History of Caxias do Sul

In the midst of the disparities, the Catholic religion, common to all, revealed itself as a powerful gathering element, through which the divergences converged for the achievement of collective purposes, the Church acquiring a great influence in the destiny of the city for many decades.

In addition, unfavorable competition with grain produced in North America disrupted the Italian agricultural economy, causing rural exodus, a decline in craft trades and food production, and the emergence of a surplus population in the cities with no qualifications for urban work.

They entered the state via the Rio Grande river and disembarked in Porto Alegre, where they stayed at the "Immigrants' House" until they took smaller boats to São Sebastião do Caí, from where they continued on foot, in carts, or on horseback to the top of the mountains.

Once the choice was made, they received a provisional ownership title and moved to other shacks in the "crossings" or "lines", the first roads, and began the work of their settlement, cutting down the forest, building the house, and planting the first subsistence crops.

While the house was not ready and agriculture did not bear its fruits, their sustenance came from gathering, hunting, selling wood, some official aid in cash and food, and from working for the government, taking part in the demarcation of new lots and the opening of roads.

The tropeiros, with their caravans contributed to trade, as did the Germans from São Sebastião do Caí, who had already developed an efficient network of warehouses, facilitating the flow of the first agricultural products such as honey, wine, grappa, sausages, lard, flour, and cheese, and the exchange for other goods, thus stimulating incipient industrialization.

[14][15] The result of this activity could be seen in 1881 with the first Agro-Industrial Fair, the origin of the modern Festa da Uva, which was installed in the building of the Land Commission Board, bringing together in one main event the various festivities commemorating the harvests held sparsely by the settlers.

Between the election on 20 October and the inauguration of the Council, occurred the first popular uprising of the colony, the Revolt of the Colonists, in protest against the political orientation of the administrators, the collection of late taxes with fines and interest, and the terrible condition of the roads.

The climate remained tense and another revolt took place the following year, involving 300 seditious people, who took over the municipal administration and installed in power a Revolutionary Board, composed of Luiz Pieruccini, Domingos Maineri, and Vicente Rovea, leaders of the movement, being supported by the police delegate Francisco Januário Salerno, who appointed himself as Intendant.

In 1898, Father Pietro Nosadini, who had already been kidnapped and almost killed in 1897, wrote an open letter to the government denouncing the slander that involved him in the attempt on the life of the Intendant José Cândido de Campos Júnior, and other facts revealing the climate of intrigue, animosity, and incomprehension that reigned between the church and local politicians.

[26] Dedication to work was a fundamental value, but the agricultural techniques brought from Italy did not serve well the different climate and geography of southern Brazil, and the adaptation of the traditional Italian agrarian culture to an acclimated substitute did not take place without difficulties.

The progressive loss of contact with Italy and the cessation of the arrival of new immigrants at the turn of the century favored, even more, the dissemination of this new way of speaking, which began to be used at all times, orally or in writing, and would have a predominant use in the region until the Second World War.

The autonomous specialized professionals find a bigger market and syndicates are formed, following the growing urbanization of the city, which begins to build with greater sophistication in masonry, abandoning the stone and wood constructions that were typical of the early days, and can now erect monuments and take care of the "macadamization" of the central streets, and the embellishment of the main public places.

Even though an impact was felt in the region due to the scarcity of circulating capital, limiting credit and preventing the fulfillment of commitments, the federal government's incentive to primary activities resulted, at the first moment, in the growth of local commerce and industry, still strongly based on the processing of natural products.

"[15] The first half of the century ends in the city with the appearance of a radio station, Rádio Caxias, which from 1946 also gave its contribution to the economy by serving as an efficient advertising vehicle for companies, when until then the dissemination of products depended on newspapers, word of mouth and loudspeakers.

[62] A notable moment was the holding of the Diocesan Eucharistic Congress in 1948, which mobilized virtually the entire city and attracted crowds from outside when a monumental altar was built in Dante Square, and a huge procession of cars accompanied the transfer of the image of Our Lady of Caravaggio from her shrine in Farroupilha to the Cathedral, where it remained for a few weeks.

[63] Parallel to the continuity of the religious factor as the unifying link of society, the economic growth of Caxias do Sul and the end of the immigrants' settlement phase enabled the formation of an elite, which was more educated and could devote itself more to leisure and culture in less folkloric and more cosmopolitan patterns, while the general population also benefited from these advances.

