There have been three major sources of Brazilian immigrants in the twentieth century: the Northeast, where emigration offers one of the few realistic opportunities to escape poverty; the South, where middle-class families embraced an opportunity to continue a farming tradition; and the Central West, where immigrants have flowed northward as part of an organic expansion of the agricultural frontier. Internal migration within the Amazon responds to gold rushes and land grabs when roads are about to be improved, as well as job opportunities at large-scale infrastructure projects, such as industrial mines and hydropower plants. The most persistent trend is the flow of people from rural to urban communities. Immigrants have included entrepreneurs, professionals and cattle ranchers, but a much larger cohort has consisted of impoverished or marginalized families seeking economic opportunity. Migration was first stimulated by the construction of the Rodovia Belem-Brasília. Built between 1958 and 1960, this transportation corridor linked the new capital with the largest city in the Amazon and triggered the first land rush into the Legal Amazon. During this period, the state governments of Pará and Goiás commercialized millions of hectares of land to promote colonization and settlement by affluent and middle-class families. An even larger migratory flow occurred in the 1970s, however, when large-scale highway building led to the construction of the Rodovia Transamazônica (BR-175), the railway to the Carajás mining district (EF-315), and the trunk highway connecting the municipalities of Eastern Pará (BR-158). In the 2010 census, 725,000 residents of Pará listed their origin…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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