Alteridade e estranhamento: a figura do “novo negro” na imigração italiana no Brasil

The Brazilian immigration process is very complex and involves different experiences of territorial occupancy: urban-rural, small agricultural owner-land/salaried workers. In this article, the main objective is to analyze some racial dynamics that have involved the Italian work force importation, by the coffee farmers of the State of São Paulo, in the two last decades of the XIXth Century, of which goal was to substitute the slave population. The present discussion considers that, as a reading of the social, the identities alterities are structured in harmony with the cultural representations build by the societies that use them. In this way, in the end of the XIXth Century, occurs the dissociation of two term presented as synonym in the whole Brazilian Imperial period: black people and slave. In that period of conceptual change, persisting the Imperial binomial, the Italians that have arrived overseas, to substitute the slave workers, were regarded by the landowners, in the firsts contacts, as part of this negative association, and so they had experienced the consequences of the biopower.