Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Following almost 200 years of emigration, today an estimated two million Polish-Brazilians live within the state of Brazil, largely concentrated in the southern state of Paraná. Through interviews with current leaders of the Polish-Brazilian community in, this paper argues that the Polish migrant community in Curitiba has changed the meaning of “what it is to be Polish.” It shows that while the Polish-Brazilian community of Paraná experienced a sharp decline in Polish language maintenance that accelerated near the end of the 1930s, it also experienced an aberrant increase in public heritage performance beginning in the 1980s. This paper finds that three intertwined phenomena explain this anomaly. First, following the visit of Pope John Paul II to Curitiba in 1980 and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, widespread discrimination against Polish migrants rooted in the oppressive nationalistic policies of the 1930’s Vargas regime stopped, allowing Polish culture to become a respected and celebrated part of Brazilian society. Second, within Brazilian society more generally, an insistence upon a singular national identity gave way to the creation of “hybrid-identities” and the acceptance of migrant communities. Third, advances in technology and increasing travel opportunities changed the Polish-Brazilian community’s ability to communicate with and to form more formal and permanent relationships with Poland and Polish society. This paper shows how the performance of “Polishness” within the Polish-Brazilian community has emerged from decades of oppression, and in the processed shifted from a focus on language to a focus on performing heritage traditions and holidays.