Cecília Colony () was an experimental commune based on anarchist principles. The colony was founded in 1890, in the municipality of Palmeira, in the state of Paraná, by a group of libertarians mobilized by the Italian writer and agronomist Giovanni Rossi.
The foundation of Cecília Colony was the first effective attempt to implement anarchism in Brazil. Rossi, an anarchist writer, was instigated by the Brazilian musician Carlos Gomes to seek audience with Pedro II for the purpose of establishing a libertarian community capable of propelling a "new time".
Interested in the colonization of Brazil, Pedro II met the request and wrote Rossi offering lands in the Southern Region to be occupied by Italians. But this donation, in fact, did not happen: shortly after their supply by the emperor, the Brazilian Republic was established, which did not recognize land concessions granted to foreigners by the deposed Empire. Instead, Rossi had to buy the land through the "inspector of land and colonization."
Brazil received a lot of immigrants, mainly Italians, at the end of the nineteenth century. The living conditions in the countryside which caused emigration from Italy was not very different in Brazil, both in coffee farms and colonial nuclei, being distant from an innovative process: the immigrant was inserted into Brazil as a potential proletarian. It was in this social environment that anarchism spread in Brazil.
Life in the colony
The first settlers arrived in 1890 and built a collective shed that families were provisionally installed into, before each one dealt with building their own home. At that time, the population contingent in Cecília Colony was almost three hundred people, including Rossi himself. At the end of 1891, the population explosion surpassed the available structure: 20 wooden houses and a community shed. The crops and livestock did not produce enough for the subsistence of settlers, a large part of whom were industrial workers without agricultural knowledge to implement a larger scale production.
The first obstacle faced by the anarchist nucleus was the way to organize the work. Tasks were designated to the artisans that were similar to those which they already practiced. But as to the farmers, Giovanni Rossi had already had sensed that they would find difficulties because of the difference between the Brazilian soil and the Italian.
In concluding the construction of collective and individual dwellings and rationally divided work among the 150 colonists, they encountered a real fact: maize, which was ideal for that region, is not born from day to night. With the money they brought, they managed to subsist, to buy groceries, instruments and seeds for the farming. However, they were forced to look for other activities for them to sustain their livelihood until they could live only from their crop. Some occupied the plantation while others worked in government works.
The settlers planted more than eighty alqueires of land - in the area provided to them by Emperor Pedro II, shortly before the proclamation of the Republic - and built more than ten kilometers of road, at a time in which there were no machines, tractors or transport cranes.
In addition to the large corn plantation, they built a collective shed, twenty individual sheds, barns, a Fubá Mill, a fish tank, the collective pavilion - which also housed the doctor's office - a nursery of seedlings, wells, ditches, a pear orchard and stables.
In the four years of existence of the colony (1890-1894), its population reached about 250 people. Two polyamorous relations were held. Rossi himself proposed as a concrete example of the new lifestyle, sharing with another man his love for a woman in the colony.
In 1892, the first setback occurred in the colony: seven families decided on returning to Italy - the first breakdown that, followed by others, reduced the colony to only twenty people until the end of that same year. Many settlers, which included doctors, engineers, teachers, intellectuals and workers, as well as peasants, then started to migrate to Curitiba, where they founded the Giuseppe Garibaldi Society.
The following year, the colony received the arrival of new settlers. In this period, the manufacture of shoes and wine barrels began. At the end of this year, the colony counted sixty-four people, two artesian wells and an access road. It was also during this period that the cobblers from the colony promoted a prominent role in the operating movement of Paraná.