São Paulo – The Museum of Immigration, in the state of São Paulo, is undergoing a renovation and should reopen only in the second half of 2012. Even though the building is closed, millions of Brazilians who descend from immigrants can now check documents previously available only to the state government. The Secretariat for Culture of the State of São Paulo has uploaded 87,640 images of documents, records, photographs, newspapers and even colony maps for public consultation at www.museudaimigracao.org.br.
Some documents may attest to a given immigrant’s arrival in São Paulo. That would enable descendants to gather up documents to apply for passports to their ancestors’ countries of origin. Researchers can also use the site to seek information on the colonies. In some cases, the information available even includes the city the person went to upon leaving Hospedaria de Imigrantes do Brás (Brás Immigrants Lodge), which now hosts the Museum of Immigration, known as Memorial do Imigrante (Immigrant’s Memorial) prior to the renovation.
According to the coordinator of the Public Archive of the State of São Paulo, Carlos de Almeida Prado Bacellar, the opportunity to scan the documents came up as the museum was shut down for restoration. When collection was about to the transferred to the Public Archive for storage, the Secretariat for Culture requested that the former scan it.
“It makes access easier to the public, which otherwise would only be able to research these documents by coming over. Some people, however, live far from São Paulo and would not be able to commute to the capital. This way, we preserve the originals, whose access is restricted,” he says.
Out of all the documents available on the web, 3,223 are invitation letters, 2,824 are cartographical documents, 9,740 are iconographical (such as photos), 2,098 are newspapers from the Public Archive collection, 37,739 are registry books from the Immigrants Lodge and 32,016 are Requests to the Secretariat for Culture, Commerce and Public Works (Sacop), through which the immigrants would file for travel expense refunds. The invitation letters were guarantees that immigrants would have a tutor in Brazil until they were able to support themselves. All the files were scanned by the Public Archive team over a seven-month period, at an approximate cost of 166,000 reals (US$ 126,100). Following scanning, the documents were stored in packaging to keep them from decomposing.
Some of the documents were already available at the Immigrant’s Memorial website. The Secretariat for Culture claims that over 90% of the images available on that website were low quality, while the current ones are high quality. Some of the documents could not be copied because they were either very sensitive or at an advanced stage of decomposition. Documents of all types had these sorts of issues, but according to Bacellar, it was more frequent among registry books. “Those are large books, up to 1 meter tall, with many pages, and they were heavily handled. They will need restoring before they are scanned,” says Bacellar.
Most documents were stored starting in 1887, the year the Immigrants Lodge opened. The Public Archive estimates that 2 million people stayed there since that year, but according to Bacellar, it is impossible to tell how many of these immigrants were Arab. “Many, though Syrian or Lebanese, entered the country using Turkish passports, because of the Ottoman Empire invasion,” he says.
Bacellar also claims the documents concern only people who stayed at the Immigrants Lodge and who came to Brazil subsidized by the government of São Paulo. Immigrants who came on their own resources did not stay at the lodge and the system does not hold information on them. “If they came by themselves, they didn’t stay here. Only those funded by the state of São Paulo would go to the lodge,” says Bacellar.
The project is not over yet. The Secretariat for Culture estimates that by June 2012 it should upload another 100,000 pages from travel diaries off the ships that brought the immigrants to Brazil. To the state secretary for Culture, Andrea Matarazzo, “this is an action which democratizes access to knowledge.”
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
