The Central Union of Poles in Brazil and the national cultural imposition (1930 - 1938)

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the Central Union of Poles in Brazil, in his perspective of promoting ethnic culture, as a way of maintaining Polish nationality in ethnic groups and the compulsory closure through nationalization, as a form of promoted cultural imposition by the ideological political instances of the Estado Novo in Brazil. The organization of ethnic institutions had been important for the propagation and maintenance of a culture brought with immigrants, however, transformed and updated in the cultural spaces of insertion, with decisive inferences both from the Polish governmental bodies, in the promotion of ethnic culture among the immigrants who here were, how much, of the Brazilian nationalizing processes in the Era Vargas. To write this article, consular documentation of the Polish MSZ from 1938 was analyzed, as well as articles from ethnic journals circulating in Polish immigration centers in Brazil. However, the historical investigation of ethnic institutions demands some care in the appropriation of meanings and organizations of the possible information from the research sources. The history of broader sociability institutions or networks is not based on simple analysis of documents, whether official or from any other sources. One may question, above all, whether historical knowledge can provide truths. For Reis (2000, p 325), there are several challenges that put historical truths in perspective: knowledge is linked to the time of production and the author's subjectivity; truths unverifiable by experience and sources produced and manipulated according to the directed expectations. For Foucault (2000, p. 14), ideology itself is the truth represented in a power relationship perspective, in the so-called regimes of truths and in their representations.