Campo Limpo

Coffee warehouses become a reception hostel

The buildings belonged to the railway and coffee-trading landscape of Campo Limpo Paulista. A local history describes the former coffee depots being adapted for newcomers and preserves a childhood recollection of a Russian family staying there in 1948. Its photographs place those warehouses within the history of the station and the district’s later industrial development.

These were depots of the national coffee department. Millions of sacks were burnt there in 1941 under the federal export policy, and older residents remembered the smell reaching the centre of Jundiaí eleven kilometres away. The sheds then stood almost abandoned until the war ended. One of the people who passed through, a Russian who was two years old in 1948, later researched the place and observed that for want of publicity the hostel at Campo Limpo station does not appear in the history of the last migrations and survives only in the testimony of those who were there.

This was accommodation after the ocean crossing to Brazil, rather than a European displaced-persons camp. Research on refugee reception describes arrivals through Rio de Janeiro and the Ilha das Flores hostel before transfer to Campo Limpo when São Paulo was their initial destination. The hostel was an intermediate place between international resettlement and employment in Brazil.

Who passed through Campo Limpo

The annual totals grew from 2,579 registrations in 1947 to 4,891 in 1949. Ukrainians represented 12.27% of the three-year total. These figures count people registered over time; they do not measure how many slept in the warehouses on a particular night. The table records nationality as classified in the contemporary administration.

Poles were the largest group at 28.60%, Ukrainians the second at 12.27%, followed by Balts, Hungarians, stateless people, Russians, Yugoslavs and Czechs. The Ukrainian share fell across the three years, from 17.02% of the 1947 registrations to 8.79% of those in 1949, while Hungarian and Yugoslav numbers rose sharply. Nearly eight per cent of all those registered were recorded as stateless, a classification the museum illustrates with an identity booklet describing its holder as belonging to no state.

From temporary accommodation to work

Many arrivals brought industrial skills. The museum identifies mechanics, electricians, metalworkers, cabinetmakers and welders among the declared occupations. This contrasted with earlier immigration streams associated chiefly with agricultural labour.

Employers recruiting the newcomers were concentrated in metropolitan São Paulo, especially the city itself. Brazilian recruitment sought both agricultural labour and skills for modernising industry, while encouraging family migration. Temporary reception therefore led into a labour market with several kinds of work, rather than one uniform destination for every household.

Firms put their requirements to the authorities and to the hostel itself, so that a good part of the newcomers arrived with a contract already made. Salles names medium and large employers: meat works, building and engineering firms, motor-vehicle and components plants, food, textile and printing works, leather and mining companies, among them Swift, Armour, General Motors and Firestone as well as immigrant-owned businesses such as Indústrias Reunidas F. Matarazzo.

Salles’s sample of the Campo Limpo disembarkation lists gives 52 Ukrainians in first employment, 49 of them as skilled workers, one as a technician or professional and two in unskilled service work. Ukrainian employers were most concentrated at São Caetano and in the eastern zone of the city, and Ukrainian households settled mainly in the eastern, western and southern zones, with none recorded in the centre. Declared qualifications did not always match the first job obtained: across all nationalities the proportion classed as skilled workers rose from 71% on the passport to almost 80% in the first job.

Community and the idea of return

The hostel fed into an older Ukrainian settlement. Salles cites research on the Sociedade Ucrânia Livre at São Caetano, whose statute showed that its organisers were less concerned with gathering the Ukrainian community in Brazil than with political events in Ukraine, their stated aim being a sovereign, democratic and republican country. The earlier Ukrainian migration to São Caetano is described as made up of former officers of the Ukrainian army and of workers who had left their land because of hard conditions.

Among the surprises of the oral testimony Salles gathered is how persistent the idea of return remained. For a good part of these communities the question was not only rebuilding a life in Brazil but preparing to go back, and she notes that what she says of the Ukrainians holds for a significant part of the Russians as well.

The documents that travelled with people

Surviving papers make the journey visible in another way. The museum’s research for a 2024 exhibition brought together temporary identity documents issued by the International Refugee Organisation, travel permits, vaccination records and later identity papers. Some bear the stamp of the provisional hostel at Campo Limpo Paulista. Photographs, physical descriptions and successive stamps record the administrative steps accompanying a family’s search for a new home.

The resulting virtual exhibition shows identity certificates and laissez-passer issued in the late 1940s, an IRO certificate serving in place of a passport until a permanent travel document could be issued, and a chart of registrations at the provisional hostel. Its caption dates the hostel 1947 to 1952, where the museum’s own earlier article and Salles both give 1947 to 1951.

Return to the Brás hostel

In 1951 the Brás building returned to its immigration function and Campo Limpo’s temporary role ended; the IRO was succeeded by the intergovernmental committee for European migration, which agreed with Brazil that the movement would continue. The registers of those who passed through Campo Limpo are held at the state public archive of São Paulo, and the warehouse site later became the Krupp works.