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ABSTRACT
What is the relationship between immigration, health, and the built environment? This article focuses on Bom Retiro, a textile industry-dominated, immigrant-populated zone of about forty thousand people in the center of São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in the Americas. It analyzes structural racism, memory and self-representation, and Jewish and Arab economic trajectories. Bom Retiro reflects the socioeconomic and racial diversity of São Paulo and is like many other immigrant-populated neighborhoods around the globe. The neighborhood’s residents, and attitudes about them, were critical to the making of São Paulo.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Demographic Information can be found at the website of the IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, specifically ‘Dados Historicos dos censos demográficos’ - https://memoria.ibge.gov.br/historia-do-ibge/historico-dos-censos/dados-historicos-dos-censos-demograficos.html. See also Maria Stella Ferreira Levy, ‘O papel da migração internacional na evolução da população brasileira (1872–1972).’ Revista de Saúde Pública 8:72 (1974), pp. 49–90.
2. Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Gabriel Shavitt Lesser once told me that ‘If New York were cool, it would be São Paulo’
3. Lance Taylor and Edmar L. Bacha. ‘The Unequalizing Spiral: A First Growth Model for Belindia.’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics 90:2 (May 1976); 197–218.
4. Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, An Economic and Demographic History of São Paulo, 1850–1950 (Stanford University Press, 2018.)
5. George J. Sánchez, Boyle Heights How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (University of California Press, 2021).
6. Karl Monsma, “Symbolic Conflicts, Deadly Consequences: Fights between Italians and Blacks in Western São Paulo, 1888–1914,” Journal of Social History 39: 4 (Summer 2006), 1123–1152, 1123–1124.
7. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted.” The Journal of American History 51:3 (1964): 404–17.
8. Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 119–121.
9. Jeffrey Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 53. Open access at http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft367nb2gm/
10. Renée Avigdor, “Judeus, Sinagogas e Rabinos: O Judaismo em São Paulo em Mudança,” Doctoral Thesis, FFLCH- Department of Sociology, 2010. For reader’s obsessed with distance, the following google map shows the distance between the two synagogues.
11. Jeffrey Lesser, Emily Pingel, Alexandra Caridad Llovet, and Fernando Cosentino ‘Committing to Continuity: Primary Care Practices during COVID-19 in an Urban Brazilian Neighborhood.’ Health, Education and Behavior (December 2020), 29–33. Marcia C. Castro, Adriano Massuda, et al, ‘Brazil’s unified health system: the first 30 years and prospects for the future,’ The Lancet: Health Policy 394:10195 (July, 2019), 345–356.
12. For a discussion of why I use ‘Jewish-Brazilians’ rather than ‘Brazilian Jews’ see Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, ‘Challenging Particularity: Jews as a Lens on Latin American Ethnicity.’ Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1:2 (September 2006), 249–263.
13. Jeffrey Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Open access at http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft367nb2gm/
14. Jung Yun Chi, “O Bom Retiro dos coreanos. Descrição de um enclave étnico,” Dissertação apresentada à Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo para obtenção do título de Mestre em Arquitetura e Urbanismo, São Paulo 2016, p. 53–54.
15. Guilherme de Almeida, “Cosmópolis: O ‘Ghetto’,” O Estado de São Paulo, 31 March 1929, 4. Florestan Fernandes, ‘As Trocinhas do Bom Retiro.’ Separata da Revista do Arquivo Municipal, 113: 9–109, São Paulo, 1947.
16. Andrew G. Britt, “’I’ll Samba Someplace Else’: Constructing Neighborhood and Identity in São Paulo, 1930s-1980s.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University (2018); Barbara Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
17. ”Doria quer renomear Bom Retiro para ‘Little Seul’,” Exame April 13, 2017.
