Brazil Archives - Page 2 of 3

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

Introduced and compiled by Edward Shore

Brazilian researchers have described the fire that consumed the National Museum of Brazil on September 2, 2018 as a “tragédia anunciada” an anticipated tragedy. This week, Not Even Past caught up with historians who have visited and conducted research there. They shared memories of their experiences and explained what this immeasurable loss means to scholars of Brazil. If you would like to add your own thoughts and memories, please go to our Facebook page and leave them there.

Brazil’s National Museum in flames (Foto: Folha)

King João VI of Portugal established the Royal Museum, Brazil’s first scientific research institution, on June 6, 1818, while living in exile in Rio de Janeiro. Located on the grounds of one of Rio’s most iconic parks, the Quinta da Boa Vista, the Royal Museum sheltered botanical and animal specimens from Brazil, particularly tropical birds. European naturalists, including Johann Baptist von Spix, Carl Friedrich Philip von Martius, and Augustin Saint-Hilaire, flocked to the Royal Museum during the 1820s to conduct research and contribute additional specimens to the museum’s growing collection. Brazilian Emperor Pedro II renamed the facility the National Museum and promoted investment in the areas of anthropology, paleontology, and archaeology. By the turn of the twentieth century, Brazil’s National Museum had emerged as one of the largest anthropological and natural history museums in the Americas. Its collection grew to more than 20 million items. These included Luiza, a 12,000-year old skeleton of a Paleo-Indian woman, the oldest in the Americas, and the Bendegó meteorite, discovered in 1784 by a farm boy searching for a lost cow in the arid hinterlands of Bahia. Despite the National Museum’s importance, celebrations marking the bicentenary of its founding were subdued.

The National Museum of Brazil before the fire.

“Brazil does not recognize the museum’s greatness,” National Museum Director Alexander Kellner told the Brazilian newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, in May. “If it did, the country would not have left it like this.”

By 2018, the National Museum had been falling into disrepair for decades. In May 2018, Brazilian reporter Marco Aurélio Canônico observed termite-infested walls, leaky ceilings, and loose electrical wires. Its precarious condition was exacerbated by the Temer government’s austerity measures, which include a twenty-year cap on federal spending. Brazil’s national universities, archives, and museums were among the casualties. The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), which has managed the National Museum since 1946, experienced a nearly 30 percent reduction in its operating budget over the past five years. In 2013, the National Museum’s budget was $R 531,000 (approximately $132,000 USD). In 2018, that figure dropped to $R 54,000 ($13,500), an amount less than a single graduate student fellowship in the UT Austin History Department. Budget cuts forced the museum to close a third of its collections to the public. This past April, the museum launched an online funding campaign to raise $R 50,000 to reopen a popular wing featuring a skeleton of the Maxakalisaurus, the largest dinosaur discovered in Brazil. As the National Museum’s spending declined, so did its visitors. Last year, more Brazilians visited the Louvre than the National Museum.

The writing was on the wall. In the aftermath of a fire that destroyed São Paulo’s Museum of the Portuguese Language in 2015, the National Museum’s leadership pressed for funding to install a sprinkler system — but to no avail. As a result, 90% of the National Museum’s collections perished in the flames, including Amerindian artifacts and audio recordings of indigenous languages, some of which are no longer spoken.

Seth Garfield, Professor of History, UT Austin

After the catastrophic fire at Brazilian National Museum, I sent an email to a colleague there to express my condolences and solidarity. I had first met him when I was a graduate student in the early 1990s conducting my field research on the history of Brazilian government policy towards indigenous peoples. Like the other social anthropologists who teach at the Museum’s graduate program, his work is brilliant and had a tremendous influence on my own scholarship. He also showed great kindness towards a very junior scholar, pointing me to relevant readings, collections, and specialists. There is much to mourn about the priceless objects that were destroyed in the blaze, the architectural loss of an imperial palace, the devastating blow to Brazil’s historical patrimony. There is much to condemn about the flouting of fire codes, the deplorable state of funding for public institutions and services in Brazil, and the shocking political corruption that lies at the heart of the nation’s problems. Yet for me, as an academic, rather than a museum-goer, the institution’s researchers have always been the main event.

Aerial view of the damage to the National Museum of Brazil after a devastating fire on September 3, 2018 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It houses several landmark collections including Egyptian artifacts and the oldest human fossil found in Brazil. Its collection include more than 20 million items ranging from archaeological findings to historical memorabilia. (Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

Over the years, I visited the Museum on a number of occasions. I conducted research on the Xavante Indians in the anthropology library, which was totally gutted by the fire. I served on a dissertation committee, attended doctoral defenses, and gave a talk on multidisciplinary approaches to indigenous studies. I confess, I never much liked the trip: the wait at the bus stop always seemed long and the ride took over an hour. But once on the grounds of the stately old imperial palace, whose dilapidated pastel-colored walls only made the whole place feel even more historical, there was a sensation of being transported to another world. A place dedicated to the life of the mind, to the investigation of Brazil’s multicultural heritage and the empowerment of its underprivileged populations. This was a place that the professors, graduate students, and staff gave life to, just as their predecessors had filled its halls and cabinets with fossils, gems, and antiquities.

This undated handout photo provided by Brazil’s National Museum shows a specimen of the Macrodontia cervicornis beetle, at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. The long-horned beetle, an endangered species, can exceed 6 inches in length. (Museu Nacional Brasil via AP)

Now it’s a place where the heart cries out, because it is broken. The automated response from my Brazilian colleague — the kind that usually announces the recipient is on vacation and will only be checking email sporadically — read: “My institution burned in its entirety. All my personal material of 33 years of work in the same institution burned in full. I ask colleagues and institutions to understand that, under many challenges, my colleagues and I try to take care of things. It is not always possible. Thanks for the comprehension.” A lifetime of intellectual pursuit cut down, truncated into a few sentences. The macabre becomes the mundane. A half hour later, however, he sent me a personal message. It read: “The situation is devastating. But we are also all committed to building another Museum. We will need all the solidarity possible.”

Vivian Flanzer, Senior Lecturer, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UT Austin

Like all Brazilians who learned about the terrible loss caused by the fire at National Museum last evening, I am absolutely devastated. But as an alumna from this institution, this loss feels also very personal. It was at the graduate program in social anthropology where I became trained by leading academics in the field. It was also there that I made life-long friends, to whom I reached out last night.

Being a student at the National Museum was a unique experience. I don’t know of many institutions in which, to reach the classroom, one has to climb up a steep hill with magnificent gardens and enter the majestic building that once was the emperor’s residence and housed important ethnological collections. I have so many fond memories. There was the time when I was taking the entrance exam for the graduate program and left the room to find the restroom. I got lost inside the museum and found myself all alone in a huge room full of mummies. It took me a good 20 minutes and many dinosaurs later to find my way back to the exam room. In the internal courtyard, a beautiful red macaw greeted us when classes were over. There were the intellectually rigorous courses that I took with brilliant scholars, and the amazing library where I did so much research for my graduate work.

Maxikalisaurus topai (Wikimedia)

My thesis from National Museum looked at the power of collective memory. Using concepts from the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, I showed how a community that was largely exterminated by the Nazis became reconstituted in Brazil through the memories and the stories told by their surviving members. I benefited in my training from the finest minds in the Brazilian academia, including João Pacheco de Oliveira, Lygia Sigaud, and Yonne Leite. Now the National Museum is in ashes and I am part of the surviving community telling my story and the stories of others. Hopefully, through our joined forces the National Museum will make history again.

David Ribeiro, PhD student in History, Universidade de São Paulo
(translated by Edward Shore)

“I have to dedicate my professional life to the study of history, museology, and the study of African, Afro-Brazilian, and indigenous cultures. In the wake of what happened at the Museu Nacional, many possibilities for building knowledge about ourselves and the historical experiences of peoples who were and continue to be marginalized vanished overnight. Thousands of items and decades of work turned to ashes. I only visited once, in 2010, the year I started working at the Afro-Brazilian Museum, and I remember perfectly the impact that these two museums had on me. I remember the richness of these collections, but also how neglected they were, too. Rio de Janeiro, with its emblematic museums, such as the Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of the Republic, is the same city in which valorizes culture only when it is profitable or only when there are possibilities for gentrification. One notices the splendor of the newly constructed Museum of Tomorrow, built to attract visitors during the World Cup, and the decadence of the historic Valongo Pier, just blocks away. University museums, especially those linked to scientific production, education, and cultural heritage are ignored. These are examples of choices made by civil society and by politicians, to whom investment in science, education, technology, and innovation is an onerous expense.

This undated handout photo provided by Brazil’s National Museum shows wooden masks from the Aweti, Waura and Mehinaku indigenous groups, at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. (Museu Nacional Brasil via AP)

We see and experience the consequences of the lack of the public investment in health, education, and public safety every day. Culture, which is almost always neglected by our politicians, and which receives little to no attention from the elites, is only remembered when a tragedy occurs. There are a number of cases like this over the past few years. And this will probably not be the last.

As disheartening as it may be, we must press on. The work is overwhelming, our resources are few, and our goals may not be reached for several generations—and this is made worse by the fact the Temer government has instituted a 20-year freeze on public spending—but there is no alternative but to continue. I persist, in history, museology, anthropology and in other fields, working so that this country might understand the deep need to value its greatest good: its different ways of being and existing, of relating, doing, and producing what we call “culture.”

Regina Duarte, Professor of History, The Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
(translated by Edward Shore)

In his book, Biology in Brazil (1938), the zoologist Cândido Firmino de Mello Leitão recalled his experience reading a manuscript by Louis Agassiz, stored in the archives of the National Museum. Agassiz was lamenting the precarious condition of the National Museum that he found when he had visited Brazil during the 1860s. In the margins of this text, Mello Leitão found a note written in pencil at the end of the nineteenth century and signed by the ornithologist, Emilio Goeldi: “still today, the same thing.” Gripping the book in his hands, Mello Leitão was devastated by the difficulties the Museum had faced, despite the dedication of the many scientists who worked there. He resisted the urge to add his own commentary in the margins of the book: “still today the same thing.”

Mello Leitão was one of the scientists whom I researched for my book, Activist Biology: The National Museum, Politics, and Nation Building in Brazil, published in 2016 by University of Arizona Press. I conducted my research at SEMEAR, a rich historical archive based in the National Museum. The tragedy that struck the National Museum is so great that we cannot even repeat what Agassiz, Goeldi, and Mello Leitão had written almost a century ago. Collections, books, and documents were simply devoured by fire. The efforts undertaken by countless men and women for the advancement of science now seem to be reduced to ashes. It is an irreparable loss for Brazil, for scientists all over the world, and for all those who experienced the joy of visiting the National Museum.

Edward Shore received his PhD in History at UT Austin in 2018. His dissertation is entitled “Avengers of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil.” He is currently Lecturer/CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in Latin American and Latina/o Studies at UT Austin.

Cuba’s Revolutionary World

By Jonathan C. Brown

On January 2, 1959, Fidel Castro, the rebel comandante who had just overthrown Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, addressed a crowd of jubilant supporters. Recalling the failed popular uprisings of past decades, Castro assured them that this time “the real Revolution” had arrived. Castro’s words proved prophetic not only for his countrymen but for Latin America and the wider world.

Fidel Castro announcing the arrival of “the real revolution,” 1959.

The political turmoil that rocked a small Caribbean nation in the 1950s became one of the twentieth century’s most transformative events. Initially, Castro’s revolution augured well for democratic reform movements then gaining traction in Latin America. But what had begun promisingly veered off course as Castro took a heavy hand in efforts to centralize Cuba’s economy and stamp out private enterprise. Embracing the Soviet Union as an ally, Castro and his lieutenants, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro, sought to export the socialist revolution abroad through armed insurrection. Chairman Khrushchev’s early support aided the Cuban revolutionaries in defeating of the CIA invasion of Cuban émigré fighters at the Bay of Pigs. However, he subsequently lost his job over the 1962 Missile Crisis that pushed the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

By the end of the 1960s, rural and urban uprisings linked to the Cuban Revolution had spilled over from Central America into the bigger countries of South America. Revolutionary groups whose leaders had trained in Havana were operating in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. Most of the rural and urban guerrillas may not have traveled to Cuba. Yet they certainly followed Fidel’s “anti-imperialist” example. Che himself attempted to spread the revolution to Bolivia, where he died. Other rebel groups with names such as the Tupamaros and Montoneros and still others with initials like FALN, ELN, and MIR defined the 1960s as the age of student unrest.

Castro’s provocations inspired intense opposition. Cuban anti-communists who had fled to Miami found a patron in the CIA, which actively supported their efforts to topple Castro’s regime. American presidents supported anti-communist forces that often utilized disproportionate violence against pro-Cuban dissidence in their own countries. The insurrections fomented by leftist guerrillas lent support to Latin America’s military castes, who promised to restore stability. Brazil was the first to succumb to a coup in 1964. A decade later, juntas of generals governed most Spanish and Portuguese-speaking nations of the Western Hemisphere. Rightwing terror claimed increasing numbers of casualties into the 1980s. Thus did a revolution that had seemed to signal the death knell of dictatorship in Latin America produce its tragic opposite.

Latin America’s military establishments especially came to oppose revolution because they learned what had happened to the Cuban army that failed to defeat Castro’s guerrilla rebellion. Revolutionary firing squads killed hundreds of military and police officers when the Batista dictatorship fell. Consequently, Che Guevara’s travels in Latin America proved especially toxic. President Jânio Quadros of Brazil resigned one week after presenting Guevara with a medal and Argentina’s army generals deposed President Arturo Frondizi several months after he “secretly” met with El Che.

