Abstract
Between the 1940s and 1970s, in Brazil, immigrant studies competed with community, rural, and indigenous studies. As regards theory, all of them worked with the same theme of assimilation to the national society. Journals such as Sociologia (ELSP), Revista de Antropologia, Revista do Museu Paulista and Anhembi have published several papers on immigrants, describing the finding of researches conducted by authors such as Emílio Willems, Hiroshi Saito and Ruth Cardoso. Florestan Fernandes was interested in the subject, having published three articles on Arab immigration in Brazil. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, the theme lost interest. Brazilian sociologists changed their focus to the studies on social class and national development. The present work returns to that specific period to analyze the trajectory of this production on the subject of immigration, seeking to understand its importance and loss of centrality within Brazilian sociology. We focused our analysis in the period from 1930 to 1970, when the sociological production on the subject was numerous, taking as source of information both the main journals of the area and books published, in order to understand the place and the role played by the immigrant studies in Brazilian sociology.
Keywords
Brazilian sociology; Immigration; Immigrant studies