Um homem de letras e de ação: a trajetória de Artur Hehl Neiva no campo imigratório do Brasil entre as décadas de 1930-1950

Abstract

Artur Hehl Neiva was an engineer, lawyer and one of the ideologists of immigration policies for Brazil between the 1930s and 1950s. As a member of his generation of intellectuals and political agents, he worked in different spaces of power, focusing on the issue of immigration its most prominent production and debate at a time of great political and institutional transformations. In his intellectual career and as a man of action, he wrote dozens of articles on immigration and colonization, as well as books on this topic. However, their attention was not only focused on purely theoretical analyses, but found support in practice, in incursions into the interior of Brazil, in on-site analyzes of colonial centers, and in the selection of war refugees in European displaced camps. Understanding its trajectory is to analyze the internal disputes in the decision-making spaces, to understand the influence, or lack thereof, in the circulation it had in the different instances of the Vargas government, sometimes in the Police of the Federal District, sometimes in the Fundação Brasil Central, in the Council of Immigration and Colonization, as Head of the Brazilian Refugee Selection Delegation and also as the country's representative on the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (CIME). Having this character as an object of study allows us to observe the period between the 1930s and 1950s from another perspective, analyzing the possible intersections of his intellectual activity within the context of major transformations in the country. Specifically in the immigration field, we focus on debates around concepts important to historiographical discussions about immigration in that context, such as nationalization campaigns, immigration restrictions, the ideal type of immigrant, the idea of assimilation, among many others. It is, ultimately, to analyze the limits of an agent's action within a political-administrative system, observing permanences, nuances and peculiarities.