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The Armenian Renaissance in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Roberto Grün
Roberto Grün*
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal de São Carlos and IDESP, São Paulo, Brazil
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Extract

The “Armenian renaissance” in Brazil is a process of the simultaneous establishment of a network of community entities, the diffusion of the Armenian language and religion, and the creation of a nucleus of entrepreneurs of Armenian origin in the shoe industry in São Paulo. My central argument is that not one of these three processes can be understood in isolation, since the economic activities only exist when rooted in a cultural substrate which gives them meaning. The production of Armenian identity on Brazilian soil is a collective project, where each individual included in the identification of “Armenian” has an interest in being included—an interest inextricably emotive, cultural, religious and economic—in the collectivity of the Brazilian Armenian community. The convergence of the individual interests of the “average” Armenian with those of the diverse leadership of the community, who extract their strength precisely from their position as spokesmen, provides the elements for the “production of identities.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , July 1996 , pp. 113 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1996

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References

1 There is a history of the Armenian community, written in Armenian by an Apostolic priest in the 1950s, to which I did not have access. I should mention the difficulty of external control on my observations and analysis. Due to these limitations, I chose to do a study based on the symbolic systems used by the members of the sample to explain themselves. Through this technique, I sought to take account of the way that the immigrants and their descendants construct concepts with which they give meaning to their experiences and redefine the concepts and values inherited from their ancestors, mixing them with the contributions captured from the São Paulo and Brazilian scene in general.

2 “At present, around 50 percent of the retail shoe business in São Paulo is in the hands of Armenian descendants,” estimated a business man from that ethnic group interviewed in Veja SP (10/3/90, pg. 25). An investigation of the names of the stable businesses in the 1990 São Paulo “Yellow Pages,” counted by the suffix “ian” in the owner’s narfie, found a proportion on the same order (ian means “son of” and is the suffix at the end of almost all surnames of Armenian origin).

3 Eugenics—“sister” science to physical anthropology—held a serious scientific status in the period between the end of the last century and the fall of the Nazi regime. In this sense, it is wise to remember that it was intimately associated with the development of inferential statistics at the beginning of the twentieth century, as this latter discipline was developed by none other than the eugenicists Galton and Pierson, in order to prove their theses. If at the end of the twentieth century inferential statistics still produces scientific verisimilitude in the most diverse hypotheses, we can “infer” its effects during the first half of the century. For the Brazilian “importers of Science”, the diverse versions of this pinnacle of erudite thought represented a rich framework which included everyone from the “socialist” eugenicist Lombroso to the racial delirium of the Nazis. See, Mackenzie, D.A.: Statistics in Britain: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

4 “Caucasian” equals “white” in the language of physical anthropology. The Caucasian claim ought to be contextualized in a time in which the literature of physical anthropology was in vogue in Brazil and other countries. We can therefore relate the mobilization of this evidence to the scientific trends of the time.

5 The description of Armenian family life comes to appear like a direct opposition to the description of “Família das mulheres,” the study on matrifocal families in the neighborhood of Alagados in Salvador (in the state of Bahia, Brazil), researched by Woortmann, K. A família das mulheres (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Tempo Brasileiro, 1987).Google Scholar

6 The strength of the image of the “Turk” for Brazilians is interesting since there has never been a wave of immigration of ethnic Turks in Brazil.

7 The relational sophistication should be noted: in the first case, the Crusaders were more Western than the Byzantines; in the second, the Byzantines were more Western than the Turks. The books, however, were translations of works produced in the most important countries of the Armenian diaspora, such as the United States, France, and Argentina. Given the international nature of the eugenicist discourse, we can imagine that the Armenian ethnic group must have entered into analogous symbolic combat in those countries.

8 A book of Armenian history, translated and edited by the community in Brazil, includes the following first sentence: “In the great duel which occurred between Europe and Asia, there was Armenia taking the side of European civilization, or as was said at the time, of Christianity.” Artzruni, A., História dopovo armênio (São Paulo: Éd. da Comunidade da Igreja Apostólica Armênia do Brasil, São Paulo, 1976).Google Scholar

9 The claim to a Caucasian origin also responded to a legal attack against Armenian immigration in the United States, where they were catalogued as “Asiatic” until 1909, in this way losing the necessary conditions to petition for American citizenship. Managing to be catalogued as “Caucasians”, they became a “White race”, against which there was no legal discrimination. See Mirak, R., “Armenians,” in: Themstrom, S., ed., The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

10 It would be extremely interesting to compare the repertory of the typical virtues of the members of the middle classes in states of the Brazilian Federation like São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, highly affected by European immigration, with states where such extracts were formed by the internal differentiation among the “natives.” In a monograph which I wrote (Grun 1985), I noted a shuffling of the classificatory systems of the self-taught bankers from São Paulo, when they encountered bank colleagues from other states, “morenos,” but still good bankers (proven to be reliable; working beyond the required eight hours per day; “well-dressed,” although a bit gaudy; well-behaved, but uncomfortably noisy and “sticky,” etc....).

