[LINK] "Italian Immigrants Helped Forge Local Identity in the South"

[rfmcdonald]

This IPS article, authored by Valerie Dee, helps to highlight the huge Italian presence in South America, not only in Argentina and Uruguay but in Brazil, too.

In 1875 a handful of families from the Veneto region of northern Italy, fleeing hardship and hunger, took ship for the Empire of Brazil. Disembarking in Porto Alegre in the southeast, they hacked their way for over 100 kilometres through densely wooded country into the Serra Gaúcha hills, up to 800 metres above sea level.

Land, 25 to 50 hectares per family, was distributed free to these self-reliant pioneers in an area of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul named Dona Isabel, after his daughter, by the emperor Dom Pedro II (1831-1889). This imperial policy, which followed the abolition of slavery in 1871, was aimed at populating the land and making it productive.

Important changes were under way in the economy of Rio Grande do Sul. Soon, railways connected the countryside to Porto Alegre, the state capital and chief port, and together with the introduction of steam ships, quicker and cheaper transport boosted exports.

The population of the state of Rio Grande do Sul doubled between 1872 and 1890, from 434,813 people to 897,455, according to records at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). This was partly due to immigration: about 60,000 immigrants, mostly from Italy, settled in the Serra Gaúcha region during this period, and continued to arrive in large numbers in the following decades.

The descendants of Italian immigrants are estimated at 25 million in this country of 190 million, and in southern Brazil they represent around 35 percent of the population.

[. . .]

Rio Grande do Sul is the Brazilian state with the fourth highest human development index (HDI), according to the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP), after Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Santa Catarina. Brazil's overall HDI ranking places it 70th out of 177 countries worldwide.

Eleventh in size out of the 26 Brazilian states, with a population of 11 million people, Rio Grande do Sul is larger in area than the country of Uruguay, with 3.2 million people, on its southern border.