Omar Torrijos and Fidel Castro in 1976

However, it is instructive that two generals who performed coups d’état in 1968 took advantage of the nationalist feelings of peasants and workers to establish pro-Cuban juntas. Generals Juan Velasco of Peru and Omar Torrijos of Panama ousted elected governments in order to implement overdue social reforms. Many countries of Latin America followed the Brazilian example of establishing long-term counterrevolutionary military dictatorships. Brazil’s generals governed for twenty-one years.

The Cold War that Cuba introduced to Latin America affected the lives of countless ordinary citizens. Humberto Sorí Marín, the revolution’s first agriculture minister. opposed the turn toward communism, resigned, and fled to Miami, only to return with a cache of weapons for an uprising against Castro. He died before a firing squad. There was also Osvaldo Ramírez, the bandit king of the Escambray Mountains who led a widespread guerrilla rebellion against Castro’s rule until militia troops shot and killed him in battle. His anti-communist guerrilla successors endured within Cuba until 1965.

Cuban militiamen capture an anti-Castro guerilla fighter, c. 1962.

Antonio “Tony” Zamora was one Castro opponent who survived. He aspired to study law but left Cuba in 1960 to join the brigade of exiled Cuban youths who landed at the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy ransomed Zamora and his fellow prisoners following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tony became a lawyer in Miami and went on to advocate greater dialog with the Castro regime as the Cuban Revolution approached its fiftieth anniversary.

Cuba’s revolution attracted youthful visitors from all over Latin America who wished to learn how they too might become armed revolutionaries. Julio García left the University of Buenos Aires to learn how to fight as a guerrilla in 1962. However, he and several other Argentineans quit the camps after training became too rigorous for them. Venezuelans like Luben Petkoff did finish Cuban guerrilla training. Luben engaged in combat for nearly ten years only to give up finally with a pardon from one of the few democracies that survived the 1960s.

Venezuelan Leftist Guerillas

Women too became involved in the turmoil. The guerrilla Tania gave up her life for the revolution, this one in Bolivia. Tania’s real name was Tamara Bunke Bider, an Argentinean-born East German who first met Che Guevara as a government translator in East Berlin. She immigrated to Cuba in the early 1960s and eventually became Che’s spy in La Paz, Bolivia. Tania campaigned with Guevara’s last guerrilla group in 1967 and suffered the fate of most of his followers.

Student rioters in Córdoba, Argentina, 1969

Argentina’s Norma Arrostita visited Havana in 1967 to attend a conference of armed leftists from all over Latin America. When she returned to Buenos Aires, Norma acted as the lookout for the kidnapping and killing of a former general who once served as Argentina’s president. A founding member of the urban guerrilla group known as the Montoneros, Arrostita later “disappeared” in a military prison like thousands of other suspected radicals.

As Mao used to say, “The revolution is not a dinner party.” Fidel Castro provided the corollary. “But the counterrevolution” he said, “is always more cruel.”

Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (2017)

For more on twentieth-century Latin American revolutions, try these:

Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (1978).
The foundational text for any serious study of Cuba’s three revolutions in the modern age: the Wars of Independence, the 1933 Revolution and rise of Fulgencio Batista, and the 1959 Revolution of Fidel Castro and his many associates.

Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (1997).
A fascinating account of Havana-Moscow relations culminating in the October Missile Crisis of 1962. The authors had access to Soviet and US document collections but only a few Cuban ones, which are generally not available to researchers. The title derives from a statement by President Kennedy during a White House discussion about Premier Khrushchev’s possible motivations for placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Jan Lust, Lucha revolucionaria: Perú, 1958-1967 (2013).
The most thorough study of a guerrilla movement in any country of Latin America during the 1960s. The author interviewed survivors and collected detailed information on leaders and fighters from a variety of sources.

Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (2014).
An important study of the student movements of one important country in South America during an age of youthful protests and cultural change wrought by national political turmoil and military interventions. The book covers the period from the 1955 overthrow of Juan Perón to the 1976 coup d’état that preceded the last military dictatorship of the country.

Getz/Gilberto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

by Edward Shore

“I’m not a sociologist but it was a time when people in the States wanted to turn to something other than their troubles,” Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto mused in 1996. “There was a feeling of dissatisfaction, possibly the hint of war to come, and people needed some romance, something dreamy for distraction.” This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of 1964’s Getz/Gilberto, the triumphant collaboration between North American jazz saxophonist Stanley Getz (1927-1991), Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto (b. 1931), his then-wife, Astrud Gilberto (b. 1940), and their friend and compatriot, the composer Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim (1927-1994).

Getz/Gilberto was not North America’s first encounter with bossa nova, the lyrical fusion of samba and cool jazz emanating from the smoky nightclubs, recording studios, and performance halls of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1950s. Yet the eight-track LP was by far the most successful. Propelled by the genre-defining single, “The Girl From Ipanema,” Getz/Gilberto spent ninety-six weeks on the charts and won four Grammy awards, including Best Album of the Year in 1965. Other tracks, including “Para Machucar Meu Coração,” “Desafinado,” and “Corcovado/Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars,” also became jazz standards. “Americans are generally not very curious about the styles of other countries,” Astrud Gilberto insisted. “But our music was Brazilian music in a modern form. It was very pretty and it was exceptional for managing to infiltrate America’s musical culture.”

What explains Americans’ love affair with bossa nova in the winter of 1964? Part of the answer lies in the power of popular music to relieve a broken heart. Critics associated Getz/Gilberto’s cool, sophisticated sound with the Kennedy White House, where music, high fashion, and glamorous parties had been hallmarks of “Camelot” on Pennsylvania Avenue during the early 1960s. Perhaps audiences sought to recapture a bit of the mystique that had vanished when President Kennedy was slain in Dallas, Texas, only five months before the record’s release.

For jazz critic Howard Mandel, Getz/Gilberto was like “another tonic for the assassination’s disruption, akin for adults to the salve upbeat the Beatles had provided for teenagers’ after their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.” Gilberto’s hushed vocals and understated guitar, Jobim’s gentle piano, and Getz’s lush saxophone transported weary listeners to a sun soaked, tropical paradise light years removed from the turmoil confronting the United States in the winter of 1964.

Yet the Brazil of North American fantasy–languid, exotic, and serene–contrasted sharply with reality. By late 1963, the United States had declared Brazil a “trouble spot” in its hemispheric crusade against communism. Traditional elites and U.S. Cold Warriors opposed Brazilian President João “Jango” Goulart and his center-left agenda, which extended voting rights to illiterates, taxed foreign corporations, and introduced land reform. Meanwhile, peasant agitation in the Brazilian Northeast, the fulcrum of the global sugar trade, deepened the anxieties of U.S. policymakers who feared that Latin America’s largest economy might soon follow in Cuba’s footsteps. In March 1964, the Lyndon Johnson administration and the Brazilian military secretly began plotting Goulart’s overthrow.