Under the stimulus of the upper classes, the first cafés and recreational clubs were created, such as the Clube Juvenil (1905) and the Recreio da Juventude (1912), which offered a cultural program to their members, including poetry and music recitals, thematic and sports contests, and holding the first gala balls.

[69] The social customs and the urban landscape were recorded at the beginning of the century by the important photographers Domingos and Reno Mancuso, Giacomo and Ulysses Geremia, and Julio Calegari, who were in great demand at the time and left extensive work.

[71] The manipulated ascension of Borges de Medeiros to state power triggered the 1923 Revolution, culminating in a period of a political and economic crisis that had been brewing for some time, with negative consequences for Caxias do Sul's commerce and industry.

[47] Despite the difficulties, in 1925, the fiftieth anniversary of Italian immigration to Brazil was celebrated, in a period that proved to be extremely propitious to start a public consecration of the successes already achieved and consolidated, aiming first to integrate the colonial elites in the state historical panorama, until then dominated by the pastoralist-landowning representations.

[72][73] At the same time, in Fascist Italy, an interest arose in reconstructing the history of the emigrants by interpreting it as a powerful civilizing contribution of the Latin race to the New World and urging Italians in Brazil to defend their ethnic origin.

Its construction was proposed in 1949, being inaugurated in 1954, in line with the policy of reconciliation with Italy undertaken by Getúlio after the end of the War, and revaluing the foreign worker after the disdain expressed a few years earlier, when all ethnic schools were compulsorily nationalized and the use of dialects was repressed.

"[84] The festival was a complete success, gathering more than fifty exhibitors that presented more than one hundred species of grapes and dozens of types of wines, which served to guide its realization in a new and broader format, resulting in the 1932 edition being called by the Revista do Globo as "the most memorable event, until today, in this part of the state."

The speeches, the display and distribution of grapes, the triumphal procession, the tendeiras in their typical costumes, the songs, the banquets, the congress and the flags adorning the streets, all reflected the efforts of the offerers of the feast in the process of self-representation.As for the symbolic figure of the queen of the festivity, the eloquent greeting addressed to her at the opening of the 1933 event, recorded in the report of that edition, exemplifies the image Italians intended to build of themselves and of the role they imagined they would play on the national scene: "I salute you, Queen of the Festa da Uva and Lady of the domains without end of our sympathy and the heart of Caxias, the heart that moves and acts by the valorous blood of a race of heroes, still unsung, that gives Rio Grande the propulsive sap to the realization of what it will be one day, within Brazil, and under the sky of free America.

With the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek, a developmentalism program was initiated in an attempt to modernize the country and overcome its backwardness, but the economic failure of João Goulart's government would lead to a coup that established the Military Dictatorship in Brazil, making the first decades of this period tumultuous.

The more or less tranquil traditional relations between employers and employees begin to become complex and delicate with the increasing occurrence of strikes, where those of the early 1960s shake the business environment and force a reformulation of postures in this field, and a large supply of cheap and unskilled labor causes a greater turnover in jobs.

The centennial celebrations of immigration in 1975 found the city as the second largest metropolis in the state and one of the ten fastest growing in the entire country, which gave rise to more problems in terms of basic infrastructure of health, environment, urban planning, education, housing, transportation, and employment.

[95] The decline of religion as a social agglutinating force, the new consumer habits, the profound change in the local productive system, the standardization of Brazilian education, the disregard of the new generations for the language and customs of their grandparents, the presence of a large number of migrants of non-Italian descent, the great popularization of means of communication and entertainment such as radio, TV, cinema, and the progressive opening of the city to the world, provoked in the 1950s and 1960s a rapid decharacterization of the ethnic and traditional features of the Caxias culture[32][41][96] This led historians in the mid-1970s like Loraine Slomp Giron, Mário Gardelin, Maria Abel Machado, Vania Herédia and many others, (following the steps of the pioneer João Spadari Adami) to develop important researches which resulted in the publication of several books for the study of local history.

[101] Among the local artists of great projection, Bruno Segalla, a renowned medalist, sculptor, and author of several monuments,[102] and Diana Domingues, who led the research group on contemporary media linked to UCS, are worthy of note.