More Stories about Lives and Ideas

Keynote Lecture to the Conference “German Migrants and Migrating Knowledge in Latin American History.” The stream will begin promptly at 6 pm with a welcome and the introduction to the conference. The keynote lecture will start at 6:30pm.

Register to join on Zoom

Bom Retiro (Good Retreat) is a textile industry-dominated, immigrant—populated central São Paulo neighborhood of about 34,000 residents.  It is like immigrant neighborhoods throughout the Americas and had and has an outsized role in the creation of Brazilian health policies. Bom Retiro’s enduring centrality as a space of “Public Health” is the result of the Brazilian state’s long-term concern that disease was imported.  Anti-foreigner prejudices migrated to Brazil with German immigrants, including the many foreign trained physicians working in the city. Thus migrating knowledge included what today we would consider bigoted ideas about immigrants, including those from Central Europe.

Jeffrey Lesser is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research at Emory University.  He is the author of multiple prize-winning books including: Immigration, Ethnicity and National Identity in Brazil (Cambridge University /Editora UNESP); A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy (Duke University /Editora Paz e Terra); Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Duke University /Editora UNESP/Akashi Shoken); and Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (University of California /Imago/Tel Aviv University).  His current project, “Bad Health in a Good Retreat: Immigrants, the State, and the Built Environment in São Paulo, 1870-2020,”examines a multi-ethnic neighborhood using anthropological and historical methods.