Immigration, Colonizationand Agricultural Development in the Campos Gerais Region of the Paraná State, Brazil

Abstract

This article approaches narratives within the report entitled Campos Gerais: Estudo da colonização, that was composed in the early seventies by Albert Elfes, a German agricultural engineer, and published in 1973 by the national institute of colonization and agrarian reform (INCRA), Paraná regional superintendency, south of Brazil. Elfes analyzed the settling of European and Asian immigrants in the Campos Gerais do Paraná region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, through interpretations related to the past and present (1970) of such region, the agronomist constitutes this geographic and human space as proper for the increase of agricultural production, which would originate from the work of immigrants and their descendants, in individual properties, with business characteristics that function as cooperatives. In our analysis, we don't deal with Elfes narratives just as descriptions of some specific realities, but as interpretations about the past, the present and expectations of the future that involve the ideas of progress, the passing of time and that classify and hierarchize the ways of living of the caboclos, Brazilian farmers and immigrants in Campos Gerais do Paraná.