Marito e buoi dei paesi tuoi: estratégias familiares de friulanos na região de colonização italiana do Rio Grande do Sul (1880-1964)

Abstract

Through genealogical reconstruction, this study aims to analyze the movements of family groups of Italian immigrants and their descendants, mainly from the western part of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region, located in northeastern Italy. To analyze these groups, surnames are used as the guiding threads of the study, starting with the Santin family and its branches. These Italians, with previous experiences of seasonal migrations to urban areas in Central Europe, from 1880 onwards, settled in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, initially in the town of Dona Isabel, giving rise to a complex family network based on craft professions. This network extended to the town of Guaporé, where the group was analyzed until 1964, the date of the last marriage of a descendant of the family. In this time interval, the parental groups migrated again to other parts of Latin America, but maintained the contacts and ties still established in Italy. The research was therefore guided by this central problem: how do the processes of cultural transmutation of Friulians occur in the places of migratory destination, mainly in the field of trades and matrimonial strategies, to determine their ethnic-cultural border? To answer the prevailing question, the following sources were compared: parish records (baptismal and marriage) from several Brazilian municipalities and from one Argentine municipality (Mar del Plata); Brazilian and Italian civil registry documents (marriage and birth certificates); correspondence exchanged between families located in different parts of the world; interviews given by descendants. The methodology followed the line of Italian oral history and micro-history, which, based on specific cases, insists on an expanded historiographical dimension at national and supranational level. This work is not justified by the lack of studies on Italian immigration to Brazil, but by the objective of demonstrating how the family was the center of socioeconomic dynamics, especially in a context such as that of Guaporé, which has been little explored to date. Understanding the strategies, motives and specificities of a migratory process explains much of the activities of groups with qualified professions, that is, those with particular characteristics and inserted in a peasant universe. It has been shown that certain long-standing European labor traditions have enabled the reproduction of crafts in Latin America. In the town of Guaporé, for example, exchanges of technical and practical knowledge have emerged between groups of artisans originating from mountainous areas, not only in Friuli, but also from the rest of the Alpine arch. These groups originated from neighboring Italian regions and had extra-agricultural knowledge, were largely literate and had some financial resources, which provided a concrete glimpse into and enabled new migrations through networks linked to professions and family relationships. Some became industrialized, while others, in the fifth generation, still practice the professions inherited from their ancestors. However, each group consciously sought to re-propose the original ethnic-cultural and labor networks.