This article aims to analyze the form in which the Italian migrants who arrived in the central region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul at the end of the 19th century colonized the region and the social categories used in the process. As a source, I make use of memoirs written by two immigrants: Julio Lorenzoni (published in 1975) and Andrea Pozzobon (published in 1997), as well as the Album celebrating the First Fifty Years of Italian Immigration in the state, written in Italian and printed in 1925. An anthropological analysis of the written narratives documenting this immigration has also proven to be extremely fertile in terms of understanding the contemporary dynamic of ethnic claims at local level, based on the construction of an origin rooted in Italian ancestry.
Italianness; Colonization; Ethnic identity