Paper short abstract:

This exhibition analyzes the ethnic and cultural relevance of European immigration to Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had, as objectives, to replace the slave labor, to ‘civilize’ the country through European habits and to provide the ‘whitening’ of the working population.

Paper long abstract:

This exhibition analyzes the ethnic and cultural relevance of European immigration to Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had, as objectives, to replace the slave labor, to 'civilize' the country through European habits and to provide the 'whitening' of the working population. The immigrant would bring to the newly formed Brazilian nation a double change in society. On one hand, he would enable the extinction of a form of work that was associated with the past and widely condemned by European nations and, secondly, the immigration would spread in the country white men, accustomed to live together under modern laws and able to work freely. Able, therefore, to constitute a community similar to those that Brazilian intellectuals considered the model of civilization, i.e., Germany and Italy. Indeed, the arrival of immigrants produced a great revolution in the country, capable of transforming a 'behind schedule' country of slavery into a free and modern country. Exactly why, throughout the nineteenth century and particularly in its second half, funding for immigration were intensified and so were the speeches against slavery. Thus, in this exhibition we reflect on the cultural and political character of the interrelationship between immigration and abolition in the discourse of Brazilian intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century and how they have attributed to the immigrants a proposal for the civilization of the nation through their culture, of their education and, especially, through the color of their skin.