During the late nineteenth century, while many Italians migrated to North American cities like New York and Chicago, they also headed to South America. While my research fits within this global context, it does not emphasize the popular images of Italian day-laborers and seamstresses in North American urban centers, or industrial workers and owners in Buenos Aires, or transient agricultural laborers in São Paulo's coffee fields. Instead, my study focuses on families of Italian settlers recruited to southern Brazil, not with paid ocean passage like their migratory counterparts in São Paulo, but with promises of land ownership. Within Brazil's southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, one of the most popular destinations for these migrant families was the mountainous area of Caxias do Sul, which was designated by the state in 1875 as one of its intentionally Italian migrant colonies.By examining this late nineteenth century migrant community through a nested series of increasingly broad lenses, I highlight the critical, yet underappreciated, roles of the state, non-Italians, and non-local trends within early Caxias history. The academic scholarship regarding this period, from 1870 to 1910, currently deemphasizes, and often neglects, the importance of these factors. The Brazilian state--at both the provincial and national scale--possessed considerable influence during the establishment of Caxias as the economically successful city it is today. Also, although Italians dominated the population of Caxias, the minority non-Italians who lived and worked there contributedsignificantly to the community's subsequent success. In addition, the broad trends and changes of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century at all scales--regional, national, diasporic, and global--also influenced local Caxias. Therefore, despite the current Italo- centric scholarship of Caxias's early history, these other forces provided major contributions to the social, political, and economic development of this Italian "pearl of the colonies."More than just a case study of an Italian migrant community, my work provides a model for the examination of microstudies at the meso and macroscales by adopting a global paradigm through which to view and analyze local histories. Scholars often use broad scale findings to simply provide context for their local work, not necessarily to deepen its analysis. In contrast, a "nested lenses" approach attempts to contribute more than just a wider context, instead offering--and this is of utmost importance--the opportunity for deeper analysis, broader perspective, and better explanations of the many interconnected processes involved, from the local to the global scale.
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