The attempt to settle stateless Assyrians in 1930s Brazil

A theoretical reflection

Abstract

The end of the World War I, the dissolution of multi-ethnic empires, and consequently the refugee and stateless persons crisis, represented a severe challenge to several countries, European or not, regarding the reception of new social, cultural, and national groups. Among these countries was Brazil, which, since the end of the War, had encouraged immigration and, after the Coup of 1930, continued with the same posture - nevertheless, with critical adaptations regarding the immigrants’ religiosity and ethnicity. Vargas wanted the colonization of idle arable land, while he wanted this to be done, a priori, by white, Roman Catholic settlers. In this gap, therefore, was inserted a contingent of thousands of Assyrians made stateless with the end of the world confl ict, who remained under the British yoke but urgently needed a new home. In this sense, this paper proposes an evaluation of the attempt to settle Assyrians in Brazil in the 1930s through the lens of political-sociological theory of identity, migration and borders. With this intention, we seek not only to raise questions and bring new doubts, but also to conjecture the reasons for the Brazilian government’s refusal to welcome such Assyrians beyond the racial issue, patent in Brazilian society of that period. To this end, the text is divided into two parts: the fi rst is historiographical in nature and reports the events that occurred in those circumstances; and the second draws on the information reported in the previous section and sheds light on them through the use of political-sociological theory.