While “The Girl from Ipanema” climbed to the top of the Billboard charts, U.S. warships penetrated Brazilian waters to support a military coup d’état on April 1, 1964, terminating the country’s brief flirtation with social reform. The United States had once again intervened in Latin America to preserve an illusion of tropical tranquility that existed only in the imaginations of ruling elites, intelligence agencies, and North American consumers. The military dictators who succeeded Jango and controlled Brazil for the next two decades understood the uses of music just as well and embraced bossa nova for its commercial appeal, apolitical subject matter, and potential to smooth over the nation’s deep-seated socio-political divisions.

Yet the marriage between bossa nova and the dictatorship was not to last. A younger generation of Brazilian artists, including Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, Rita Lee, and Tom Zé, fused elements of bossa nova with rock n’roll, psychedelia, experimental theatre, and Brazilian folk music into the colorful, exuberant countercultural movement known as Tropicália. Gone was the “tall, tan, young, and lovely” morena of Ipanema Beach. By 1968, the regime’s censors raced to cleanse Brazilian popular music of anti-establishment themes, even forcing Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, two of the country’s most visible stars, into exile in the United Kingdom. The coup government ultimately turned its back on bossa nova, too. In 1969, the regime sacked Vinícius de Moraes from his post in the Foreign Ministry after the legendary composer, playwright, and original author of “The Girl from Ipanema” criticized the dictatorship’s restraints on artistic freedom.

Popular interest in bossa nova continued to wane over the course of the 1970s. Outraged by U.S. sponsorship of the military regime, Brazilian musicians distanced themselves from a style that enjoyed intimate ties to the “giant from the North.” A blend of rock, samba, and jazz known as MPB, or “música popular brasileira,”eclipsed bossa nova as Brazil’s national sound. MPB artists like Chico Buarque, Jorge Ben, and Novos Baianos camouflaged criticisms of government repression, social injustice, and imperialism with irresistible melodies, appealing to a growing audience of middle-class youth. Meanwhile, in the slums and favelas of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador, a young generation of Afro-Brazilians challenged the nation’s vaunted reputation as a “racial democracy,” while embracing cultural symbols of Black Power and the African Diaspora, including soul, funk, and reggae. Amid this rising tide of popular protest against the regime, bossa nova, with its dreamy, cool detachment, appeared painfully at odds with the struggles of ordinary Brazilians.

Still, the genre remains a major force in Brazilian pop culture and “world” music. The millions of tourists who visit Rio de Janeiro every year arrive at an airport named after Tom Jobim. Inevitably, more than a few vacationers board their flights home in “Girl from Ipanema” t-shirts purchased at the airport gift shop. Bossa nova also experienced a brief resurgence in the mid-1990s. Red Hot+Rio, a compilation album produced by the AIDS-awareness organization Red Hot in 1996, paid tribute to the musical career of Tom Jobim and featured covers by artists including Sting, Astrud Gilberto, and David Byrne. Today, pop stars like Marisa Monte, Celso Fonseca, and Uruguay’s Jorge Drexler refashion bossa nova sounds for contemporary audiences. And what about the song that made bossa nova an international sensation? “The Girl From Ipanema” currently ranks as the second-most-recorded pop song of all time, after the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Amid the pageantry surrounding the upcoming FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, look for “The Girl From Ipanema” to sway gently back into the spotlight.

Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto perform “The Girl From Ipanema” in 1964:

Hear more Bossa Nova:

João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim in a 1992 live concert

Elis Regina and Tom Jobim performing “Aguas de Março” in 1974

Astrud Gilberto’s comments can be found in “Interview with Astrud Gilberto,” by Howard Mandel, Verve Records, Re-issue of Getz/Gilberto, 1996, liner notes.

Howard Mandel’s comments come from correspondence with the author, January 2014. A special thanks to him from the author.

Photo Credits:

1964 LP cover of Getz/Gilberto (Image courtesy of Verve Records)

Creed Taylor, Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, João Gilberto and Stan Getz recording together (Image courtesy of last.fm)

Brazilians marching against the country’s military dictatorship, 1964 (Image courtesy of Mount Holyoke College)

Musical team on Getz/Gilberto: (from left) Stan Getz, Milton Banana, Tom Creed Taylor, João Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto (Image courtesy of last.fm)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

The Cross-Cultural Exchange of Atlantic Slavery

by Samantha Rubino

An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World by Mariana Candido (2013)

Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferriera (2012)

The Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas connected merchants, Portuguese colonists, convicts, and slaves in cultural and economic relationships, reconfiguring the space of the southern Atlantic. The work of Mariana Candido and Roquinaldo Ferriera shows how creolization and the economic prosperity created by the slave trade was a two-way street.

In An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World, Mariana Candido traces development of Benguela (in today’s Angola) from the first Portuguese expedition in 15^th century until the mid-nineteenth century. She studies colonial documents, reports, official letters, censuses, export data, parish records, official chronicles, and oral traditions collected by missionaries and anthropologists. Candido stresses the role of the local population in the Atlantic slave trade. As the demand for slaves increased in Brazil, local interactions with Portuguese officials led to a constant reconfiguration of identity and community in the port city, based on political alliances and economic preservation. Political and social instability of the hinterlands in part led to the exponential growth of the slave trade, displaying the reverberating aspects of the slave trade within the Atlantic realm. Additionally, women played a major role in the development of the slave society within Africa. Mixed marriages became the rule, and African women seized on the chance to apprehend cultural practices and a space of power. These donas controlled a large number of dependents, widows or singles, and became involved in local business, investing in the slave trade after the deaths of foreign husbands. In this regard, Candido shows slavery as a process of negotiation, adaptation, invention, and transformation rather than complete annihilation of African communities.

Candido also argues that creolization was a social-cultural transformation rather merely than an incorporation and assimilation of Western values. Luso-Africans and colonial officials spread Portuguese customs and Catholicism beyond the littoral, accelerating creolization away from coast. Colonial outposts, such as Caconda, attracted people with cultural exchange and the elaboration of new codes transforming cultural diets and colonial institutions. African religion and cosmology remained strong in the hinterland and on the coast in Benguela because they offered explanations and solutions to everyday problems that Catholicism could not address. Additionally, local languages were extremely important to the construct of a slave society. Despite colonial laws against its use, the army, commerce transactions, and the church in the hinterlands used these languages.

