Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

BIBTEX RIS

Navigating Life and Work in Old Republic São Paulo

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-9052109

1527-1900

Francisco Vidal Luna,

Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

This excellent study by Molly C. Ball deals with the period 1891–1930, a crucial moment in the history of the state and especially the city of São Paulo. Slavery's end in Brazil in 1888 and an acceleration of coffee activity in the state stimulated an intense migration process, initially from abroad and gradually complemented by national migrants. The state government, pressured by the coffee elite, promoted subsidized foreign immigration to replace slave labor. The state fully assumed the burden of transporting the immigrant and his family from their country of origin to São Paulo city, temporarily housing them at the Hospedaria de Imigrantes, and arranging their employment in the farms. Ball covers the expansion of São Paulo city, the formal and informal labor markets that emerged, the coffee economy's crisis in the First Republic's first years, World War I, and the transformations that occurred into the 1920s. According to Ball, the period from the 1880s to the 1920s “provides the ideal setting to investigate where and how working-class stories, expectations, hopes, and failures intersected” with these “impersonal trends” (p. 4). She aims to challenge the traditional view on many of these themes by analyzing numerous primary sources, principally the thousands of registries of the Hospedaria de Imigrantes (both a temporary residence for immigrants in transit and an employment bureau) and extensive worker records from some of the city's largest companies during this period. She supplements these with labor recruitment newspaper ads. Her data shows that the hospedaria not only catered to rural-bound immigrants but also arranged relocations for those already in Brazil as well as urban employment for those arriving to the city, including from the Northeast.By focusing on city-countryside relations, unstable growth, and the immigrant population's characteristics, Ball challenges earlier studies. She points out that most studies of immigration and the labor market from 1880 to 1930 deal with dichotomies: white and nonwhite, and immigrants and nationals. She finds great disparity among the immigrants. Portuguese immigrants were the least educated, and Germans were the most educated. Thus the prejudice against the Portuguese meant that they were only offered the least remunerative occupations. The labor market had a hierarchy of prejudice, with Afro-Brazilians penalized among national immigrants and Portuguese penalized among foreigners. There was also a strong gender prejudice. Women of all nationalities and educational levels were employed in jobs of lower quality and remuneration and received less than men employed in the same occupations. This issue of prejudice and differentiation was even more evident during World War I, when there was a retraction in the labor market, a decrease in the supply of jobs, and a decline in wages. The groups with a lower educational level or who suffered more prejudice were the most affected by this crisis.São Paulo's immigration was predominantly of families, which was unusual for European immigration to the Americas. The author, using private letters, shows that immigrants' economic behavior in the First Republic should be seen as a family strategy, not an individual one. Given low wages, reduced working hours, and men's frequent unemployment, families sent to work women, even with their lower wages, as well as children, who were employed within or outside legal norms. The expanding textile sector was one of the main employers of these women and children.An original contribution by Ball is to show that the hospedaria's role was not limited to accommodating newcomers in their transit to the countryside. The institution exercised a broader role in facilitating the labor market's functioning, the urban employment of national and foreign immigrants, and the relocation of immigrants between field and city. But she claims that the hospedaria's employment policies were one possible cause of São Paulo city's low worker remuneration and inequality. It does not seem evident that these broader functions of the hospedaria, which made the labor market more transparent and supported workers and employers, could have directly influenced levels of pay and inequality.One can also question her analysis of why certain sectors of the economy paid lower salaries. She argues, for example, that the wage differentiation between São Paulo's textile company and the other major employers that she examines, particularly during World War I, indicates that textile companies had low productivity and suffered from lack of investment, and that this caused the depreciation of labor remuneration. Ball, unfortunately, provides no information to evaluate this conclusion, whether it be financial capacity, the availability of credit, or even the economic viability of these textile investments.Despite these questions regarding some of her findings, Ball has deepened our understanding of this complex period in the history of São Paulo state and city and in the formation of Brazil's urban free labor market during the First Republic. Her analysis sheds new light on this market's characteristics as well as workers' living conditions, family strategies, and the fundamental role of institutions such as the Hospedaria de Imigrantes.