Ares de Vingança : redes sociais, honra familiar e práticas de justiça entre imigrantes italianos no sul do Brasil (1878-1910)

Abstract

This paper has the aim of analyzing how the Italian immigrants in the south of Brazil used to solve problems related to the familiar honor. For that, it will be given attention to the social relations that bound the peasants to the justice they used to when certain facts offended their families or the community. As a motto, this research starts from an emblematic episode occurred during the first days of 1900: the tragic death of Antônio Sório, the priest of the ex-colony Silveira Martins, nucleus of the Italian immigration in the center of Rio Grande do Sul. The death of the priest propitiated the sprouting of some versions among the local population: political crime, where the Masonry would be the responsible for it, and revenge crime related to the familiar honor issues. To follow the trajectory of this priest, since he arrived the colonial region in 1881, as well as others immigrants, make it possible to notice the rules that guided the behavior and organized the dynamics of the society. Individual and collective experiences will help to understand the universe in which groups of peasant families and local leaderships made their choices. The explanations given by the population related to the death of the priest make sense in the social reality of the immigrants, where the adjustments used to occur through independent justice, extrajudicial agreements and cultural mechanisms aiming reestablish the balance in the rural communities