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Braudel Papers Document of the Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics BRAUDEL Associated with the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado PAPERS Migration far and wide Nº 27 - 2001 From the Andes to São Paulo Albino Ruiz Lazo From the Andes to São Paulo 03 00 Old Times in Bom Retiro x14 BRAUDEL PAPERS Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics Associated with FAAP (Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado) Rua Ceará, 2 – 01243-010 03 From the Andes to São Paulo São Paulo, SP – Brazil (Albino Ruiz Lazo) Phone: 55- 11 3824-9633 “My birth stopped telegraph service on the line e-mail: [email protected] that used to link the towns along the shore of Lake www.braudel.org.br Titicaca in Peru’s highlands. On...” 03 New Opportunities Honorary President: Rubens Ricupero 04 Migrations and Human Adaptation Board of Directors: Francisco Gros (Chairman), Marcello Resende Allain (Vice-Chairman), Paulo Andreoli, Hélio 05 The Cuzco Cradle de Lima Carvalho, José Luiz Pereira da Costa Dias, 07 Koreans Arrive Eduardo Giannetti da Fonseca, Roberto Giannetti da 08 Low Production Costs Fonseca, Antônio Corrêa de Lacerda, Arnim Lore, Idel 10 Sunday Nights in the Plaza Parí Metzger, Charles B. Neilson, Luís Carlos Bresser Pereira, 11 Work Like Coolies John Schulz, Luiza Erundina de Sousa, Beno Suchodolski, Joaquim Elói Cirne de Toledo, David Thomas, Maarten Albert Waelkens and Paulo Yokota. 14 Old Times in Bom Retiro Executive Director: Norman Gall (Bernardo Ricupero) “Juó Bananére never existed. But a young Brazilian Coordinator: Nilson Oliveira writer using this name produced one of the best portraits of São Paulo of the early...” Sponsors: ABN - Amro-Bank | Alcan | Alstom Banco Lloyds | Bradesco | Brascan | Brasmotor Editora Abril | Enron | Ericsson General Electric Foundation | Icatu Holding Itaú | Klabin | Natura | O Estado de S. Paulo Philips | Pirelli | Safra - Projeto Cultural Siemens | Souza Cruz | Voith Braudel Papers is published by the Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial ISSN: 1981-6499 Editor: Norman Gall Assistant editor: Nilson Oliveira Braudel Papers is published by the Online version: Emily Attarian Fernand Braudel Institute of World Layout by Emily Attarian Economics with special support of The Copyright 2001 Fernand Braudel Tinker Foundation, KM Distribuidora Institute of World Economics and O Estado de S. Paulo www.braudel.org.br BRAUDEL PAPERS 02 Migration far and wide From the Andes to São Paulo Albino Ruiz Lazo My birth stopped telegraph service on the line that used to link the towns along the shore of Lake Titicaca in Peru’s highlands. On a dull wet Sunday in December 1955, neighbors rook an old blind midwife from her shack high above the town of Acora to the post office where my mother worked as a telegrapher. When her labor pains starred, my mother informed the other telegraph operators on the line from the city of Puno to the Bolivian border. They kept the line open, in case my birth proved difficult and she had to be rushed in a passing truck to Puno, 30 kilometers to the north. Every day Peruvian telegraphers spread news of villages and the world, transmitting headlines of Lima newspapers which didn’t of the corruption scandal leading to the fall of reach Andean towns, news of politics, President Alberto Fujimori and the creation of soccer and military coups. Japanese new political alliances. My son Miguel, wandering transistor radios, available elsewhere, had among the villages of Puno, Formed an Internet not yet reached our mountain villages. The friendship with Raquel Salvador, a Spaniard living telegraph office where I was born took part in London, whom he met in the Chat Café Ole. She in all the changes which Peru went through has just arrived in Peru to spend a few days with until improved communications discarded Miguel in the Andes to become better acquainted. the thousands of poles and wires of the national telegraph system. New Opportunities The wand of change worked its magic Even before the Internet facilitated quickly connecting isolated communities communications so dramatically, the spread of with the rest of the world, freeing the secondary schools after the agrarian reforms of peasants from servitude and ignorance. the 1970s pulled young people from villages into The changes brought new roads, schools, towns and cities. The new opportunities brought by different fuels, electricity, transport by these changes dispersed the mass of poor Quechua- bus, truck and plane, telephones with speaking peas-ants who went to my mother’s post direct dialing, radios and recently public office to receive the medicines and cures that she Internet booths, a new medium of mass distributed. When I returned to Acora many years communications. In remote towns, people later only old people were left. I was treated like a now pay 57 U.S. cents per hour to phone stranger. They told me I spoke and