Minas Gerais – O Éden Brasileiro: notas sobre a propaganda imigratória mineira e suas alusões territoriais no findar dos oitocentos

Abstract

"Everything is stopped!" This was one of the sayings used by the Minas Gerais governmentaiming to tell the lethargic situation where Minas Gerais would meet in the final years of the nineteenth century. It was argued that the abolition of slavery would have contributed to disrupt the work and dramatically undermine the activities of the coffee crop. In an attempt to change this situation, the government invested considerable sums of money in the introduction of European immigrants. But how would it be possible to attract them? One of the alternatives found was consolidated through the dissemination of advertisements in which certain parts of the territory - especially those linked to the physiographic world, but without forgetting the population and human settlements - earned raised enhancement attempting to demonstrate an Edenic image of the state of Minas Gerais. However, it is emblematic to observe that the territory - so effusively acclaimed at the discursive level - was represented through a dissociated form of what is inherit to it: the power relationships. For the politicians, the "territory" was just a word managed with the intention to describe a substrate that housed a wealth of natural beauty, valorous people and infrastructure. Despite this vanished sense, propagandistic materials - and other speeches on immigration - ended up bringing up, in a veiled or blatant manner, the power disputes in a state that had relevant regional disparities. And it is precisely those disputes that adds a bifrontal character to the territorial allusions present in the title of this work: they refer to the abundant advertisements that flaunted the benefits of the Minas Gerais "territory", but also refer to the “chess game” in which immigrants were viewed as medullary pieces so that the representatives of the Minas Gerais rural oligarchy – “kings and queens” of a chess set – keep dictating the rules on the board.