From Tuscany to Brazil
Tuscan emigrants in southern Brazil 1875 – 1914
The first big immigration phase to Brazil started in 1875 and a second one in 1887 because of a new emancipation law of slave labor approved in the following year.
From 1875 to 1914 there were about eighty thousand Tuscans who left for Brazil. As shown by the official statistics of the Kingdom of Italy, the highest peaks in Tuscany were reached in the three-year period 1895-97 when they emigrated to the South American country respectively 7419, 6902 and 8163 individuals.
A very recent study testifies to the incidence of family ties in emigration to Brazil, already from the 1860s and the 70s in some places with a strong migration vocation.
The second chapter focuses on the main locations of the Tuscans in Brazil. To this end, the recognition of official data was useful through what was called the Consular Bulletin until 1888, which later became the Bulletin of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and finally, from 1902 to 1927, the Emigration Bulletin, the official organ of the new institute of the General Commissariat of Emigration, headed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, drawn up by the consuls in the main cities of arrival of the Italian emigration.
From the analysis of these data we learn that if it is true that the great majority of fellow countrymen headed towards the State of São Paulo and in some southern areas of Minas Gerais, where the induced of coffee production in the last decade of the 19th century.
The new opportunities offered to emigration from coffee-growing, first in the state of São Paulo, starting in 1887, and then in that of Minas Gerais from 1892. While the propensity of Tuscan emigration to the State of São Paulo is known, few times it is emphasized that it was also consistent in the South of Minas Gerais.
A last paragraph is dedicated, then, to the numerous letters and documents deposited in the precious Archive of the Paolo Cresci Foundation of Lucca, the museum-archive on the most important emigration in our region. The study of these epistolary sources for the analysis of Tuscan emigration in Brazil provides us with the possibility of reconstructing the individual events of some regional parties in the period of our interest.
The last detailed studies in this regard show that the only district of Lucca, which in addition to the capital included, among others, the municipalities of Bagni di Lucca, Barga, Borgo a Mozzano, Massarosa and Pescia, in the period 1876-1915, engraved in average with around 50% of all Tuscan emigration to Brazil. If considered also the district of Castelnuovo Garfagnana, with the main mountain towns of Castiglione di Garfagnana, Gallicano, Minucciano, Molazzana and Pieve Fosciana, at the time under the provincial jurisdiction of Massa Carrara, the entire area will be numerically the first in all Central Italy in relation to the movements towards the South American country. In 1896 almost 70% of the entire emigration in the district of Lucca was absorbed by departures to Brazil, compared with a Tuscan average of 52.5% and a national one of 24.93 % in the same year.
His experience is linked to that of the co-founder of the magazine, Alessandro Leopoldo Cerchiai of Pescia, who arrived in Brazil in 1898 after serving a two-year sentence for the 1898 Italian street protests. as a sweeper in the streets of São Paulo, and then employed by a company that built the Sorocabana railway.
Sources:
Emigranti toscani nel Brasile meridionale 1875 – 1914 DALLA TOSCANA AL BRASILE
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI FIRENZE – Antonio de Ruggiero
https://flore.unifi.it/retrieve/handle/2158/557493/16589/de%20ruggiero%20xxiii.pdf
Tuscan emigration from 1876 – 1925
A good part of the Italian emigrants who went to Argentina, chose this destination as the final, while Tuscans – and Lucchese in the head – preferred Brazil, perhaps due to the fact that the migratory flow towards Argentina consolidates some decade before the one to Brazil. Nevertheless, from the territory currently corresponding to the province of Lucca there is the first sporadic group of emigrants to Brazil as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, with the usual figurine makers, who certainly functioned as ‘facilitators’ for future Tuscan migration flows. They departed between 1850 and 1870 from the ports of Marseilles and Le Havre on steamships that reached the Brazilian states of Bahia and Pernambuco.
These early stages were certainly not a migration model with a strong social impact, but rather a physiological episode in the age-old experience of Lucca migration.
It is only from 1880 onwards that there is a substantial flow of Lucca that is directed towards Brazil, whose economy now requires labor-power on the vast interior coffee plantations, where it is necessary to replace the color labor force after the abolition of slavery in 1888. The growth of the flow is now generated by various concurrent factors: the growth of the Brazilian economy, the consolidated presence in Brazil of some ‘facilitators’ turned into merchants along the coastal areas and – not least – the propaganda activity carried out by the migratory agents in Lucca and elsewhere, confirming also a classic example of the internationalization of the migration process.
Between 1876 and the end of the century, Brazil absorbs an average of 15 percent of all emigrants from the province of Lucca, culminating at 68.6 percent in 1896 and enough to force the authorities to open a deputy Brazilian consulate in Lucca in order to prepare all the necessary bureaucratic procedures for expatriation. While until 1890 the number of male emigrants was exorbitant, in the decade leading up to the twentieth century the number of women emigrating from Lucca increased gradually, partially confirming a change in the migration model which, from temporary, evidently turned into permanent with the arrival of wives, companions and daughters.
The international coffee price crisis in 1898 created a sharp slowdown in migratory flows arriving in Brazil and the consequent return of many Italians and Tuscans to the starting communities. Nevertheless, the Tuscan emigrants in Brazil still represent one of the most numerous communities on a regional basis, and certainly one of those of the most ancient settlement.
Sources:
https://www.asei.eu/it/2006/11/lemigrazione-toscana/