Paraguay Immigrants
Mennonite farmers from San Pedro Department
Courtesy Richard S. Sacks
A trickle of European and Middle Eastern immigrants began making
their way to Paraguay in the decades following the War of the
Triple Alliance. The government pursued a pro-immigration policy in
an effort to increase population. Government records indicated that
approximately 12,000 immigrants entered the port of Asunción
between 1882 and 1907, of that total, almost 9,000 came from the
Italy, Germany, France, and Spain. Migrants also arrived from
neighboring Latin American countries, especially Argentina.
Most migrants--even many who began their lives in Paraguay's
agricultural settlements--typically found their way into urban
trades and commerce and became the backbone of the country's small
middle class. Middle Easterners tended to remain culturally and
socially distinct even after several generations. European and
Latin American immigrants were more readily assimilated.
Nonetheless, in small towns non-Paraguayan family origins were
noted for generations after the original migrant's arrival.
Although most minority groups tended to prefer urban life,
Japanese immigrants founded and remained in agricultural colonies.
Until the twentieth century, Japanese immigration was limited by
Paraguay's unwillingness to accept Asian colonists; Japanese
themselves preferred the more lucrative opportunities offered by
the expanding Brazilian economy. When Brazil set quotas on Asian
immigration in the 1930s, however, a Japanese land company set up
an agricultural settlement southeast of Asunción. Two more colonies
near Encarnación followed in the 1950s. A 1959 bilateral agreement
between the Japanese and Paraguayan governments encouraged further
immigration. By the 1980s there were about 8,000 Japanese settlers
in agricultural colonies. The colonists made a concerted effort to
preserve Japanese language and culture with varying degrees of
success. Until the end of World War II, the earliest settlement
supported a parallel educational system with subjects taught
entirely in Japanese; the colonists eventually limited this to
supplemental Japanese language classes. By the late 1960s, many
Japanese children could speak in Japanese, Guaraní, and Spanish.
But there was strong bias against Japanese-Paraguayan
intermarriage.
Like the Japanese, most German--speaking Mennonite immigrants
remained in agricultural colonies. The bulk of the Mennonite
population came between the 1920s and the 1940s and established
three colonies in the central Chaco. In 1926 approximately 2,000
persons left Canada after the passage of legislation requiring
English to be the language of instruction in Mennonite schools. The
Paraguayan government, eager to develop the Chaco, readily allowed
Mennonites to conduct their own schools in German and exempted the
immigrants from military service.
The original Menno Colony was followed by the establishment of
the Fernheim Colony in 1930 and the Neuland Colony in 1947. These
latter two groups of colonists, also German--speaking, fled
religious persecution in the Soviet Union. The Fernheimers, who had
higher levels of education and more exposure to urban life than did
the Mennos, also founded the town of Filadelfia, which eventually
became an important agricultural supply center for the central
Chaco. Some Fernheimers and Neulands left the Chaco to establish
small colonies in Eastern Paraguay. In the early 1980s, there were
approximately 15,000 Mennonites in Paraguay; two-thirds lived in
the Chaco, with the remainder in Caaguazú, San Pedro, and Itapúa
departments and in Asunción
(see Agriculture
, ch. 3).
Until the 1970s, the Brazilian presence in Paraguay was
relatively minor and was confined primarily to privately organized
agricultural colonies along the easter border. In 1943 there were
fewer than 500 Brazilian farmers in all of Paraguay; throughout the
1950s and 1960s the proportion of Brazilians in the eastern border
region held constant at between 3 and 4 percent of the total
population of the area.
In the early 1970s, however, Brazilian immigrants, persuaded by
a variety of factors, began streaming into the region from the
neighboring Brazilian state of Paraná. In 1967 the Paraguayan
government repealed a statute that had prohibited foreigners from
purchasing land within 150 kilometers of the country's borders.
During the same era, increased mechanization of soybean production
in Paraná generated a growing concentration of landholdings in that
area. Brazilian farmers whose holdings were too small to support
increased production costs sold their land in Brazil and bought
cheap land in Paraguay. In the late 1970s, land along Paraguay's
eastern frontier was seven to eight times cheaper than comparable
land in Brazil. The disparity in prices drew large investors who
cleared the land of saleable timber, then subdivided it and sold it
to Brazilian immigrants.
Official records gave only an imprecise sense of the number of
Brazilians who had come to the country. According to the 1982
census, there were 99,000 Brazilians residing in Paraguay. Most
analysts discounted this figure, however, and contended that
between 300,000 and 350,000 Brazilians lived in the eastern border
region. Along the border, the Brazilian cruzeiro was more commonly
used than the guaraní (for value of the
guaraní--see Glossary), and
Portuguese was heard more often than Spanish or Guaraní. Many
Paraguayan peasants and Indians were evicted from lands purchased
by immigrants. The pace of land sales increased to such a point
that undercapitalized Paraguayan farmers who had settled in the
region as part of IBR's colonization programs were selling their
lands to Brazilian farmers and financial groups.
Analysts also rejected government figures on the number of
immigrants from the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Hong Kong, and
Taiwan. The 1982 census reported that there were 2,700 Koreans in
Paraguay, along with another 1,100 non-Korean or non-Japanese Asian
immigrants. The actual number of Koreans and ethnic Chinese,
however, was believed to be between 30,000 and 50,000. Virtually
all Koreans and ethnic Chinese lived in Puerto Presidente
Stroessner or Asunción and played a major role in the importation
and sale of electronic goods manufactured in Asia.
Data as of December 1988
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