Porto Novo project: utopia or ethnocentrism?

Abstract

This article aimed to analyze the web of cultural, economic and social relations that have woven the life of Germans from Porto Novo Project (currently the towns of Itapiranga, São João do Oeste and Tunápolis), founded by the Society of Jesus in 1926, in the Far West of Santa Catarina. The study, full of subjective meaning, intends to depart from the positivist Official Story which until now established the truths about the daring homogeneous project. The research is justified for reopening pages filtered by essays and official narratives; for opposing the exercise of oppression, which gives a marginal status to the history of the majority and, especially, for stirring wounds healed by time but not forgotten by the collective memory. The history of Porto Novo Project is mentioned in Teutonic-Brazilian literature as one of the most closed and coercive settlements of European migration in Brazil. The results extrapolated initial forecasts and some conclusions stand as sovereign: the demarcation of a captive territory of 583 square kilometers, amid the natural environment, aimed the formation of Christians who were perfect for the economic, social and cultural life; the colony, through the leveling action of the community, experienced a mystic and fanatical religious noosphere, without precedents in settlements of Southern Brazil; the project responded and adapted to two distinct periods: had its epicenter of decisions in the Church until the 1970s, consolidating its latent desire to prevent that the horrors and immorality, inflated by modernity, reached the social fabric and, post-70, when the big agro-industries (milk, poultry and pork) put up as radiating centers of modernity in the region, ruling in accordance with the laws of the market.