Memórias de uma paisagem de fronteira: Fritz Plaumann e a colonização do oeste catarinense nas décadas de 1920 e 1930

Abstract

This work aims to understand the process of transformation of the landscape in the Western Border of Santa Catarina based on the memories of the immigrant of German origin and entomologista of great magnitude, Fritz Plaumann. To this end, we seek to analyze the uses, values, descriptions and perceptions of the landscape observed in the 1920s and 1930s, a period marked by the beginning of colonization. The region comprises the Uruguay River Basin, located specifically between the Irani and Ariranhazinha rivers, where the colonial nucleus of Nova Teutônia was established by the Colonization Company Luce & Rosa e Cia in 1922. The Plaumann family, after migrating from Germany to Brazil as a result of the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), arrived in the region in 1924. The immigrants who settled there began to practice hunting, fishing, agriculture and livestock farming for subsistence, producing a surplus for trade. The region, which consists mainly of the Deciduous Seasonal Forest, with fertile valleys, abundant water resources, a dense forest with a great diversity of animal and plant species and inhabited by indigenous and caboclo peoples, had its landscape contemplated in different ways by colonization. We used the theoretical and methodological framework of Environmental History, addressing environmental aspects of the region, the uses and modes of production practiced by colonization and, in a more subjective way, the perceptions produced about the landscape. We used the concept of landscape, understood as the overlapping of times and memories, formed by the physical world, as materiality, and by human perceptions, as culture. We used as sources the reports described in Fritz Plaumann's Diary, a set of photographs portrayed by Fritz Plaumann during the period covered by the research, pamphlets produced by the Colonization Companies and maps of different origins. It is clear that Fritz Plaumann was a person attentive to nature, concerned with environmental issues, developing studies in the area of entomology. In his memories, preserved in photographs and diary entries, he demonstrated the process of adaptation in a forest that required facing inhospitable fauna, dense vegetation and other climatic conditions, marked by the search for subsistence, in which nature needs to be overcome, but above all understood, making clear a preservationist perspective. In this landscape, Fritz Plaumann recorded the coexistence with traditional peoples and other colonizers of European origin. He highlighted the agricultural advance and the formation of infrastructure, with the opening of roads and the construction of houses, in which the forest gradually gives way to a rural landscape, with increasingly prominent human features.