São Paulo, Brazil

From Jesuit School to Modern City

The origins of the city date back to 1554, when members of the Society of Jesus founded a Jesuit school on a hill near the Anhangabaú River. Six years later São Paulo received the status of Vila and, in 1681, became the capital of the capitanía of São Paulo, a subnational unit governed hereditarily by appointees of the king of Portugal. Because the soil was not suitable for agricultural production, São Paulo was, for centuries, the point of departure of the bandeiras—inland expeditions in search of Indians to enslave, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in search of precious metals and stones, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1711 São Paulo became a city, but in 1748 the capitanía was incorporated into Rio de Janeiro. In 1765, the city returned to its earlier status, as part of a strategy by the Portuguese Crown to prevent the loss of territory to Spain, which ruled over the rest of South America.

São Paulo grew very slowly throughout those early centuries. With the Brazilian independence in 1822, the city became a provincial capital and five years later a law school was founded there, turning São Paulo into a relatively important intellectual center. During the second half of that century, coffee plantations became a highly profitable economic activity in the interior of the state. Those regions were connected to the Port of Santos by a railway in the 1870s, providing an export corridor that passed through the city. Unlike other Brazilian plantations, coffee in São Paulo was based not on slave labor but on immigrant labor, brought from Europe and Japan in several waves of institutionalized migration organized by the private producers and financed by the government. That was the reason why the local economy did not change much after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the inauguration of the republic in 1889. By that time, the city experienced its first period of intense demographic growth, jumping from 30,000 inhabitants in 1872 to nearly 240,000 in 1890, almost 85 percent of them of foreign origin. This ethnic and cultural mixture remained—the foreign population grew 13 times between 1890 and 1920—and is still a central feature of the city today.

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