Citizenship and belonging in the in-between: transatlantic immigration to Venezuela and Brazil, 1830-1914
This dissertation analyzes representations of citizenship and belonging in literary and cultural production that emerged during Spanish immigration to Venezuela and Portuguese immigration to Brazil throughout the long nineteenth century. The questions that guide my analysis are: what do immigration and citizenship laws tell us about how Brazilians and Venezuelans viewed Portuguese and Spanish migrants’ roles? What do literary authors’ discursive constructions of migrants tell us about how Brazilians and Venezuelans perceived migrants’ negotiation of belonging? To what extent did migrants’ status of being legally and emotionally “in between” their places of origin and settlement hinder their attempts to belong? How did the emotional communities and ties migrants formed help actively reconstruct bonds across the Iberian Atlantic? To answer these questions and study these contexts comparatively, I draw upon the fields of Transatlantic Studies and Migration Studies, which allow me to analyze the concepts and constructions of identity, citizenship, belonging, community, and emotions that occur in my primary texts while also expanding the scope beyond the Anglophone and Francophone worlds. The primary sources I analyze include laws and regulations, diplomatic correspondence, newspaper articles and advertisements, and novels. Chapter I examines laws, regulations, and decrees pertaining to immigration law that dictated the role of the migrant in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. Chapter II analyzes diplomatic correspondence, newspaper articles, and labor contracts concerning migrants from the Canary and Azores Islands who worked as indentured field laborers and the racial and social transformations they underwent that led to the construction of “regional” identities. Chapter III interrogates the discursive constructions and representations of Spanish and Portuguese migrants in Brazilian and Venezuelan novels published in the late nineteenth century that often relied on historical stereotypes. I consider the ways that these authors combated the rhetoric of “sameness” between migrants and natives that the elite frequently propagated. Chapter IV looks at Spanish and Portuguese migrant newspapers in Caracas, Venezuela and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the emotional communities they represented. I analyze how these emotional communities bound together in times of crisis and the emotions they valued and those they rejected.
immigration, transnational, transatlantic, belonging, citizenship, emotions
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign