From communal agropastoral practices to the slaughterhouses in the Brazilian border line with Argentina: the significance of lard in settlers’ narratives (1930s–1960s)

This article addresses how, between the 1920s and 1960s, the Brazilian border line with Argentina, a territory then known as a ‘demographic vacuum’, received a considerable number of migrants from the neighbouring state of Rio Grande do Sul, with the intention of establishing an occupation through colonisation. Specifically, this paper explores how the settlers capitalised on an existing agricultural and pastoral production model to set up small butcher’s shops and establish a market based on lard that became integrated into other regions in the following decades. With the purpose of analysing the settlers’ narratives, this article draws on 24 interviews with meat traders in the Chapecó region, complementing and contrasting the information about the rise of slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants with secondary sources, such as newspapers, commemorative books and academic literature. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .