Marriage patterns in São Paulo coffee economy (1860-1930)

Abstract

This paper discusses marriage patterns in a representative city in the state of São Paulo during the coffee economy of 1860-1930. It takes these patterns as indicators of the strength of ethnic identities and of the assimilation of European immigrants in the local society. The city of São Carlos was founded in 1857 and by the late 19th century, it can be seen as fairly typical of the coffee economy that developed in the state of São Paulo. In fact, with a workforce initially composed of African slaves, from the 1880s the city began to receive significant waves of European immigrants – Italians, Portuguese, Spanish and other less numerically significant – for work on coffee plantations, to the point that, in the year of 1894, it received the highest number of immigrants in all of the state, except for the capital. From an analysis of 15,011 parish registers of marriage observed in the period, this paper discusses the evolution of marriage preferences among diverse groups that, alongside black and white Brazilians, conformed an estimated population of 60,000 individuals in 1930. The data analyzed indicate thatnational origin served as very significant determinant of marital options effectively implemented until at least the late 1920s. Thus, the evidence gathered indicates that at least the first two generations of persons of immigrant origins, living in São Carlos until the Great Depression in the late 1920s, were quite resistant to the process of assimilation, at least in regards to marriage patterns.