times would not return, more and more resources were directed towards commercial plantations (sugar cane farms were established but had a tough time competing with the large farms of the country’s Northeast). Besides being able to choose to cultivate the products that would be most accepted by the consumer markets, Minas had the extra advantage of having created, over the decades, channels of distribution within several parts of Brazil (two luxuries that the monocultures which predominated along the coast did not have). By the middle of the nineteenth century, Minas was again one of the most important provinces of Brazil, as it had been during the boom times of gold mining; at this same time, a new product gave an extra boost to the economy and also helped the state gain political relevance: coffee. During the Empire years, the Brazilian economy was very dependent on coffee. Minas Gerais had large areas of fertile land in the south, across the border from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where the coffee plant was first introduced. Plenty of people with capital to invest were looking for an alternative to gold; these factors combined caused coffee to thrive in Minas. Like other states where coffee was successful, farmers in Minas struggled to find skilled manpower to work the coffee plantations. The government of Minas tried to create colonies of Germans (near Juiz de Fora), Italians (near São João del Rei) and others, but most Europeans were better able to adapt to the cooler climates of southern Brazil, which were closer to the climates of their native countries. Today, a major influence from the region’s Portuguese settlers on the culture of Minas can be discerned, as well as a lesser influence from the immigrants who came later. Minas is still seen in Brazil as a conservative state; several religious (especially Catholic) traditions are maintained in the smaller cities; and the figure of the mineirinho, the naive-looking hillbilly who turns out to be smarter than the smart guys, is recurrent in Brazilian jokes and anecdotes. When Brazil became a Republic in 1889, Minas Gerais was the most-populated province. The old provincial capital, Ouro Preto, no longer had the importance it had maintained during the golden times. A new capital, Belo Horizonte (Portuguese for “beautiful horizon”), was planned and inaugurated in 1901. Because of the economic power brought by coffee and cattle, Minas Gerais and São Paulo were the two states that dominated the Brazilian political scene in the first decades of the 1900s. Between the founding of the Republic and 1926, Afonso Pena, Venceslau Brás, Delfim Moreira, and Artur Bernardes were the mineiros (an adjective that simply means “from Minas”) politicians who became Presidents of the Republic. In the early 1900s, the state’s huge iron reserves began attracting increasing attention from international capi-
Vista aérea da Praça Raul Soares (Aerial view of Raul Soares Square), 1956 by Câncio de Oliveira Museu Histórico Abílio Barreto, Fundação Municipal de Cultura
talists, and the Itabira Iron Ore Company, with British capital, was the first to be granted a charter in 1910; in 1918, an
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