Similarly, Roquinaldo Ferriera focuses on the bilateral connections between the Portuguese colonies of Brazil and Angola in Cross Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World. Through the lens of micro histories, Ferriera pushes back from the macro structural approach to the slave trade to examine the personal trials endured by Africans and their descendants. Throughout the text he suggests an argument similar to Candido’s, in which African institutions were transformed rather than unilaterally corrupted by the slave trade. For example, the use of the traditional African court systems (tribunal de mucano) displays the transformation of the court system and the fluid boundaries between freedom and enslavement in Angola. Additionally, the relationship between belief in the power of the supernatural and accusations of witchcraft as a form of entering into enslavement was employed by Luso-Africans and Portuguese officials alike. If an accused “witch” died, a number of the witch’s relatives were enslaved and sold. As Ferriera points out, the actual number of people enslaved through these accusations would be difficult to precisely enumerate, however, the connection between these accusations and commercial disputes was unmistakable. Moreover, such accusations provide insight into the commonalities between African and colonial officials’ worldviews. Thus, through the lens of micro history, Ferriera claims that Atlantic history is a pluralistic entity in which individuals created their own spaces without strict adherence to the Portuguese institutions.

These two historians transform the way we view the impact of the slave trade. By emphasizing the role of the African populace as well as the Portuguese in the flourishing slave trade, Mariana Candido and Roquinaldo Ferriera redistribute the economic and cultural burden of the Atlantic. Candido and Ferriera demonstrate the cultural exchange between the Portuguese and African, altering the way historians conceptualizes creolization and the formation of slave societies.

You may also like:

The story of Brazil’s most infamous slave rebellion

An environmental and labor history of Brazil’s sugar industry

Photo Credits:

Cross-section of a Brazilian slave ship, taken from “Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829” (1830) by Robert Walsh (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Portuguese officials meet with the Manikongo, who ruled the African Kongo Kingdom (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A slave ship heading to Brazil, 1835 (Image courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

Recently arrived slaves in Brazil on their way to the farms of the landowners who bought them, 1830 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Seth Garfield on the Brazilian Amazon

At 2,700,000 square miles, the Amazon Basin is three-quarters the size of the continental United States, and a million square miles larger than all of Europe exclusive of Russia. Covering two-fifths of South America and three-fifths of Brazil, the Amazon Basin contains one-fifth of available fresh water in the world, one-third of evergreen broad-leaved forest resources, and one-tenth of the world’s living species. The Amazon river, the longest in the world (at 4,255 miles), has some 1,100 tributaries, seven of which are over 1,000 miles long.

And the Amazon’s forests, along with the adjacent Orinoco and Guyanas, represent over half the world’s surviving tropical rain forests. While contemporary accounts of the Amazon often begin by rattling off such statistics to provide readers with seemingly definitive answers, I raise them to make a fundamental point about the region. The Amazon is often imagined as a pristine, and increasingly endangered, realm of nature, but it should be seen as a region that has been constructed by public policies, social mediators, and cultural representations that operate at multiple scales: local, national, and global.

During World War II, the governments of Brazil and the United States made an unprecedented level of joint investment in the economy and infrastructure of the Amazon region. The dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45) trumpeted the colonization and development of the Amazon (christened the “March to the West”) as a nationalist imperative to defend a sparsely settled frontier covering some sixty percent of Brazilian territory. The Vargas regime subsidized labor migration and agricultural colonization, modernized river transportation, and rationalized rubber production in The Amazon. These fledgling efforts were given an unexpected boost when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and subsequently invaded the Malayan peninsula and Dutch East Indies, which deprived the United States of more than 92 percent of its rubber supply.

Unlike other types of tropical flora, rubber was indispensable for modern warfare, ensuring the mobility, speed, and efficiency critical for military defense. The United States, which consumed more rubber than the rest of the world combined in 1940, was dependent on Southeast Asian rubber sources, having failed to develop a synthetic rubber industry, or diversify its sources of natural rubber, or stockpile in preparation for emergencies. In 1942, Brazil agreed to sell its surplus rubber to the United States for a fixed rate for five years. The United States, in turn, invested millions of dollars in health and sanitation programs, public finance, and the relocation of tens of thousands of migrant workers from Northeastern Brazil to tap rubber in the Amazon.

In the context of binational wartime mobilization, a host of new (or renewed) claimants on Amazonian resources and populations emerged. Agronomists, sanitarians, physicians, botanists, engineers, technicians, army officials, intellectuals, consumers, migrant workers, and the media all became involved in Amazonian development. As Earl Parker Hanson noted in 1944: “It is probable that the past two years have seen more actual exploration of the basin, more knowledge gained about its physical nature than have all the four centuries since that early conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, was the first white commander to traverse it.”

Despite wartime pronouncements exhorting the peoples of Brazil and the United States to join in battle against the Axis and the forest, the Amazon’s vast territory, varied natural resources, and charged ideological significance precluded any uniform ideas or policies. National interests and cultural biases often divided people despite shared professional backgrounds or technocratic mindsets that might have united select Brazilian and U.S. policy makers in their efforts to develop the Amazon. Headiness marked an economic boom, but rubber tappers and their bosses jousted over revenues and resources, while migrants pursued varied livelihoods in the region.

Today the landscape of the Amazon reflects the legacy of such wartime tensions and transformations. The creation of Brazilian banking and public health institutions, alongside the expansion of airfields and transportation infrastructure, heralded the postwar advance of capital markets and state consolidation in the region. Mass wartime migration from Northeastern Brazil contributed to the region’s rapid demographic growth and urban expansion. Forest populations’ maintenance of traditional patterns of extraction, slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, and fishing preserved tropical ecosystems and systems of local knowledge. And the U.S. development of a domestic synthetic rubber industry by 1944-45 redirected postwar foreign investment in the Amazon from the wild rubber trade to mineral extraction. The history of wartime Amazonia also illustrates the shifting appropriation of the region’s resources. The Amazon’s reincarnation as ecological sanctuary resulted not only from postwar deforestation, but the rise of a global environmental movement, the emergence of new fields of scientific inquiry, and the grass roots mobilization of forest dwellers.

By melding the concerns and approaches of environmental, diplomatic, labor, economic, and social history, we can see Amazonian landscapes and lifestyles as the products of ecological, material, and political forces that a competing set of social mediators brought to bear on the meanings and uses of nature. This little known chapter of World War II history illuminates the ways outsiders’ very understandings and representations of the nature of the Amazon have evolved over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Seth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region.

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

by Elizabeth O’Brien

There is a vast historiography on worker strikes and resistance to economic exploitation in Latin America and Brazil, yet most scholars disregard the environmental backdrop to struggles over land, labor, and resources. Aiming to fill this lacuna, The Deepest Wounds is a combination of labor and environmental histories, and it has elements of commodity-chain and literary analysis as well. Examining over four centuries of sugar production in Pernambuco, Brazil, Thomas Rogers demonstrates that sugar monocropping not only changed the environment, it also altered the nature of politics, social dynamics, and labor mobilization in the region. Above all, Rogers claims that the exploitation of nature and labor shaped the power dynamics that harmed workers and damaged the land itself.