11 It is true that the relation between the researcher and the research subject is not resolved by the “scholastic” artifice. Those who are researched have all the interest in the world in the researcher endorsing—giving scientific veracity to—their pretensions of origin. In this way it would be quite possible to invoke the later use, on the part of the Armenians engaged in the shoe industry, of a “scientific study carried out by IDESP” (Instituto de Estudos Económicos, Sociais e Políticos—the Institute of Economic, Social and Political Study), which shows the prominent role in and the vocation that the Armenians have for the field. It is clear that control cannot be claimed over the uses and effects of the reconstructive work on immigrant epics, but it should be noted to remind us that this type of work ends up interfering in the very reality of which it tries to take account, in the same way that the prior efforts of the intellectuals of the community serve as an eventual subsidy so that the descendants of immigrants could localize themselves in reference to a position in the social space.

12 The 1928 industrial yearbook for the state of São Paulo registers eight shoe factories belonging to Armenians, for a total of one hundred and twenty establishments existing in the state capital. For 1937, the statistics register forty-seven enterprises, the owners of which had Armenian surnames, for a total of two-hundred-and ten factories.

13 The countryman “presented” with the old models and rejected raw material would not be a direct competitor of the “donating” manufacturer, since the products which he would offer the market would be of a quality inferior to the original, as much due to the raw material as to the model.

14 In the words of an informant: “First, the manufacturer had to pay the garbage-collector to take the mold (it was heavy, and couldn’t be compacted). Later, with the passing of time, as the people would get the molds, there began to be disputes, and many people began to sell for 5 or 10 of the value of the sale.”

15 Leather also entered into the credit scheme. The leather stores, according to the informants, were owned by Italians, and were generally located on Avenida Rangel Pestana (where a few still exist). I did not find consistent records of Armenians working with tanning. Nevertheless, the credit that the new manufacturer could receive “from the Italian” was achieved by way of an introduction made by a fellow countryman who already had credit, and formally or informally endorsed the purchases of the new arrival. However, the informants attributed lesser importance to the raw leather, since “at that time leather was practically free, not expensive like now.” The increase in the weight of leather in the final price of the shoes could have interfered in the movement of the Armenians into the commercial sector. In an evaluation of the shoe manufacturing sector in Franca and Birigui—cities in the interior of the state of São Paulo, where centers of men’s and women’s shoes are respectively concentrated—there is an immense majority of factories of Italian origin, with a weak presence of Armenians. Generally speaking the Italians were a major presence in the population of those cities.

16 There is an identical affirmation among Jewish boys in the Bom Retiro neighborhood, who refused the label of “little Russians” or “little Pollacks” in Levin, E., Bom Retiro (São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 1972).Google Scholar

17 In the partisan business, the cutting of the piece of cloth is the fundamental operation, since the leftovers of the patterns to be fit in the pieces of cloth could represent an important supplementary resource for the family. Larger scraps were sold at higher prices per kilo, or could be fit into other patterns which worked, such as, for children’s clothing.

18 An interviewee tells: “… He paid the debt, worked for 6 or 7 more years, got together a certain capital, and with this capital he managed to marry off one of his brothers, a sister, and the family dispersed. After ten or 15 years, he began to settle, saw that it was possible to sustain the family, and then he turned to representing shoes. He represented one of his relatives’ factories, one of his brothers-in-law (information which was not spontaneously given) to sell in the interior. He paid for the train, full of boxes to sell, it was difficult. . Until he managed to open his own business, it’s been 28 years in business. He himself asked me to get into the business. I was in the first year of dentistry and I quit. He thought that I should sustain the family. He was getting old, and I was the youngest son.”

19 Originally, “Lanificío Varam, Gasparian & Filleppo,” the division of which gave rise to three important industries which carried the names of their owners. The matrimonial ties should be noted, where Gaspar's sister was Keutenedjian’s wife. Lanificio Varam was one of the most important wool industries in São Paulo in the 50s, and later had its stock control transferred, and was transformed into the Vicunha group, having new owners of Jewish origin.