18. Rodrigo Borges Delfim, “Little Seul? Proposta sobre o nome do Bom Retiro contraria história e realidade do bairro paulistano.” MigraMundo April 172,017. https://www.migramundo.com/little-seul-proposta-sobre-o-nome-do-bom-retiro-contraria-historia-e-realidade-do-bairro-paulistano/
19. Folha de Manhã 15 October 1944, p.15.
20. Jose Carlos G. Durand, “Formação do pequeno empresariado têxtil em São Paulo (1880–1950),” in Pequena empresa: O comportamento empresarial na acumulação e na luta pela sobrevivência, ed. Henrique Rattner (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985), 1:112; Oscar Egídio de Araújo, “Enquistamentos étnicos,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal de São Paulo 6:65 (March 1940): 241.
21. José Ortega Y Gasset ‘La pedagogía del paisaje’. En: El Imparcial (Madrid), 17 de septiembre 1906 in Obras Completas (Madrid: Alianza Editorial-Revista de Occidente, 1983), vol. 1, págs. 53–57. P. 55.
22. Oscar E Araújo, ‘Enquistamentos étnicos,’ Revista do Arquivo Municipal. Vol. LXV, p. 227–246. 1940; Lorenna Ribeiro Zem El-Dine, ‘Eugenia e seleção imigratória: notas sobre o debate entre Alfredo Ellis Junior, Oliveira Vianna e Menotti Del Picchia, 1926.’ Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos 2016, vol.23, suppl.1, pp.243–252.
23. Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 45–49
24. Rollie E. Poppino, Brazil: The Land and People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 194.
25. Jorge S. Safady “A Imigração Arabe no Brasil.” Ph.D. Dissertation (Universidade de São Paulo, Department of History, l972).
26. Raffalovich (Rio de Janeiro) to ICA (Paris), 27 March 1926, SCA (3 July 1926), 2:103, JCA-L.
27. Jacob Lestschinsky, “The Industrial and Social Structure of the Jewish Population of Interbellum Poland,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 11, (1957), 246, table 1.
28. Evaristo de Moraes, ‘ Judeus sem dinheiro taes como eu vejo,’ in Os judeus na história do Brasil, ed. Afrânio Peixoto (Rio de Janeiro: Uri Zwerling, 1936), 105. Pierre Deffontaines, ‘Mascates,’ Geografia 2:1 (1936), 28.
29. Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
30. C.R. Box, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society ;(University of California Press; 1962), p. 108
31. Felisbelo da Silva (Police Investigator), Dicionário de Gíria [Dictionary of Slang] (São Paulo: Editora Prelúdio, 1974), 69, 107.
32. Queiroz Júnior, 222 Anedotas de Getúlio Vargas: Anedotário Popular, Irrevente e Potoresco. Getúlio no Inferno. Getúlio no Céu (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Brasileira de Artes Gráficas, 1955), 179.
33. Elie Safa, L’Émigration Libanaise (Beirut: Université Saint – Joseph, 1960), 54–68; Samuel Malamud, Do Arquivo e Da Memória: Fatos, personagens e reflexões sobre o sionismo brasileiro e mundial (Rio de Janeiro: Bloch, 1983).
34. Henrique Rodrigues, “Leia a série Judeus e Bolsonaro, da Revista Fórum, completa,” Forum 21 April 2021. https://revistaforum.com.br/brasil/2021/4/21/leia-serie-judeus-bolsonaro-da-revista-forum-completa-95720.html. Among Brazilian votes in Israel, not all Jewish of course, Bolsonaro received over 77 per cent in 2018 and over 53 per cent in 2022. Daniela Kresch, ‘Bolsonaro vence em Israel, mas não de lavada, como em 2018,’ Instituto Brasil-Israel (São Paulo), https://www.institutobrasilisrael.org/2022/10/30/bolsonaro-vence-em-israel-mas-nao-de-lavada-como-em-2018/
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jeffrey Lesser
Jeffrey Lesser is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University. His research focuses on the relationships between immigration, ethnicity, and national identity. His forthcoming book, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, the Health State, and the Built Environment will be published by Duke University Press in mid-2024. Lesser is also the author of a series of prize-winning books published in English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Hebrew: Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil (Cambridge University Press/Editora UNESP); A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy (Duke University Press/Editora Paz e Terra); Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Duke University Press/Editora UNESP/Akashi Shoken); and Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (University of California Press/Imago/Tel Aviv University).