Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pizzerias, bars and small theatres. During the day on Sunday there's a lively flea market,
Mercado de Antiguidades e Artesanato do Bixiga, at Praça Dom Orione (see p.516).
Liberdade
South of the centre and east of Bixiga, the
bairro
of
Liberdade
is the traditional
home of São Paulo's large Japanese community, though in recent years a number of
Vietnamese, Chinese and especially Koreans have settled here. Rua Galvão Bueno and
its intersecting streets are devoted mostly to Japanese and other East Asian restaurants
as well as shops selling semiprecious stones, Japanese food and clothes.
IMMIGRATION AND SÃO PAULO
São Paulo is a city built on
immigrants
, and it was largely due to new arrivals that its
population grew a hundred-fold in just 75 years to make it, by 1950, the country's second-
largest city. Besides sheer numbers, the mass influx of people had a tremendous impact on the
character of the city, breaking up the existing social stratification and taking economic and
political power away from the traditional elite groups much earlier than in other Brazilian cities.
Despite an attempt to bring over share-croppers from Prussia (Germany) in the 1840s, mass
immigration didn't begin until the late 1870s. Initially, conditions on arrival were dire, and
many immigrants succumbed to
malaria
or
yellow fever
while waiting in Santos to be
transferred inland to work on the coffee plantations. In response to criticisms, the government
opened the Hospedaria dos Imigrantes in 1887, a hostel in the eastern suburb of Brás, now
converted to a museum (see p.491).
Immigration to São Paulo is most closely associated with the
Italians
, who constituted 46
percent of all arrivals between 1887 and 1930. Soon after arriving in Brazil, they would be
transported to a plantation, but most slipped away within a year to seek employment in the
city or to continue south to Argentina. The rapidly expanding factories in the districts of Brás,
Moóca and Belém, east of the city centre, were desperately short of labour, and well into the
twentieth century the population of these
bairros
was largely Italian, but it is
Bela Vista
(Bixiga) where the Italian influence has been most enduring. Originally home to freed slaves,
Bela Vista had by the early 1900s established itself as São Paulo's “Little Italy”. As immigration
from Italy began to slow in the late 1890s, arrivals from other countries increased. From 1901
to 1930
Spaniards
(especially Galicians) made up 22 percent, and
Portuguese
23 percent,
of immigrants, and their languages (Galician is very similar to Portuguese) allowed them to
assimilate quickly; only Tatuapé developed into a specifically Portuguese
bairro
.
The first 830
Japanese
immigrants arrived in 1908 in Santos to be sent to the coffee plantations.
By the mid-1950s a quarter-of-a-million Japanese had emigrated to Brazil, most settling in São
Paulo state. Unlike other nationalities, the rate of return migration among them has always been
small: many chose to remain in agriculture at the end of their contract, often as market gardeners.
The city's large Japanese community is centred on
Liberdade
, a
bairro
just south of the Praça da
Sé and home to the excellent
Museu da Imigração Japonesa
(see p.496).
São Paulo's
Arab
community is also substantial. Arabs from Syria and Lebanon started arriving
in the early twentieth century and, because they originally travelled on Turkish passports, are still
commonly referred to as
turcos
. Typically starting out as itinerant traders, the community was
soon associated with small shops, and many Arabs became extremely successful in business.
Many boutiques in the city's wealthy
bairros
are still Arab-owned, but it's in the streets around
Rua 25 de Março
, north of Praça da Sé, that the community is concentrated (see box, p.491).
The
Jewish
community has prospered in São Paulo, too. Mainly of Eastern European origin,
many of the city's Jews started out as roaming pedlars before settling in
Bom Retiro
, a
bairro
near Luz train station. As they became richer, they moved to the suburbs to the south of the
city, in particular to Higienópolis, but some of the businesses in the streets around Rua Correia
de Melo are still Jewish-owned and there's still a synagogue there. As the Jews moved out,
Greeks
started moving in during the 1960s, followed in larger numbers by
Koreans
. The area
has long been known as a centre of the rag trade and in Korean-owned sweatshops the latest
immigrant arrivals -
Bolivians
and
Chinese
- are employed, often illegally and amid
appalling work conditions.
8