Rogers claims that discourses of landscape underscored the transition from slavery to a new paradigm that relied on old logic: the planter class still saw the landscape and the workers as objects to be controlled. Pointing to literature for evidence, Rogers proposes that novelist Joaquim Nabuco’s nostalgia for a landscape actually represented his longing for the paternalistic racism of slavery. José Lins de Rego and Gilberto Freyre, on the other hand, protested the havoc that cane monoculture wrought on humans and nature alike. Workers, for their part, allegedly used a language of captivity to describe post-slavery social conditions, and, by highlighting worker poverty and lack of opportunity, Rogers points to the persistence of slave-like exploitation throughout the twentieth-century.

Rogers chronicles the development of usinas (sugar mills), which grew immensely between the mid-1930s and the 1950s. Powerful families still controlled the mills, but centralization and modernization occurred under the Vargas regime. For example, the use of fertilizer in the 1940s led one producer to increase sugar output by 220% in just a decade and a half. The establishment of the Institute of Sugar and Alcohol (IAA sparked economic and labor reforms. Yet rationalization was patchy in these decades and worker-patron relations still functioned as patronage. By paying close attention to agricultural processes, Rogers shows that modernization altered systems of work without eliminating oppression. Agrarian reform laws, for example, required bosses to pay workers by the task instead of by the day. Patrons manipulated this system so that it did not result in higher wages: instead, workers labored in tasks for longer periods of time.

Many laborers resisted abuse and exploitation, and their struggles evoked solidarity from union organizers, communists, and Church groups. Overt politicization of the sugar fields began in the 1940s, and the first rural union emerged in 1946. Communist leaders organized a conference of rural workers in 1954. Shortly thereafter, 550 “suspected militants” were arrested and the regional committee collapsed. Peasant leagues soon spread throughout the region, and the Sociedade Agro-Pecuária de Pernambuco (SAAP) gained particular prominence. Governor Sampaio selectively acquiesced to union demands, eventually distributing land to members of the peasant league. Not surprisingly, some mill-owners resented the mobilizations and retaliated by shooting and killing union delegates. As a result of continued agitation and struggle, November 1963 saw the biggest strike in Brazil’s rural history: an estimated 90% of the region’s workers (200,000 people) halted production in order to protest abuses in the cane fields.

By focusing on environmental history, Rogers shows that the 1960s was an important decade for additional reasons. Scientists and mill owners introduced CO 331, a strain of sugar cane known as 3X, with the goal of increasing cane output. By 1963, mill owners were mono-cropping the strain, and 3X accounted for about 80% of state’s harvest. The per-hectare weight of yields rose, but the amount of sugar per ton of cane fell dramatically — by as much as 20 kilograms per ton between the mid-1950s and 1964. The combination of economic pressure and worker strikes weakened production, and enhanced state opportunities for intervention. Wielding the language of science and technocracy, the military regime stepped in to assert control over sugar production in 1964.

Under the military regime, agricultural workers experienced new forms of state control. The state issued identification cards designed to transform anonymous workers into “fichados,” or documented employees. Women often secured cards instead of working alongside men without their own proper wages. Characterizing worker incorporation into the state as proletarianization, Rogers points out that laborers could benefit from new legal channels and use them to challenge patrons. Nevertheless, oppressed and underpaid workers continued to organize strikes in order to protest labor abuses, and the state began to repress workers to a greater degree than before.

State incorporation did not free workers, and sugar cane production continued to pollute the environment and generate proletarian struggle.

Photo Credits:

A Brazilian worker harvests sugar cane (Image courtesy of Webzdarma.cz)

A mills worker in Moema, Brazil puts out fires in a sugar cane field. To reduce labor costs, the leaves of the plants are burned off prior to harvest (Image courtesy of the United Nations, Photo # 160780)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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Further Reading:

Eyal Weinberg writes about the Brazilian government’s efforts to promote “social peace” among the working class

And Darcy Rendón explores the origins of Brazil’s lottery, jogo do bicho

Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life by Amy Chazkel (2011)

by Darcy Rendon

Amy Chazkel’s Laws of Chance explores the rise of a cultural phenomenon that has engrossed the Brazilian imaginary since the turn of the twentieth century: the lottery game jogo do bicho. Its multifaceted analysis ties the “animal game” to the rise of urbanization, consumer capitalism, positivist criminology, and the cash economy in the First Republic (1889-1930). Chazkel focuses on the “gray area” between law criminalizing the popular practice and what actually happened to gambling Cariocas in the streets and in the courtroom. The close-to-the-ground view that she offers reveals that ineffectual criminalization—9 out of 10 cases ended in acquittal—forged a symbiotic relationship between state actors and city dwellers. She intervenes in the study of urban public life by showing that, like sumptuary laws, anti-vice laws were not premodern projects, as scholars have argued, but features central to the governing of cities and the growth of informal economies in Latin America.

Chazkel effectively weaves archival records, photographs, and charts to tell a larger story about bureaucratic efforts to control public spaces and retail economies in modernizing republican Brazil. The game began as a state-sanctioned daily drawing in 1892 to increase the revenue of Baron de Drummond’s zoo. By 1895, the game had “escaped the zoo” as bicheros and banqueiros operated unlicensed lotteries throughout the city that relied on the zoo’s winning animal and corresponding numbers. State officials responded by banning all games of chance in 1896 and inadvertently giving the game its paradoxical status as a criminal offense and widespread cultural phenomenon. The author principally shows that gambling was not only subject to regulation because of its perceived moral degeneracy, but because its revenue fell outside of the state’s purview. These ill-gotten gains flouted the system of concessions the state crafted to control the consumer economy while maintaining a laissez-faire façade.

Chazkel also examines the ways formal legislative codes were redefined in popular legal customs to show how the criminal justice system used the law to repress the growing network of clandestine games in Rio de Janeiro. The fact that the courts acquitted the majority of defendants reveals that judges had great discretionary powers when it came to interpreting the law.

João Batista, the zoo keeper who created jogo do bicho (Image courtesy of Coisas de Florani)

Furthermore, courtroom testimonies expose the law as a pliant tool in the hands of police officers, who used it to line their own pockets and empower themselves through illegal policing methods such as intimidation, blackmail, and the fabrication of evidence. In practice, the legal code meant to suppress games of chance informally taxed them as court fees and fines filled the state’s coffers. The eclectic code also ensured that the game would survive as an extralegal and entrepreneurial aspect of the police profession. Those who suffered in both cases were the ones who, according to Chazkel, could have benefited the most from games of chance: the working poor.

The streets of Rio de Janeiro, ca 1909-1919 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

But the informal lottery became a salient feature of urban street commerce. The monetization of Rio’s financial markets trickled down to the laboring classes, as they developed the need to handle currency, and fueled the expansion of petty gambling. Those who bought and sold jogo do bicho tickets understood that the anonymity the milreis granted them made it harder for authorities to trace their monetary transactions. These exchanges also took cover within the established infrastructure of petty commerce. The open-air markets and small shops Cariocas frequented for everyday necessities provided “the perfect medium in which the jogo do bicho would become institutionalized as a normal yet illegal part of Carioca society.” Chazkel convincingly argues that the state regulated petty gambling because the practice threatened their process of enclosure, which sought to control the use of public spaces and privatize leisure activities, and not because it led to moral decay, as reformists maintained.

