The process of identity construction among Italian immigrants in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (1875-1918)

Abstract

The Italian immigrants who began to arrive in Rio Grande do Sul after 1875 to work as farmers in the northeast and central areas of the state had left behind a newlyunified country, where the construction of a national identity was still in progress. Here, in contact with other ethnic groups, they abandoned their collective identification with the villages they had come from in favor of an Italian ethnic identity. Most studies on the theme of identity construction by the Italian immigrants and their descendants in Rio Grande do Sul claim that Catholicism was the main agent of collective identification. In this article we analyze documents and letters from immigrants and Italian consular agents in order to understand the process of collective identity construction before the intervention of the Catholic Church silenced the anticlerical voices in the state’s Italian community. The invention of tradition does not arise out of nowhere, according to Hobsbawm. It is a fact that most Italian immigrants were deeply Catholic and had little interest in the Italian national state. However, a Catholic identity opposed to nationalism, constructed by historians sponsored by the Catholic clergy, practically erased the existence of evidence of nationalism and anticlericalism. This paper discusses the activities of this group prior to the year 1918, because during and after the First World War the Brazilian government and the Catholic Church made their first attempts to nationalize the immigrants.

Key words: immigration, colonization, identity.