The article offers some thoughts on the political strategies devised by the São Paulo coffee producers to recruit the labor needed for the expansion of the coffee economy in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It discusses the presence of two groups that took part of that process: the European immigrants and the free citizens, in case, the escapes migrants of droughts which ravaged the hinterland Ceará.
migratory movements; coffee growing; labor; expropriation; labor market