dressed like a relatives in the United States or Europe gringo, that in my long absence I did nothing for using an Internet Protocol, sharing details my people. Albino Ruiz Lazo is a Peruvian researcher for the Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics. Some illustrations for this essay are taken from old Andean weavings. www.braudel.org.br BRAUDEL PAPERS 03 Another absentee is Oswaldo Curo, who was born to the upper floors. Doors, railings and decorations in 1971 in Capachica, on the other side of Lake in a faded green splash four of the five floors with Titicaca. I met him in São Paulo on a cold dawn in color. Dim side corridors connect the 17 rooms on August 2000, looking for space to sell hand-made each floor. Doors remain half open most of the time, earrings among spectral hawkers of jewelry, leather releasing smells of soap, food, sweat and Andean goods, clothing and school supplies cramming wool. Children play near the doors, while cries of a crowded street market near the old financial babies mix with Cuzco cassette music. On the floors center of São Paulo. Chinese, Koreans, Chileans, of the rooms, piles of alpaca fabric are separated into Rumanians, Angolans, Ecuadorians and Peruvians, piles of woolen gloves, hats, chullos (Andeancaps along with migrants from Brazil’s Northeast, sell covering the ears), and handbags. Hanging From a whole wide range products wholesale to store- wall hooks are hundreds of colored bracelets and owners from interior towns until the arrival at 8 a.m necklaces from Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil and of tenants of the street stalls which are rented from Bolivia. Rooms at the back, hidden and divided by handicapped concessionaires. At that hour a blitz of curtains, are used as bedrooms/workshops. Beds and municipal inspectors, alerted by the handicapped in mattresses crammed together at night give way by defense of their acquired rights, may descend upon day to the making of earrings by trusted people paid the scurrying street hawkers. five centavos per piece. Oswaldo employs young Oswaldo lives and produces costume jewelry with Brazilian girls in his room to make accessories like a mulata from Minas Gerais in the Hotel Itaúna, those used by the exuberant dancing Feticheira home to many Peruvian migrants in São Paulo. He (“Sorceress”) on TV. “The girls like to wear what has lived in Brazil for three of his 29 years, after Feticheira is wearing. Every Richer traders have dropping out of the Adventist University in Lima built shelves in their rooms, used alternatively as for lack of money. “I was ten years old when I left bunk-beds and for storing goods. During the day the my town for the first time on a school trip to see rooms become secret bazaars supplying thousands the sea in Arequipa,” he said. “I didn’t understand of Peruvians and other petty merchants arriving Spanish and didn’t know what to say from the streets or the interior of when someone spoke to me. In my town Brazil. A central corridor connects the we just spoke Quechua. During school second row of rooms with the toilets, vacations I went back to Arequipa and from which, in mid-morning, pour out sold ice cream in the streets. I learned half-dressed hotel residents dripping about the city. My boss fed me and with water, on the way to their rooms. let me sleep in a corner of his factory. These are wholesalers returning from Something always drove me to leave the turbulent dawn market. The hotel home. So I went to Lima to study and houses 350 Cusqueños in its 80 rooms. now I’m here”. The door of the Hotel Itaúna opens Migrations and Human Adaptation on to the Avenue Rio Branco. The These Cusqueños form part of the hotel gives off an acrid smell of mildew crescendo of world migration, one of coming from the top of the stairs leading the oldest forms of human adaptation. www.braudel.org.br BRAUDEL PAPERS 04 Between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, when the beings from Asia, has transferred its targets from the first humans appeared in Africa, migration resulted United States to Europe”. in the spread of people over all the continent, In New York, 40% of today's population was almost always as a response to ecological crises, born outside the US, in 167 different countries, political conflicts and new opportunities. “The speaking 116 languages. “Without immigration, history of America is, in its widest sense, the New York would be very different with whole history of migrations”, observes the demographic districts abandoned and a shrinking population”, historian Noble David Cook. Waves after waves states the sociologist Philip Kasinitz. The most of migrations have formed the World City of São recent waves of immigrants come from Russia, Paulo: Portuguese, Negroes, Italians, Germans, Jews, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Dominican Russians, Japanese, Koreans and now poor workers Republic and Colombia.
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