Gaúcho Conquerors? Race and Regional Identity on Brazil’s Agricultural Frontier

Beginning in the 1950s and intensifying under Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), thousands of Brazilians from the country’s south—many the descendants of German and Italian immigrants—moved north to the country’s agricultural frontier.  There they and others benefitted from favorable state policies and cheap credit aimed at spurring the modernization of the country’s agricultural industry.  This “conquest of the west” (as one TV documentary named it) represents one of the largest internal migrations in Brazil’s history.  It stands out as a counter example to the better-studied migrations of northeasterners to the country’s industrializing southeast.   

This paper examines the enduring importance of a gaúcho identity (people from Rio Grande do Sul, the country’s southernmost state) among many of these families.  In particular I am interested in the rise of the “Gaúcho Traditionalist Movement” during the 1970s and 80s.  This movement, representing hundreds of cultural institutions and tens of thousands of members throughout Brazil, purports to celebrate and maintain the southern roots of the internal migrants—the so-called “gaúcho conquerors.” I argue that in this new context, gaúcho stands out as a racialized category, making southern regional identity synonymous with whiteness.  Materials from underused state archives in Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, local periodicals unavailable elsewhere in Brazil, and oral histories with leaders of the Gaúcho Traditionalist Movement provide the documentary base to study the racialized contours of this economic and social transformation.