Maíra Ines Vendrame's Power in the Village offers a comprehensive insight into how Italian colonial settlers, who had made southern Brazil their destination, built their networks of sociality, upheld family honour, engaged in inter- and intra-ethnic violence and tacitly controlled community behaviour at the turn of the twentieth century. The book was first published by Oikos in 2016 as O poder na Aldeia and Miriam Adelman has translated it from Portuguese into English. The translated version is about a third shorter than the original, but the main structure and central arguments of the study are unchanged.
Power in the Village is an excellent addition to Routledge's ‘Microhistories’ series, for several reasons. Firstly, it engages with histories that relate to both large- and small-scale historical contexts. Secondly, it charts transatlantic routes and village-to-village connections that reveal the complexity of rural realities both in the area of migrant departure (north-east Italy) and in the area of colonial settlement (Rio Grande do Sul). Thirdly, it employs an array of sources, including crime records, that demonstrate how settler communities (re)created in unfamiliar settings not only a complex web of social networks but also their own value sets, religious beliefs, and informal justice system, equipped with conflict resolution mechanisms and punishments. Lastly, it traces the trajectories of some key social actors at different stages in their lives, from pre-migration to post-settlement, allowing the reader to navigate through the labyrinths of Italian rural culture in southern Brazil.
The book is divided into seven chapters, not including the introduction and conclusions. It begins with the different versions of an uninvestigated violent assault and murder in 1899 – the ambush and tragic death from fatal injuries to his ‘lower abdominal region’ (p. 21) of an Italian immigrant priest, Father Antonio Sorio, in the rural colonial settlement of Silveira Martins. The author stresses that she has ‘no mystery-solving intentions’ in mind (p. 10). Rather, she uses the facts about the murder case as well as the memoirs, the rumours, the commentary – and the silence – of the community as a springboard for an evaluation of the social, political and cultural dimensions of this tragic event. Father Sorio's violent end offers the reader a glimpse into a different type of investigation – the way in which an act of vengeance took place and how the local population reacted to it, interpreted it and memorialised it.
Vendrame devotes the next chapters to exploring the trajectory of Paolo (Paulo) Bortoluzzi, whose immigrant life adds essential elements to the Sorio story, and the processes of adaptation of Italian immigrants and their families in the settlement, in which Sorio was a pivotal figure. Bortoluzzi, the head of an extended family who migrated from the province of Treviso to Brazil and founded the community of Vale Veneto in 1878, epitomised the ambitions of north-eastern Italian peasants to ‘do America’. Through painstaking archival research, Vendrame challenges the assumption that dire conditions forced scores of destitute and pellagra-plagued peasants to emigrate. Instead, small landowners and renters like Bortoluzzi saw in the South American colonies opportunities hitherto not afforded to them, whether economic investment, upward social mobility, or practising one's faith freely and away from state intervention.
Country priests like Sorio, who in Italy were held in high regard for their role as religious and community leaders among the peasantry, were not just the primary supporters of emigration; indeed, more often than not they were active agents of the emigration push, and acted as mediators between those who had already left and those who were keen to depart. In other words, they placed themselves at the centre, not at the periphery, of emigration propaganda and the ‘America delirium’ (p. 51). Moreover, settlers themselves recruited country priests directly from Italy, a further testimony of the recognised leadership role of priests in the peasant culture.
Like Bortoluzzi, Sorio saw opportunities in the colonies too, arriving in Rio Grande do Sul with fellow priest Vitor Arnoffi in 1881. Here, Vendrame stresses another key point: the emigration process was first and foremost conceived of in terms of social groups and family nuclei, but rarely in terms of individuals, even priests. Sorio saw in America a chance not only for himself but also for his kin, in particular for his orphaned nieces and nephews who would soon follow him to Brazil.
The author then turns her attention to the reconstruction of relational networks in the settlement. Particularly relevant were the compadrio (ritual co-parenthood) ties that linked one family to another and formed ‘part of a politics of kinship among immigrants, with forms of assistance that circulated in different moments’ (p. 101). By fostering godparenting linkages, Father Sorio created interdependence between members of the community, including his own family and other immigrants. Such ties increased the social capital of the priest and his kin, so much so that when he was attacked, at the end of 1899, ‘Sorio received assistance from people who belonged to his group of relations, including some who had become his compadres through the baptismal font and friends from the mutual aid society’ (p. 101).
At the time of his unexpected death, Sorio's social standing was at its height: he had become a sort of ‘mayor of the village’ (p. 131). He enjoyed a consolidated web of relationships and had built a respectable family patrimony. It is in the final chapters of the book that Vendrame delves into such matters as family honour, sexual misconduct, colonial violence and group reputation and stability, which also involved Sorio and Arnoffi, whose tragic ends – Sorio in a seeming act of vengeance, Arnoffi in an alleged suicide – reveal more about the ‘complex and contradictory reality of the society of Italian immigrants’ (p. 225) in southern Brazil than their deaths, taken singly, may initially suggest.
Power in the Village is a beautifully written page-turner that substantially advances our knowledge in the area of colonial settlement and beyond. With its academic rigour and interdisciplinarity, it provides a model for future research.
