Agrarian Policies and Recruitment of Immigrants

the Provinces of São Paulo and Argentine Humid Pampa

Abstract

The article compares agrarian and migration policies developed by two significant Latin-American exporting economies in the second half of the 19th century: agropastoral in the Argentine Humid Pampa and coffee plantation in the West of São Paulo. A systematic comparison of how agrarian and migratory policies were articulated in both cases has not yet received due attention. A comparative approach highlights each case as a counterpoint to the other, stressing certain aspects that would otherwise be taken as “natural”. The article concludes that although both areas indeed conquered world markets as exporters of agricultural products, recruitment and agrarian policies were driven by completely discrepant objectives: in São Paulo, rural workers with subsidized transportation from Europe to the coffee farms, with limited access to land ownership; in Argentine, at least initially, the offering of land as an attraction for the settlement of immigrants, practiced by public and private colonizing agents who sought to balance the abundant availability of land with the chronic shortage of laborers to work on it. The article still suggests that the differences between the agrarian policies for the recruitment of European labor put into practice in these two regions produced lasting sociopolitical effects in these respective territories, such as the greater volume (in the Argentine case) of attracted contingents, the different regional origins and qualification profiles of immigrants between the two areas, as well as the effects of centralization of local political power, resulting from the maintenance of concentrated agrarian structure in the case of São Paulo.