Paulistas
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Paulistas are the inhabitants of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and of its antecessor the Capitaincy of São Vicente, whose capital early shifted from the village of São Vicente to the one of São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga.
The early population of São Paulo consisted mainly of Indians allied either to the Portuguese settlers or to the French, who had come in search of brazilwood and briefly undertook to settle as well. The Portuguese settlements were small, and the language used was the Língua Geral.
As the Bandeiras gained power and the vice-kingdom of Brazil developed, Portuguese surpassed the Língua Geral and the Portuguese element predominated in the population, the Indians being either absorbed or killed, or expelled inland to the remaining Reductions in Brazil or Paraguay. But the province of São Paulo, enlarged by the Bandeiras to include Mato Grosso, Goiás, Paraná and Santa Catarina, remained poor, having neither the gold of Minas Gerais nor the sugar cane of Pernambuco. As a consequence, it never received the same influx of black slaves as the more prosperous states of Brazil: these states would remain predominantly of European ancestry, whereas the populations of more prosperous states from Minas Gerais northward would come to have a higher proportion of inhabitants of African ancestry.
The economic development of São Paulo only really began to develop in earnest with the founding of coffee plantations in the nineteenth century, when the slave trade began its decline. Imperial policies were instituted which mandated that the population be increased through white immigration, and that the borders be secured in order to keep Brazil as European as possible. As a result São Paulo manned its plantations with European and, later, Japanese and Arab immigrants, who formed the backbone of Paulista enterpreneurship that currently distinguishes their state in Brazil. The main colonists were Italian, but Germans, Spaniards, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians and Armenians, among others, can also be found, as well as some US Southerners escaping from the US Civil War and the abolition of slavery in their native country.
As a curiosity, the influx of Italians was so big that at a period in the beginning of the 20th century the capital city of São Paulo had more Italian than Brazilian citizens, and the city developed a distinctively Italianised accent of Portuguese.