Entre a escravidão e trabalho livre: imigração Suíça no Brasil oitocentista a partir de memórias de um colono no Brasil de Thomas Davatz 1855-1857

Abstract

BASED ON THOMAS DAVATZ'S MEMOIRS OF A COLONIST IN BRAZIL, 1855 – 1857 Swiss immigration to 19th-century Brazil occurred within a context of crisis in the slave system and a search for alternatives to reorganize labor on large plantations. Based on Thomas Davatz's work *Memoirs of a Colonist in Brazil* (1858), this study analyzes the contradictions of the transition from enslaved to free labor, using the experience of the Ibicaba Farm in São Paulo as a case study. The study demonstrates that, although immigrants were presented as agents of modernization, civilization, and whitening of the Brazilian population, in practice they faced exploitative conditions that brought the sharecropping system closer to slave-based logics. The research discusses the role of the imperial state, the interests of the agrarian elite, and the policies of attracting European colonists, highlighting how the immigration project was simultaneously articulated with economic demands and racial ideologies. Davatz's narrative, understood here as a historical source and as an exercise in memory, reveals contractual abuses, forced indebtedness, conflicts with landowners, and the tense coexistence between free and enslaved workers. It concludes that Swiss immigration, far from representing a break with slavery, exposes the structural limits of the conservative modernization of Brazilian society, which incorporated free labor without breaking with coercive practices inherited from slavery.