Maíra Ines Vendrame offers a captivating account of practices of local justice amongst Italian immigrants in rural settlements of Rio Grande do Sul, in southern Brazil, at the turn of the twentieth century. The limitations of the Brazilian state in investigating and punishing crime in the immigrant colonies, led Vendrame to explore informal arrangements and uncover strategies of selective cooperation and autonomous practices of justice defined by ideas of family honour and communal order with roots in the migrants’ peasant world of origin in northern Italy. Vendrame's study is written within the tradition of Italian microhistory and combines scales of analysis – regional patterns, local histories, social networks, and individual strategies – grounded in an impressive array of archival sources from Italy and Brazil.
In typical microhistorical fashion, Power in the Village starts with the story of an event that disrupted the daily life of the Italian agricultural settlements in the late 1800s – the death of the priest of the Silveira Martins Colony, Antonio Sorio. Had he fallen from his horse as the official account stated? Was he attacked by Freemasons whose proselytism in the local community had been publicly criticized by the priest, as rumours intimated? Or was he ambushed and beaten by the family and friends of a young woman whom the priest had sexually abused, as other accounts suggested? The existence of different explanations acts as an invitation to the reader to unveil the local universe in which these multiple stories took shape, the logics that gave them credence, the choices that made them possible, and their cultural and social foundations.
After presenting the conflicting interpretations of Father Sorio's death in Chapter 1, the analysis unfolds in six additional chapters each focusing on different aspects of the local world through a historical narrative that combines regional and local patterns with individual trajectories. Chapters 2 and 3 widen the lens to focus on the history of the community, the characteristics of migration from the Veneto region to Brazil, and the social networks that connected northern Italy and southern Brazil and facilitated the settlement and adaptation of migrant families. Chapter 4 sheds light on the social fabric of the immigrant settlements by examining the recreation of social networks through fictive kin like godparents and other social and economic arrangements. Chapter 5 explores the nature of local power and the sources of economic, social, and political prestige among immigrants with strong social networks and the capacity of mediation between the rural colonies and the external world that sustained them. Chapters 6 and 7 delve deeper into the core of social organisation in the immigrant settlements by examining the relationship between family and community and the reactions to threats to their integrity, prestige, and accepted order built around notions of honour and shame. These chapters reveal the tensions between local forms of justice that followed immigrant values and practices and the limited state power that sought to centralise justice and impose order.
Through this layered analysis, Vendrame argues that local social order was based on social networks that provided individuals with intangible resources. These networks originated in Italy, were reinforced by migration, and then extended through the experience of settlement and community-building in Brazil. Notions of prestige and trust were fundamental in these relations. Individuals who were most successful in building these relationships emerged as mediators, as exemplified by the trajectory of Father Sorio. Leadership and mediation, however, were contested terrain. There were also fracture lines in these communities, deepened by individual economic, ideological, and political rivalries. Sorio's ideas about religious philosophies, his criticism of the activities of Freemasons, and his campaign to make the settlement of Silveira Martins an autonomous municipality were opposed by some of his fellow countrymen, and his activities as an ethnic leader were the target of criticism outside of the rural colonies. This last issue is connected to another key theme in the book: the tension between a spirit of local autonomy among Italian immigrants in the rural settlements and the attempts at exercising power by the Brazilian state; tensions that were exacerbated by political changes during the transition from monarchical to republican rule in Brazil in 1889.
Another pillar of the local universe was family honour. A resourceful use of judicial records provides Vendrame with the material to weave a vivid account of local reactions to cases of illicit sexual liaisons and sexual abuse that threatened this family honour. Local residents acted in different ways according to the position of the perpetrator, their own standing in local society, and the relative access to the intangible resource of interpersonal ties. The assessment of the damage done to the community and the necessary action to redress it was in the hands of local leaders whose informal authority was grounded in social networks and whose legitimacy originated in shared notions of prestige and power. Outsiders were considered as a threat in this local world – be it Afro-Brazilian workers who questioned the Italian immigrants’ authority over the space and hierarchical ethno-racial order of the colonies, or the Brazilian authorities. Tensions over these different sociocultural understandings of honour and power were heightened by episodes in which local residents took justice into their own hands. Italian immigrants resisted the interference of Brazilian authorities who found silence or lack of cooperation when immigrants were able to enact alternatives strategies of redress (including resorting to ambush with physical violence and even lynching). They turned to external sources of justice only as a pressure mechanism to achieve a resolution or when an agreement about the form of punishment was not possible.
By uncovering strategies of autonomous local justice and the sociocultural world in which they emerged, Power in the Village brings to life the social universe in which Father Antonio Sorio lived and found his tragic end. But the book uncovers a much broader history that reconstructs the varied repertoire of strategies devised by Italian immigrants in the rural settlements of southern Brazil to maintain and, if necessary, restore a social order structured around principles of honour and shame. Through a deft combination of different scales of analysis within the framework of microhistory grounded in an impressive set of archival sources and enlivened by a diversity of trajectories that illustrate individuals’ experiences and choices, Vendrame offers a richly documented social history of justice in the communities of peasant migrants created by transatlantic migrations.
