E eles viajaram em navios nos oceanos, lançando suas redes e sendo guiados ao porto desejado: migrações de italianos protestantes Valdenses na região fronteiriça Platina no século XIX

Abstract

This Master's Thesis was developed in the research line “Frontier, Politics and Society” of the History Postgraduate Program of the Federal University of Santa Maria with the aid of a CAPES/DS scholarship. Here, we used the concepts of Community, Relationship Networks and of the Platine Borderlands to support a research focused on the study of the immigration and subsequent settlement processes of the Protestant Waldensian communities "for" and "in the" Platine region. These populations, coming from the northwestern region of Italy, were marked by a characteristic identity that linked ethnic and cultural elements to a specific religiosity and to a social perception linked to political and community life. We see here that this identity has, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, constituted a sense of ethno-religious belonging endowed with multiple meanings. In it, “Waldensian” represented, simultaneously, an ethnic group, the faithful of a specific religion, the inhabitants of the Valleys of northwestern Piedmont and the members of a localized community. These multiple identities were preserved and re-signified by Waldensian immigrants who arrived in the Platine borderlands of the second half of the 19th century through a series of strategies that were based on the construction and expansion of relationship networks. Through contact with other local immigrant groups, historical ties with Protestant denominations that had a previous presence in South America (such as Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians) and maintaining close ties between colonial nuclei and between them and their original communities, the Waldensians were also able to reaffirm their presence in the region and expand the reach of both their networks and their own migratory process. This study was conducted based on the analysis of different sections of the book Compendio de Historia de los Valdenses, by the Uruguayan evangelical (Waldensian) writer Luis Jourdan. The analysis of the work, originally published in 1901, was accompanied by a long process of bibliographic review and consultation with other historical sources of the period.