20 Varam K.’s son who was interviewed—who was the president of the Centro Académico XI de Agsto in 1944, stigmatized by the members of traditional families as qui-lem-l’argent (one who has money), and state and federal representative for São Paulo for three legislatures from 1950 to 1964— continuously remembered that his father had the habit of helping a series of recently established Jewish garment workers, among whom were several of the present big groups in the field. In this paragraph he intended to register that V. “… helped all of the immigrants who arrived willing to work … at that time everyone called both Armenians and Jews Turks” and no one could stand it …”

21 According to one interviewee: ”When a boy is more or less twelve years old, he begins to go to school in the morning, and in the afternoon he goes with his father to the shoe company, while the girl stays home studying and helping her mother; he leams the business....spends some time, and it even seems like the boy was bom in a shoe box …” (Such is the facility with which he moves into the center of the business. R.G.).

22 The rejection is explicit, with statements such as: “everyone knows that a diploma doesn’t guarantee a future anymore for anyone, like it did before; that in business you earn much more.”

23 One informant tells: “I give a lot of money to my sons, for them to get the feel of it and want to earn more. My wife sometimes complains that I am going to spoil the boys, but 1 keep giving it to them, because I think that this way is the right way …”

24 The anti-intellectualism should be rigidly contextualized. In a Pan-American comparison, we can note that in the United States in 1921, the Armenian ethnic group comprised the largest percentage of advanced level students among the diverse groups of immigrants. There, the academics of Armenian origin reached a proportion of 31 out of every 10,000 individuals, versus 21 per ten thousand on the national average (Mirak, p. 142). Even in Brazil, the President of the shoe industry union, Sebastiáo Burbulhan is a sociologist, with a Master’s in sociology, and “is proud of this, although that profession doesn’t have much practical application.” It is important to mention that this informant told me that not one of his sons showed a vocation for continuing in the shoe business.

25 I tried to establish a sample of unsuccessful merchants of Armenian origin and I ran into difficulty in getting interviews. The possible informants constantly reiterated that they had “nothing to say” , and according to the fashion of the moment, that “Brazil is worthless; it would have been better if my parents had gone to the United States.” They were similar to the small public employees interviewed by A. Martins Rodrigues (1989), who had nothing to declare about their path to social decline. See: Rodrigues, A. Martins, “Pratiques et representations des petits fonctionnaires administratifs à São Paulo,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, no 87, 1988, pp.85–93.Google Scholar

26 Many social groups have the survival of their particularities, and therefore their social reproduction, threatened by the Napoleonic Civil Code in effect. In it is defended the division of family properties into equal parts for all of the direct heirs, measures following the type of family arrangement prevalent in Western societies, but not entirely among minority groups, such as these immigrants. Groups which organize themselves privileging the first -born or passing inheritance along the male line end up finding ways to circumvent the legal rules, such as transmissions while living. Among immigrant families who seek the reproduction of their ethnic characteristics, this question ends up appearing to the researcher through complaints, however timid, by the Women who are prejudiced by the divisions.

27 I did not explore the intersection between the marriage market and the internal stratification in the community. A slight indication in this sense appeared when an interviewee told me that “a kind of marriage about which everyone talked was when a young woman or man from Osasco married one from São Paulo … it was a marriage of clay with asphalt.” In a panorama where the fortunes were very recent and where all of the possibilities for enrichment were recognized, economic stratification seemed less important than spatial separation—in truth, a cultural and status separation. Either way, the information regarding this question does not allow us to go very far.

28 The affirmation of the Christian religion is important in the symbolic universe of the Armenians, being completely constructed in opposition to the Moslem Turks. In this way, an argument which seeks an endogamous ethnicity by way of religious questions is lost in a predominantly Christian country— which is clearly stated by the informants. It would be interesting to compare the attitudes and arguments of the Armenians with those of the Jews who follow a exclusivist religion, and one which is not interested in proselytizing.

29 As an interviewee explained: “If I get an Armenian girl, I know that the marriage has a greater chance of working out: I know who her family is, how she was brought up, that my son had a similar upbringing … Look, my son is 21 years old and studies economics at PUC (a Catholic university in São Paulo), he has a girl at the club, and I know her family. I encourage the boy, but the one who is going to get to know the girl and see if he likes her is him …”

30 Bourdieu, P., La distinction (Paris: Minuit), p. 60.Google Scholar

31 I was a student at that school. I could make a long catalogue of the complaints/prescriptions along the same lines as this example, passing through the chapters of credit, of removal of the directorate, of the choice of employees, etc. . Perhaps the professors were really complaining about the narrowing of the potential consultant market, perhaps the problem really is ethnic, but probably it is both at the same time.