Drama in two acts:

the Spanish emigration and the immigrant’s trajectory in the coffee-plantation of Sao Paulo, 1880-1930.

Abstract

This article aims at recovering and investigating the formation and development of a community whose origins are linked to two factors, namely, the considerable changes introduced by the upgrading of the coffee planting techniques in the region and the progressive presence of immigrant contingents of Spanish origin. As a matter of fact, the analytical reconstruction of the Spanish settlement in that region, Villa Novaes, provided elements for another series of wider formulations, whose fundamental variants derive from these immigrants' native land. We tried to apprehend the multiple dimensions of the phenomenon of mass emigration of Spaniards in its roots, and to investigate the expectations of these immigrants concerning the country they were bound to as a whole, and, more specifically, the aspects revealed by the community in which they settled down, and which is the object of this article. With this aim, and considering the double nature of our study –the collective and the individual one– we privileged two types of empirical sources to support our investigation: besides consulting written documents, we tried to open space for the investigation of the experiences of those who had actually lived all that series of past episodes, casting them as protagonists rather than as minor characters within the scenery of History. The combination of the aforementioned types of sources aimed at recovering and discussing the particular characteristics of Spanish immigrants in Brazil in the focused period (1880-1930), and at understanding their role within the general context of immigration in Brazilian society.