has a wife and family, but sons twenty-one years old can also obtain grants while bachelors; payments are made on easy terms, generally at the end of each harvest for five successive years, prices varying according to locality from a few milreis to a couple of hundred per hectare—roughly speaking; I have never heard of unfeeling treatment in cases where settlers are unable to keep up payments in bad years, but encountered many stories of help given by the authorities. When the male head of a family dies before payments are complete, the widow and family are handed clear titles if three quarters of the debt has been liquidated, and if ability to continue work is demonstrated; if not, the family is sent back to Europe at State expense. Rebates of ten per cent are given to settlers able to pay on taking up land.
Following this plan, it happens that for several years after the foundation of a new centre the colony is in debt, becoming emancipado as the obligations are paid off; Sao Paulo state is dotted with pleasant examples of these “emancipated” colonies, today flourishing agricultural regions well-farmed by the industrious and ambitious Europeans, adding enormously to the productivity of the State. At the end of 1915 the State was acting as god-mother to half a score of nucleos , of which the most promising are Campos Salles, Jorge Tibirçia, Nova Europa, Nova Veneza, Gaviao Peixoto, and the Martinho Prado group. In the same year, the President’s message states, two hundred and ninety-three colonists completed payments on their lots and received definite titles in place of the provisionary ones first issued: over one hundred and eighty-five contos was paid on lots. “The total population still under State administration is 13,793 persons, who occupy an area of 54,666 hectares; of these over 14,000 are in cultivation, yielding produce worth 1800 contos of reis last year,” said Dr. Altino Arantes (July, 1916). Twenty thousand people came into the state in 1915, of whom six thousand were Portuguese, four thousand Spanish and four thousand Italian; this is but twenty per cent of pre-war average immigration to S. Paulo.
In the course of years very many colonies have developed into regular towns, long since “emancipated;” Sao Bernardo, Sabauna and Bom Successo are notable instances, while the capital city itself has reached out and absorbed nucleo hangers-on to her spreading petticoats.
One of the interesting recent experiments of Sao Paulo was the cession of some twelve million acres of coastal land to a Japanese company with the object of creating an agricultural colony with Oriental brains and labour. The organizing syndicate, with the approval of the Japanese Government, was formed in Tokio in 1913, used Japanese capital, emigrants and ships, and has already settled several thousand people. Studied preparations and soil experiments were made before any colonists were carried over. Practical results so far have included a large addition to Brazil’s production of rice, while the resurrection of the once flourishing tea industry is also said to be in sight. This Japanese colony is notable for its tactful introduction: wishing to avoid even the chance of friction, the organizers stipulated its location in a spot which, able to communicate by water with markets, does not rub shoulders with other centres of population. Iguape is reached either by small steamers from Santos, or by rail from Santos to a spot on the river Iguape communicating with the colony by riverine boats, but little is heard of the Japanese settlement in Sao Paulo; they live to themselves and their chief appearance is in statistical reports. Besides the members of this agricultural colony there are at least another eight or ten thousand Japanese in Brazil, chiefly house servants, greatly liked for their quick, sophisticated resource.
Apart from the serious, long-continued work of the Sao Paulo authorities to win labour from abroad, there is still a remarkable amount of support given to immigration by the Federal Government; nucleos to the number of twenty are supervised by the authorities, seven of which have been “emancipated” while thirteen are still paying for their allotments. The seven free centres, Tayo, Ivahy, Jesuino Marcondes, Itapara, Iraty and Vera-Guarany, in Parana, and Affonso Penna in Espirito Santo, contain nearly 33,000 persons, the remaining thirteen counting 19,000 persons: together the colonies had an agricultural yield in 1915 worth 14,223 contos of reis, and own livestock valued at 2,427 contos.
The State of Minas Geraes has made repeated efforts to encourage immigration and spent large sums upon propaganda and the establishment of nucleos. She has under supervision sixteen state colonies, with a total population of 26,000 persons, agricultural production from the lands under cultivation amounting in 1915 to the value of 3,155 contos of reis. There are also within the state borders two Federal colonies, one of which, João Pinheiro, has freed itself from indebtedness and is on the way to become an important agricultural and stock-raising centre; these two nucleos contain over two thousand persons.
