O Circolo Italiani Uniti: uma leitura sociológica sobre identidade, mutualismo e elite étnica em Campinas-SP, 1881-1920

Abstract

This research brings to light the associative experience of Italian immigrants’ first generation settled in Campinas. Differently from the mass of humble patricians who disembarked there from 1888 upon state subsidies to replace slave labor on the coffee plantations, the oriundi examined here settled themselves precociously and mainly in the urban environment. Thus, the present thesis analyzes the relations, projects, strategies, and representations of a specific group of Italians (merchants, artisans, liberal professionals, and industrialists) which institutionalized itself via Circolo Italiani Uniti, the first Italian mutual aid association founded in Campinas (1881). Through a dialogue between memory and history, delineated from the combination of a variety of sources (entity’s documents, newspapers, almanacs, judicial proceedings, inquiries, etc.), it is argued that, unlike what the national literature on Italian ethnic associationism points out in relation to the generality of the municipalities in the interior of São Paulo state, whose more traditional sodalities, often limited to an immigrant elite, reflected the result of an accumulative process of previous associative experiences, the Circolo, in turn, was born with an elitist feature, consisting itself in an instance where its members mobilized interpretations of a newly perceived Italianness in accordance with the class habitus they shared. It was, in short, a social configuration that, instead of prioritizing assistance to the colony in general, allowed to an emerging Italian ethnic elite to reconnect – though in a mythologized way – with the values and customs of the homeland, as well as to forge ties with the local dominant class or consular authorities to extract material and symbolic profits for itself.