A jogo do bicho ticket (Image courtesy of Coisas de Florani)

Laws of Chance is an engaging and well-written legal and social history that offers a glimpse into the cultural and economic processes that shaped Brazil’s emergence as a modern nation state. One of its greatest achievements is that it forces us to question “the artificial division between jogo and negócio, between play and business, that underlies both historical and contemporary conceptions of social history of the turn of the twentieth century.” Chazkel shows how little playing “the animal game” differed from engaging in legitimate commercial transactions. Rather, the consolidating state created this false dichotomy in its zeal to control all dimensions of consumer commerce. Her historical and theoretical insights will undoubtedly appeal to readers interested in urban studies, informal economies, citizenship, and extralegality in Brazil and Latin America.

You may also like:

Eddie Shore’s review of The Cuban Connection, a history of gambling, smuggling and drug trafficking in pre-revolution Cuba

Co-Winner of April Essay Contest: Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism by Daniel Castro (2007)

Bartolomé de Las Casas has been long renowned as a religious reformer, champion of indigenous rights and an advocate of the freedoms of the Indians in the Americas. He has been lauded as the “Father of America” and “noble protector of the Indians.” Conversely, he has also been much disparaged and criticized by historians. In Another Face of Empire, Daniel Castro examines the life and work of Las Casas and addresses the reasons why the controversial Dominican reformer has been both adored and vilified throughout history.

In this in-depth study of sixteenth-century ecclesiastical imperialism, Castro illustrates the goals, accomplishments, and failures of the religious orders in the Americas, and examines the lives of the indigenous people themselves, including the myriad of ways they were perceived, treated and subjugated by the Spanish during the conquest of Mexico. Although the religious conversion advocated by Las Casas and other reformers of his ilk was thought to provide a “humanitarian element,” Castro stresses that it was nevertheless a “benevolent form of imperialism” forced upon the natives by the Spanish, who considered themselves inherently superior. His discussion of Las Casas” reform efforts in the New World effectively reveals how the priority of Spain during the conquest was not religious conversion, but the “possession of the land and its resources.”

Castro argues convincingly that while Las Casas may have thought his goal to be spiritual conversion, his actions nevertheless contributed to the priorities of the Crown, and that he directly assisted in Spain’s economic imperialism through his tacit acceptance of Spain’s “dominion and jurisdiction over America and its” inhabitants.” His ongoing written communication with the Crown in an attempt to denounce the “atrocities committed in the Indies” by the Spanish colonists was in actuality a conduit for valuable information, and as such, became a “useful tool in the imperialist designs of the monarchy.” Ergo, despite an earnest desire to secure humanitarian treatment for the natives, Las Casas was complicit in the “extraction of wealth from America,” and while he may have sincerely believed in the righteousness of religious conversion, his actions nevertheless became “a viable justification for the Spaniards to conquer.”

An illustration of Spanish atrocities against native Cubans published in Las Casas’s “Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Castro does not hesitate to reveal the less altruistic face of the “Father of America,” and unabashedly portrays Las Casas as a vociferous defender of indigenous rights, who nevertheless seemed unconcerned with the destruction of their established cultural, social and political way of life at the hands of the Spanish. Nor does Castro shy away from the dichotomy of Las Casas, who, while proclaiming that the natives should be treated as “equal subjects of the Crown, and not as slaves,” simultaneously advocated the importation of slaves from Africa to work for the colonizers.

Although Las Casas defended the rights of the indigenous people of Mexico, he inevitably served to perpetuate the imperialism and subjugation imposed upon those he was sworn to defend. A reformer he may have been, and his intentions were undoubtedly good, but he was nevertheless a servant of the Spanish Crown and its” imperialist aims. Another Face of Empire is a compelling read which affords a fascinating glimpse into the life of a controversial religious reformer who, according to Castro, was the “incarnation of a more benevolent, paternalistic form of ecclesiastical, political, cultural, and economic imperialism.”

And be sure to check out the other co-winning submission from Daniel Rusnak

Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia by João José Reis (1993)

by Michael Hatch

Shortly after 1:00am on January 25, 1835, a contingent of African-born slaves and former slaves emerged from a house at number 2 Ladeira da Praça and overpowered the justice of the peace and a police lieutenant. Throughout the night approximately six hundred rebels ran through the streets fighting and vandalizing a number of municipal buildings. Because the leaders of the revolt were African-born Muslims, some historians have characterized the revolt as a jihad. Others downplay the religious elements engrained in the rebellion, emphasizing instead ethnic differences among Africans. Joao Jose Reis effectively establishes a middle ground between these two arguments by describing networks existing across African ethnic and religious lines. Africans from a myriad of ethnic groups and religious affiliations counted themselves among the ranks of the revolt. For Reis, classifying the rebellion as either a religious or an ethnic phenomenon misrepresents the various forces of social solidarity in the Bahian slave society.

Reis begins his investigation by carefully crafting the social and economic setting of early-nineteenth-century Bahia. That society was fraught with social inequity and an atmosphere often fractured by revolts. Both free and enslaved peoples throughout the opening decades of the 19th century took to the streets as a means to voice displeasure with some aspect of society. He goes on to show the roles played by the African Muslim population in that setting. and the daily lives of the accused rebels. He ends with an examination of the depth and breadth of the Brazilian response to the revolt and subsequent repressive measures meted out against the free and enslaved Afro-descended community.

Reis utilizes documentary evidence including eyewitness accounts from Brazilian, French, and English sources in order to craft as complete an account of the events of that night as possible. The author then moves from the revolt itself to the various affiliations (religious, ethnic, social) that tied together and drove apart Afro-descended peoples in and around Salvador. Despite the majority of the primary conspirators being Muslims, religious difference did not prove an insurmountable obstacle to coordination or affiliation with the revolt.

Afro-Brazilian slaves performing “Capoeira,” a Brazilian martial art, 1825 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Muslim rebels (Malês) “never posed a threat” to ethnic and religious plurality in Bahia, and Reis emphasizes that there is no evidence to support the claim that religious conquest was the rebels’ goal as state officials at the time and some scholars would argue. However, Reis the documentary evidence of the revolt does show that “ethnic identity continued to be an organizing and sociopolitical cornerstone of African life in Bahia.” According to one document translated from Arabic by a Hausa slave, “They were to have come… taking the land and killing everyone in the white man’s land.” Other documents from African-born slaves describe a desire to kill all whites, mulattoes, and native-born blacks, while testimony from the trials indicate a desire to enslave mulattoes.

