AZOREANS IN SÃO PAULO

The city of São Paulo alone in Brazil has 12 million inhabitants. Of course, finding the Azorean presence here is like “looking for a needle in a haystack.” Nevertheless, it exists, and more than that, it dignifies us.

First, the xácaras of the Terceirans justified “Rua Paim” and “Rua Pamplona” right next to the emblematic Avenida Paulista.

Then there were the Micaelenses, especially from Brittany, who came in the 1950s to work in Italian weaving.

Now, it’s the Casa dos Açores, which has been active in Vila Carrão for more than four decades and makes a multicultural community proud with its popular festival in praise of the Divine Holy Spirit.

Founded in 1554 by Jesuit priests, São Paulo is today the most populous city in Brazil, the American continent, the Portuguese-speaking world, and the entire southern hemisphere. It has two million more people than the whole of Portugal, and it’s even the fourth most populous city on the planet.

The city is the capital of the state of the same name, which has more than 44 million inhabitants (22% of Brazil’s population) in 645 municipalities spread over a state area of 250 million square kilometers (3% of Brazil’s surface) bathed by the same waters as our Atlantic Ocean.

São Paulo is also the most multicultural city in Brazil and one of the most diverse in the world. The Portuguese community is especially significant after Italian descendants, with an estimated three million people from São Paulo having some origin in Portugal.

It is not known how many have Azorean origins or ancestry. But whether many or few, they also dignify the good name of the Azores here.

The earliest records of Azorean emigration to the city of São Paulo document the establishment of families from the island of Terceira, who created important farms for raising animals along what is now Avenida Paulista—thus giving rise to two crossroads called “Rua Paim” and “Rua Pamplona”—before moving on to Rio de Janeiro.

However, the major cause of Azorean emigration to Brazil’s largest city from the 1940s and 1950s onwards was the successive employment contracts obtained by numerous families from São Miguel, especially from the parish of Bretanha, who were guaranteed jobs at the Guilherme Giorgi e Minerva textile factory.

The Italian-owned weaving factory used mostly Azorean labor in the São Paulo neighborhood of Vila Carrão. The neighborhood was so remote and precarious at the time that the factory built a village of modest houses to house its workers. Their numbers grew in the 1960s and 1970s, justifying the establishment of the Casa dos Açores de São Paulo in 1980.

With the closure of this factory, which employed five thousand workers, “some became butchers or bakers”. The children of the first Azoreans then went on to find their own places in neighboring municipalities such as Itupeva and Mogi das Cruzes. Mogi today has half a million inhabitants and involves the whole city, including the Japanese community, in the Holy Spirit festival, organized 400 years ago by a Brazilian Brotherhood.

In the south of the city of São Paulo, Vila Medeiros is another neighborhood that has seen a significant number of Portuguese from the Azorean islands – so much so that they even tried to found the Casa dos Açores de São Paulo there, which would end up becoming the predominant neighborhood of Vila Carrão.

Like many of the residents of Vila Carrão and volunteers at the Casa dos Açores de São Paulo, Manuel de Medeiros, the institution’s first president, was born in São Miguel, in Bretanha, Pilar, Lombinha. He came here at 14, in 1954, with his parents and three brothers, and also started working in the “Guilherme Jorge” weaving factory. Fifty years ago, with his cousin, he founded the company Majam, which manufactures Arpex painting equipment. Today, it has 170 employees, supplies around 70% of the Brazilian market, and exports to South America in general.

He was the first president of the Casa dos Açores de São Paulo in 1980. He was followed by Manuel Henrique Farias Ramos (1987), Manuel Pereira Arruda (1989), António Pavão Rodrigues Júnior (1991), António Mendes Cardoso Siqueira (1992), Elisário dos Santos Filho (1996), João Pires Pereira (2000), Valdemar Luiz (2006) and, since 2009, Marcelo Stori Guerra.

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José Andrade is the Regional Director for Communities of the Government of the Autonomous Region of the Azores

Based on an article included in his book Açores no Mundo (2017)

Translated by Diniz Borges