On restricted demographic regimes: reproductive behavior and Ukrainian family culture in rural areas of the Brazilian State of Paraná (1895-1980)

Abstract

This study focuses on the family dynamics of immigrants from the present country of The Ukraine. The ancestors of these families came to Brazil in 1895 and settled in a rural area of the State of Paraná known as Colônia Antonio Olynto. Due to the group’s high legitimate fertility rate in the cohorts established for the study (1895-1949/1950-1980), the research focused on understanding the maintenance of this high rate during the period analyzed (between 8 and 9 children in the first group and 7 and 8 in the second) and the consequences in terms of family, home and social organization. In other words, the analysis questions the reasons why this group tried to perpetuate a reproductive system that historically corresponded to the realities of a quite different social space, when, in their adopted country the gross fertility rate was quickly reduced, particularly in the period that corresponded to the second group of the study. The only conclusion possible would seem to be that reproductive behavior is the result of a complex system of representation interfacing the different ways of conceiving gender-based and inter-generational relations. Also important are the role of marriage and the establishment of a home. If this is so, fertility behavior overwhelmingly corresponds to the social exercise of a specific perception of the world, especially in groups that live in social isolation, where the opportunity to reproduce ancestral models of generational replacement is favored. Among the immigrants studied, almost a century in Brazil was not enough to change the system that the families brought with them from The Ukraine. In Brazil they repeated behavior of having large numbers of offspring, even at the cost of the inevitable migration of many of their children in adulthood.