Nuclei and Museum Places of Emigration

The Brazilians’ Towns

The Brazilians’ favourite places were the New Towns (Vilas Novas) which were centres of the new liberal administration and located in fair places or in important crossroads, places where people used to go across. There, they created the old parchments of the old and ancestral roots of the sons of the rich land owners; they built their houses in the centre of the town and owned a large property.

In these streets, squares and little squares of the town many buldings were built such as private houses, public, social and cultural buildings, as well as commercial houses (banks, insurance firms, ...).

The towns received the new elite giving sense to the new political ideals, and the Brazilians began to take public jobs which were safely kept through Constitutions, codes, laws and municipal orders. Thus, public administration functions started to be inherited by those who lived with rents and often travelled to Lisbon and Oporto and stayed there in hotels or decided to live there forever.

Simultaneously, they were present in the leadership of the first social Clubs or Associations, such as in the local Brotherhoods. They talked about the latest news from Europe, about politics and they met important and “useful” people.

The Brazilian, coming from a middle and an upper-middle rural class, used his cosmopolitan contacts from Brazil and from his travel experiences in different capital cities; he showed a new sense of the urban character and legitimate symbolic power that he brought to the cities and towns of the Minho.

He used to go to casinos, beaches, thermal baths, cafés and theatres, which gave him a new social status even in his leisure time. His success return was patent in the new forms of social, cultural and symbolic capital.

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The “Brazilian” role in the small towns Minho: Fafe’s case.

In the towns of the North of Portugal there are material and symbolic evidences of the emigration to Brazil. Such evidences are the visible consequence of the investments made by the “Brazilian” in the time of  “going and returning” or in their definitive return, mainly because of those who emigrated in decade of thirty in the nineteen century.

Those who emigrated, in XIX century were mainly the sons of landowners and farmers, composing the middle class or middle high class of Minho, with strong predominance of singles, below fourteen years old, who returned,  a lot of them definitively to stand and live in the nearest city, Porto or Lisboa.

This return is reflected in the architecture, urbanization and industrialization of all the country and  it causes the increase of the commercial activity, stating the “Brazilian” and his descendants like an active bourgeois class  involved  in the public life, in time of changing the regime.

This participation in the local and national administration is present in the florescent press and the philanthropic acts are visible in  the building of hospitals, asylums and schools.

The “ Brazilian” is  the lettered actor  of a modern Portugal, and the traveller connected with the world, being the cosmopolitan Brazil the centre of knowledges to the youngs who left a small and rural country.

When they returned, the emigrants took a part in the process of development in Fafe with individual or groupal initiatives and yet, when they took a part in public or particular life of institutions, they revealed social behaviours of leadership’s  statement and confirmation.

In addition to this  the “Brazilian” distinguishes himself and states such  an integrant part of the bourgeoisie, needed in the process of the statement of an urbane, liberal and capitalist behaving.