In Rio Grande do Sul colonization has been seriously checked since 1913, but there are two important centres under State control which call for mention: one is the Guarany nucleo , in existence for a quarter of a century but counting only 25,000 inhabitants because it is off the line of communication with state markets; its position is strikingly contrasted with the Erechim colony, six years old, planted on the Rio Grande-S. Paulo railway line when the latter was opened to traffic, and which today has over 30,000 population grouped in six or seven bright little villages.
In 1915, when entries from abroad were checked on account of the war in Europe there were still immigrants from Portugal to the number of 15,000, 6,000 Italians, nearly as many Spanish, 600 Russians and 500 “Turco-Arabs:” also some two thousand Brazilians were moved from the “scourged” districts of the rainless north and sent south. From 1820 to the end of 1915 the number of immigrants entering Brazil has been as follows:—
Italians—1,361,266
Portuguese—976,386
Spaniards—468,583
Germans—122,830
Russians—103,683
Austrians—78,545
Turk-Arabs—52,434
French— 28,072
English—22,005
Japanese—15,608
Swiss—10,713
Swedes—5,435
Belgians—4,727
In addition, official lists give another 200,000 of “diversas” nationalities and a margin must also be allowed for persons who did not enter as immigrants.
Ponte Santa Isabel, Recife (Pernambuco). Praça Mauá—one of Rio’s wharves. Water-Front at Bahia, Lower City.
Where is the future immigrant of Brazil to come from, and to what part of the country is he to go? I have put this question frequently to Brazilians, and have almost invariably received an answer to this effect: “We want white immigrants, and they can settle healthily either in the cool south of Brazil or on the high interior uplands.” The sertoes of Matto Grosso and Goyaz will not attract foreign settlers until there is better communication; the land is there, but the markets are not available. But there is land and to spare still in Sao Paulo with its network of railways and good riverways, and there is excellent cereal and cattle land in Parana, Santa Catharina and Rio Grande do Sul, for the northern-born, who cannot face a semi-tropical climate: for him who can face it—as the Texas cotton-grower should do—there are extensive regions farther north in Pernambuco and her sister states. The extreme north is not fitted for white, Anglo-Saxon or Latin, families, and although single men can live healthily in such latitudes for many years, the life of such tropic exiles is not good for the individual or for society. Coloured or Asiatic colonists have been suggested for the Amazonian valley, but it is at least doubtful whether the Brazilian Government would favour such plans, or whether, in view of the fertility of the native population, such introductions would be necessary; saving babies by improved sanitation would solve the problem better than any other method of populating.
The question of where white immigration is to come from is a difficult one; after the close of the European War there may be a tendency for populations of economically hurt regions to look across the seas, but it is very probable that governments will take means to prevent any exodus; Europe will call her workers to rebuild as she has called them home to fight. There are today certainly many tens of thousands less people in the Americas than in the middle of 1914. It is possible that the returned Europeans will not come back in the same numbers. But there may be a considerable shifting of population within the Americas, North and South; men with land-hunger will look about them for the country offering most to farmers and stock-raisers. To such men there are few parts of the world which offer as much as does Brazil, with her sincere invitation to foreigners, square dealing, stability, and rewards for enterprise. The lack of development along certain definite lines is Brazil’s best recommendation to the enterprising and persistent.
No seeker after dolce far niente should come here. No thought of tropic paradises should obscure the vision of the newcomer. Brazil is a good country for the worker, with wide southern lands where careful cultivation will bring excellent results; it is a really free country of tolerant views as well as of wide spaces. The foreigner who comes here to work, to develop, will feel himself remarkably soon at home in a friendly atmosphere, and if he cares to identify himself with progressive movements he will be warmly welcomed; a very long |ist could be made up of high-class foreigners who have attained not only to wealth but to positions which proved the open mind and confidence of the Brazilian authorities. Naturalized foreigners are eligible to the legislative assemblies of Brazil, and whether naturalized or not foreigners enjoy precisely the same rights and privileges as Brazilians before the law.
For the mining engineer, the stock-raiser, the expert agriculturist, the fruit-grower, there is plenty of room in Brazil; along certain special lines his work is much wanted, and he can look forward to getting a better return for his investment of personality and cash than in most places in a world that has not many great untouched spaces left. The pioneer, hardy and determined, has still a chance in Brazil.
Elliott, L. E. Brazil Today and Tomorrow. The Macmillan Company, 1917.
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