Italian Brazilians
Italian Brazilians are Brazilians of full or partial Italian descent, whose ancestors were Italians who emigrated to Brazil during the Italian diaspora, or more recent Italian-born people who've settled in Brazil. Italian Brazilians are the largest number of people with full or partial Italian ancestry outside Italy, with São Paulo being the most populous city with Italian ancestry in the world. Nowadays, it is possible to find millions of descendants of Italians, from the southeastern state of Minas Gerais to the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, with the majority living in São Paulo state. Small southern Brazilian towns, such as Nova Veneza, have as much as 95% of their population of Italian descent.
There are no official numbers of how many Brazilians have Italian ancestry, as the national census conducted by IBGE does not ask the ancestry of the Brazilian people. In 1940, the last census to ask ancestry, 1,260,931 Brazilians were said to be the child of an Italian father, and 1,069,862 said to be the child of an Italian mother. Italians were 285,000 and naturalized Brazilians 40,000. Therefore, Italians and their children were, at most, just over 3.8% of Brazil's population in 1940.
The Embassy of Italy in Brazil, in 2013, reported the number of 32 million descendants of Italian immigrants in Brazil, half of them in the state of São Paulo, while there were around 450,000 Italian citizens in Brazil. Brazilian culture has significant connections to Italian culture in terms of language, customs, and traditions. Brazil is also a strongly Italophilic country as cuisine, fashion and lifestyle has been sharply influenced by Italian immigration.
Italian immigration to Brazil
According to the Italian government, there are 31 million Brazilians of Italian descent. All figures relate to Brazilians of any Italian descent, not necessarily linked to Italian culture in any significant way. According to García, the number of Brazilians with actual links to Italian identity and culture would be around 3.5 to 4.5 million people. Scholar Luigi Favero, in a book on Italian emigration between 1876 and 1976, pinpointed that Italians were present in Brasil since the Renaissance: Genoese sailors and merchants were among the first to settle in colonial Brazil since the first half of the 16th century, and so, because of the many descendants of Italians who emigrated there from Columbus' times until 1860, the number of Brazilians with Italian roots should be increased to 35 million.Although they were victims of some prejudice in the first decades and in spite of the persecution during World War II, Brazilians of Italian descent managed to integrate and assimilate seamlessly into the Brazilian society.
Many Brazilian politicians, artists, footballers, models, and personalities are or were of Italian descent. Italian-Brazilians have been state governors, representatives, mayors and ambassadors. Four Presidents of Brazil were of Italian descent : Pascoal Ranieri Mazzilli, Itamar Franco, Emílio Garrastazu Médici and Jair Messias Bolsonaro.
Citizenship
According to the Brazilian Constitution, anyone born in the country is a Brazilian citizen by birthright. In addition, many born in Italy have become naturalized citizens after they settled in Brazil. The Brazilian government used to prohibit multiple citizenship. However, that changed in 1994 by a new constitutional amendment. After the changes, over half a million Italian-Brazilians have requested recognition of their Italian citizenship.According to Italian legislation, an individual with an Italian parent is automatically recognized as an Italian citizen. To exercise the rights and obligations of citizenship, individual must have all documents registered in Italy, which normally involves the local consulate or embassy. Some limitations are applied to the process of recognition such as the renouncement of the Italian citizenship by the individual or the parent, a second limitation is that women transferred citizenship to their children only after 1948. After a constitutional reform in Italy, Italian citizens abroad may elect representatives to the Italian Chamber of Deputies and the Italian Senate. Italian citizens residing in Brazil elect representatives together with Argentina, Uruguay and other countries in South America. According to Italian Senator Edoardo Pollastri, over half-a-million Brazilians are waiting to have their Italian citizenship recognized.
History
Italian crisis in late 19th century
Italy did not become a unified national state until 1861. Before then, Italy was politically divided into several kingdoms, duchies, and other small states. The legacy of political fragmentation influenced deeply the character of the Italian migrant: "Before 1914, the typical Italian migrant was a man without a clear national identity but with strong attachments to his town or village or region of birth, to which half of all migrants returned."In the 19th century, many Italians fled the political persecutions in Italy led by the Imperial Austrian government after the failure of Italian unification movements in 1848 and 1861. Although very small in numbers, the well-educated and revolutionary group of emigrants left a deep mark where they settled. In Brazil, the most famous Italian was then Líbero Badaró. However, the mass Italian immigration tide that would only be second to the Portuguese and German migrant movements in shaping modern Brazilian culture started only after the 1848-1871 Risorgimento.
During the last quarter of the 19th century, the newly united Italy suffered an economic crisis. The more industrial northern half of Italy was plagued with high unemployment caused in part by the introduction of modern agricultural techniques, while southern Italy remained underdeveloped and almost untouched by agrarian modernization programs. Even in the North, industrialization was still in its initial stages and illiteracy remained common. Thus, poverty and lack of jobs and income stimulated Northern Italians to emigrate. Most Italian immigrants were very poor rural workers.
Brazilian need of immigrants
In 1850, under British pressure, Brazil finally passed a law that effectively banned transatlantic slave trade. The increased pressure of the abolitionist movement, on the other hand, made it clear that the days of slavery in Brazil were coming to an end. Slave trade was effectively suppressed, but the slave system still endured for almost four decades. Thus, Brazilian landowners claimed that such migrants were or would soon become indispensable for Brazilian agriculture. They would soon win the argument, and mass migration would begin in earnest.An Agriculture Congress in 1878 in Rio de Janeiro discussed the lack of labor and proposed to the government the stimulation of European immigration to Brazil. Immigrants from Italy, Portugal, and Spain were considered the best ones because they were Latin-based and mainly Catholic. In particular, Italian immigrants settled mainly in the São Paulo region, where there were vast coffee plantations.
At the end of the 19th century, the Brazilian government was influenced by eugenics theories.
Beginning of Italian settlement in Brazil
The Brazilian government, with or following the Emperor's support, had created the first colonies of immigrants in the early 19th century. The colonies were established in rural areas of the country, being settled by European families.The first groups of Italians arrived in 1875, but the boom of Italian immigration in Brazil happened between 1880 and 1900, when almost one million Italians arrived.
Many Italians were naturalized Brazilian at the end of the 19th century, when the 'Great Naturalization' automatically granted citizenship to all the immigrants residing in Brazil prior to 15 November 1889 "unless they declared a desire to keep their original nationality within six months."
During the end of the 19th century, denouncement of bad conditions in Brazil aggravated by the crisis in coffee plantations in São Paulo, increased in the press. Reacting to the public clamor, the Italian emigration inspector Adolfo Rossi undertook a investigation into the conditions faced by Italian emigrants on the fazendas, travelling undercover, disguised as a peasant. Rossi's report painted a dramatic picture of the semi-slavery conditions based on the testimonies collected: women raped, men whipped, discipline that "makes the fazenda look like a colony of convicts under compulsory residence," disease, failure to pay wages or delays in payment, misery.
As a result the government of Italy issued in 1902 the Prinetti Decree forbidding subsidized immigration and withdrawing the permission given to Brazil for the free importation of Italians to the farms and plantations in that country. In consequence, the number of Italian immigrants in Brazil fell drastically in the beginning of the 20th century, but the wave of Italian immigration continued until 1920.
Over half of the Italian immigrants came from northern Italian regions of Veneto, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, and from the central Italian region of Tuscany. About 30% emigrated from Veneto. On the other hand, in the 20th century, southern Italians predominated in Brazil, coming from the regions of Campania, Abruzzo, Molise, Basilicata and Sicily.