Fluxos populacionais e migrações

This dissertation explores immigrant entrepreneurship in the garment industry of São Paulo, Brazil. Brazil is the fourth largest producer of garments. Most of the production is directed at local consumption, through mostly small and medium size retailing stores and producers. I research two communities in particular: Bolivians and Koreans. Entrepreneurs from both communities form the backbone of the industry, yet their activity has recently come under governmental scrutiny. Because of cases of slave-like labor involving undocumented Bolivian workers, the government has started enforcing labor laws. The impacts of those inspections on the targeted immigrant groups have seldom been researched. In fact, very little has been written about Koreans and Korean entrepreneurs in Brazil. This dissertation seeks to answer the following research questions: How do immigrant entrepreneurs in this industry perceive and adapt to a situation where they are accused of abuses by a very bureaucratic state? What factors influence their perceptions?

This dissertation examines the interrelationship of ethnic and national identity through the lens of the Jewish community in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This community traces its origins to over 60 different countries; the resulting diversity and blending of religious and cultural practices in the context of a country which prides itself on having an emblematic fluidity of ethnic/racial categories lends itself to experiments in Jewish identity and poses challenges to conceptions of Jewishness and Brazilianness. Based on ethnographic field research conducted in São Paulo, this dissertation focuses on the ways Jewish Brazilians negotiate the often contradictory elements of their identities. Building on the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, I argue that these are two distinct levels of experience that overlap in the case of Jews, where the former operates at the level of identity and the latter at the level of practice. Deploying national ethnic ideologies, community institutions have been key to the integration of the multiple cultural influences that are the result of the convergence of people from diverse points in the Jewish diaspora on the city of São Paulo. Their lives are expressive of the social contradictions that characterize Brazilian society and are reproduced in tensions between inclusion and exclusion. I argue that creating community involves intertwining these many cultural strands while seeking a balance between maintaining ethnic distinction and achieving full cultural citizenship. Economic and social class intersect with ethnic identity as well; as generations following migration have deepened their participation in Brazilian society, they have become increasingly subject to the instabilities that affect the society as a whole, thereby solidifying their identification with Brazil. Urban violence and security concerns provide additional contexts for Jewish experience in São Paulo. Since Jews maintain active transnational ties and are also the potential target of hostility from abroad, being Jewish in São Paulo requires mediating conflicting desires for invisibility and visibility. The Jewish community responds to the possibility of violence in ways that are consistent with local norms. Though these external threats are a reminder of their fragile status as nationals, Jews in Brazil embrace their dual identities as Jewish and Brazilian.

This doctoral dissertation is an ethnographic study of musical culture among Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo, Brazil. Specifically, the study explores how the musical culture of this community has changed in recent years as a result of the dekasegui movement, the migration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Brazilians who have traveled to Japan since 1990 in search of work. In order to explore these questions, I conducted fieldwork between May and November of 2003 on three musical groups, Zhen Brasil, Ton Ton Mi, and Wadaiko Sho, each of which have found different ways to invoke, contest, and reinvent their Brazilian and Japanese musical heritages. By exploring these groups’ musical practices, texts, dance, costumes, and discourses of self-definition, this study offers insight into shifts in the ethnic self-definition and racial consciousness of the Japanese Brazilian community that have taken place as the result of face-to-face contact between Japanese Brazilians and Japanese under the conditions of contiguous globalization. This study contributes to our current understandings of the impact of circular forms of migration on the musical culture and ethnic identity of diasporic communities in the contemporary world.

A política de remoção de favelas, caracterizada por uma mobilidade residencial forçada, é responsável pela diáspora a que foram submetidas as populações dos assentamentos de baixa renda do entorno da zona sul carioca; sobretudo, durante os anos 50 e 60. Essa dispersão, entretanto, foi orientada por dois dos grandes eixos através dos quais deveria se concretizar nos anos subsequentes a vertiginosa expansão da cidade em direção ao que viria a se constituir em sua periferia urbana. As famílias submetidas a este processo, reassentadas na Favela da Maré, irão experimentar o amargo empreendimento de recomporem suas vidas e vínculos sociais nas novas localidades para as quais foram compulsoriamente transferidas. Marcadas pela problemática proveniência, estigmatizada e estigmatizante, vão empenhar-se na edificação de distintas formas de organização capazes de proporcionar-lhes um novo quadro de referências capaz de conferir plausibilidade moral às suas vidas, seja do ponto de vista de estratégias de reprodução econômica, seja do ponto de vista das alternativas de interlocução com as diferentes agências do poder público, seja, enfim, do ponto de vista de uma incessante luta pelo reconhecimento. A extensão da rede escolar, tanto municipal quanto estadual, constitui no passado, e constitui ainda no presente, um delicado momento no dramático processo de reivindicação/reinvenção da cidadania. O ponto de partida do presente estudo esteve focalizado no papel desempenhado pelo Centro Integrado de Educação Pública, CIEP Samora Marchel, implantado em 1987 numa área fronteiriça entre as favelas de Nova Holanda e Parque Maré. Como objetivo principal da pesquisa pode-se delimitar a investigação e o levantamento da chamada centralidade que o CIEP desempenhou nesse período no âmbito daquelas favelas. Diante da dificuldade de estabelecer, através da rotina da escola, um contato mais pessoal com os alunos, a proposta desdobrou-se em conhecer a favela com a crianças. A interação com as mães dos alunos complementou a proposta.

“‘I’ll Samba Someplace Else’” charts the interconnected histories of three São Paulo neighborhoods constructed as “Japanese” Liberdade, “Italian” Bexiga, and “Afro” Brasilândia over the middle of the twentieth century. Today a cosmopolitan, global metropolis, the city of São Paulo began its meteoric growth in the late nineteenth century with an influx of formerly-enslaved Afro-descendants and immigrants from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. City planner-turned-mayor Francisco Prestes Maia (terms 1938-’45 and 1961-’65) ushered in a new phase of São Paulo’s development. Prestes Maia’s center-city redevelopment projects constructed new avenues, raised property values, and dislocated predominantly Afro-descendants from Liberdade and Bexiga, two of the city’s historic hubs of Afro-descendent settlement. Dislocated residents migrated to the city’s geographical margins, where they partnered with regional migrants in the construction of new neighborhoods like Brasilândia independent of official city planners. Despite the multiethnic resident populations of these neighborhoods, by the 1980s their racialized/ethnicized identities as “Japanese” Liberdade, “Italian” Bexiga, and “Afro” Brasilândia had become fixed in material space as well as popular and official discourse. Based on archival research, oral history, and historical geographic information systems, my research shows that neighborhoods marked with ethnoracial identities are produced contingently, despite ethnoracial diversity, and through an array of official and unofficial spatial practices. From the 1930s through the 1980s, official city planners (employed by the state or real estate firms) and informal planners (local residents) engaged in contested redevelopment projects that remade the built and natural environments of these three neighborhoods along with the ethnoracialized identities associated with them. Practices of demolition, naming places, and producing roadways dislocated Afro-descendent populations from city-center neighborhoods and razed spaces with significant historical and contemporary connections to enslavement, abolition, and black self-determination. Those same practices paved the way for the construction of two whitened, immigrant neighborhoods in Liberdade and Bexiga. The making of identity and neighborhood in Brazil’s most populous, ethnoracially-diverse city details how the attachment of race/ethnicity to place contributes to identity formation as well as the reproduction of spatial and ethnoracial inequities over time.