Migration Patterns of Paraíba Peasants

Studies of internal migration in twentieth-century Brazil have focused on socioeconomic developments in various sectors, particularly agriculture and industry. The 1930s are regarded as a milestone in industrial development and also in migration patterns. Brazil was transformed from a colonial country characterized by four centuries of immigration from Africa, Asia, and Europe to one with massive internal migration. The chief population movement has been migration out of the Northeast, a region looked upon as agriculturally and economically backward, toward the Southeast, the industrial heartland and center of technological and scientific progress. Theories of migration tend to explain movements of population within the national territory as arising from differences between regions in the accumulation and concentration of capital and the resulting inequalities. According to these theories, the Northeast provides the Southeast with cheap labor and therefore plays an important role in depressing its wages and favoring capital growth. Permanent migration is seen as an increasing rural exodus from the Northeast and an increasing urban concentration in the Southeast. This article questions this thesis. It seeks to show that short-term migration is also significant and is not, as some have asserted, a phenomenon peculiar to the last decades of the twentieth century but goes back to the beginning of industrialization in Brazil. I seek to understand migration not just as the result of the dynamic of the industrial sector but as deriving also from the survival and reproduction strategies of rural society. The temporary migration strategies of people from the countryside may present quite differing patterns. While some do migrate permanently, for others migration is a basic strategy for remaining on the land. Rather than being just a transfer of the labor force from one region or one sector of the economy to another, migration is in the first instance the way in which the rural and industrial labor markets interact with the dynamic of peasants' social reproduction.