Public flagellation of a slave, Rio de Janeiro, 1834-1839 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Reis also uncovers the tensions within the Afro-descended communities of Bahia, most notably, the friction between African-born and Brazilian-born people of color. Brazilian-born (crioulo) free people of color made up a large fraction of the city police, regular army, and slave hunters. In a way, Reis characterizes the face of oppression as Afro-Brazilian because many crioulos were viewed by African-born slaves as the most apparent beneficiaries of the slave society and economy. The author takes pains to emphasize the role that ethnicity played in the revolt, while tempering it with religious undertones. The relationship between religion and ethnic plurality played a key role in the revolt, and although “Islam is not an ethnic religion… it may have been ethnic in the 1835 scenario.” Although the religious motivations for the revolt were secondary to ethnic ones, religion was an important element in the development of a specific ethnic and cultural affiliation, which manifested itself, in this case, as confrontation. Reis utilizes the trial documentation as a window through which to view everyday life under the auspices of urban slavery. The revolt then becomes the vehicle to understanding a wider social and cultural history; a reversal of the introductory chapters which supply a portrait of the society which nurtured a rebellious tradition.

Receipt of a Rio de Janeiro slave sale, 1851 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The concluding chapters of Slave Rebellion in Brazil describe the response from governmental and political authorities and repression of the Afro-descended population of Bahia. In the immediate aftermath floggings, deportations, and death sentences characterized a swift and violent response to the revolt. After appeal and deliberation, however, the courts commuted many executions. Tomás, a Nagô slave and one of the leaders of the rebellion initially sentenced to death on March 10, had his execution commuted to 800 lashes on June 20. Reis argues that 1835 was a watershed moment because the response to the rebellion represented a systematic and far-reaching effort “exorcize [sic] anything African” from Bahian society. Additionally, the author hints that the post-1835 repression symbolized an effort on the part of Brazilian officials to develop slavery as a firm foundation for the newly independent nation. Of all assertions in this work, this is the least substantiated by evidence, and appears more a conjecture regarding official efforts to “whiten” society.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil is a magnificent example of interpretative historical analysis based on rigorous archival research. Slave Rebellion represents a dramatic shift in the historiography of Latin American and Brazilian slavery, emphasizing both slave agency and the importance of a plurality of African ethnic identities in the development of Afro-Latino cultures rooted in the Atlantic slave trade.

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin (2010)

by Cristina Metz

Greg Grandin has written a page-turner that tells the story of Henry Ford’s foray into the Brazilian Amazon and much more. In 1925, Ford met with Harvey Firestone to discuss England’s challenge to the US rubber supply. Much as the Belgians had done in Africa in the late nineteenth-century, England had extracted this resource by proxy—through companies such as the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in the Amazon and its Asian colonies. Ford’s response was to embark upon his own South American venture into the world of rubber.

That same year, the governor of Pará sent Custódio Alves de Lima, a Brazilian diplomat, traveled to the U.S. with the aim of enticing Ford into establishing a rubber plantation in the region. The governor was prepared to grant Ford a number of perquisites, including land and tax concessions. Henry Ford took the bait. Within two years, he received a concession of close to 2.5 million acres, half private property at a cost of $125,000 and half public property granted to him free of charge. This tract of land that would soon be called “Fordlandia” became more than just a potential rubber plantation. Ford saw it as an opportunity to begin a new socio-industrial experiment that sought to impose his brand of Americanism on a people and environment.

Over the next few decades, Ford’s determination to build a place that would “safeguard rural virtues and remedy urban ills” would meet its match in the Amazon. Ford’s emissaries began a Sisyphean attempt to clear land during the rainy season, they siphoned money to line their own pockets, and they began exploiting workers who were already leery of working on Ford’s jungle experiment. Workers were expected to work in extremely high heat and humidity. Adverse work conditions, coupled with an ignorance of Amazonian epidemiology, led to many deaths. Such a high rate of mortality at Ford’s Amazon project was a common feature of other U.S. and European forays into Central and South America in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In The Path Between the Seas, for instance, David McCullough tells the story of how the building of the Panama Canal, which at various points in its history was in the hands of a Frenchman and an American who each refused to give up in the face of nature’s challenges, also resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of workers from disease and various threats of the Panamanian jungle.

Ford also tried to impose a lifestyle that did not jibe well with Fordlandia workers. His attempt at cultural imperialism met violent resistance, such as a multi-day riot that started in the worker’s dining hall. Up until the riot, the men had often taken their meals at local brothels and saloons. Ford, who was a teetotaler, implemented a new policy to coerce the men into eating their meals at the mess hall instead. Money for meals was automatically deducted from their paychecks and the workers resented this. To make matters worse, Ford managers chose a bland menu: oatmeal, canned peaches, and unpolished rice. The mess hall riot signaled the beginning of the end of Ford’s project aimed at restoring a bygone era. By 1945, Fordlandia had failed.

Grandin is ambivalent about explaining this failure as rooted in Ford’s hubris, opting instead for the negative effects of deindustrialization. Much of the evidence, however, points to Ford’s excessive self-confidence as a primary factor for the failure of his Amazonian project. To begin with, he purposely did not hire experts—botanists, agronomists, interpreters—who could have helped Fordlandia succeed. The Amazon was not the only place where Ford’s personal hang-ups, like his suspicion of experts and his cantankerousness, caused problems. Grandin transports readers back and forth between Brazil and the U.S. to show that at the same time that Ford was trying to build a perfect world in the middle of the jungle, his empire at home was beginning to show the strain of scandals and shop-floor abuses of despotic foremen in his factory.

In typical Grandin style, the book ends in the contemporary period. Today the Amazon forest suffers from rapid deforestation caused in part by projects like Ford’s. His doggedness in growing rubber trees his own way led Ford to clear acres upon acres of forest. Soy farming, another of Ford’s projects, required the use of toxic chemicals that have allowed this non-native crop to thrive by killing off native species. The environmental degradation that modern industry and agriculture cause is not often something that consumers consider when they purchase a car that has Brazilian soy-based plastic parts or purchase a piece of furniture containing particle board made from young trees that could have reforested the Amazon if they had been left to mature. This disjuncture between the environmental and human degradation associated with mass production and consumption is characteristic of far too-many commodity chains.

If Fordlandia is a story about one man’s attempt to impose his will over nature, it is also a story about modernity and globalization. While Grandin mentions only superficially the presence of women, Chinese, U.S. Confederates, and West Indian workers in the Amazon, readers can be sure that their presence was an effect of the shortening of time and space brought on by modernity that facilitated increased movement of people, goods, and ideas. In contrast to works that exalt the benefits of the modern world—in the realm of ideas and technological advancements, for instance—Grandin implies a weighty question. Has global industrial capitalism, of which Fordlandia is a microcosmic case-in-point, actually advanced humanity or are we now in an age of what scholars have called “the coloniality of power” where all of the old imperial modes are as entrenched as they were in the none too distant past, but now sporting the sheen of the twenty-first century?

Photo credits:

All images courtesy of thehenryford/Flickr Creative Commons.

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