In the Realm of Rubber - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 226

pers, a point they themselves raise today. 103 Historian Greg Grandin remarks in his in-
comparable studyofHenryFord'sfailed plantation attempt atFordlândia thatlaborcon-
trol in the lower Amazon was quite difficult even in the 1920s and 1930s, not so long
after the collapse of the rubber industry. Workers would work for wages for a time, but
when irritated by time clocks (these were demolished during labor uprisings) or miffed
at the soy products and brown rice served to them in the canteen in lieu of turtle, fish,
and farinha, the men simply headed back to their homes to plant and fish. 104
Quilombos and Rubber
The number of quilombos —fugitive slave communities—in Amazonia was substantial,
as recent research has shown. 105 Many slaves and detribalized natives fled into quilom-
bos during the Cabanagem to avoid the extensive violence and to escape their chains.
The rubber economy provided, as had gold elsewhere, a lucrative means of exchange
to support autonomous and renegade cultures. 106 In eastern Amazonia, Amapá, Pará,
and Maranhão, quilombos were engaged in complex systems of commodity exchange
in which rubber, like gold, was one of the most important items. From mocambos on
Marajó Island to the upper reaches of the Trombetas, through to Bolivia, slavery's fu-
gitives tapped the “black gold” but used the small-scale traders, the regatões , for their
transactions. In a world of rampant malaria, black and mulatto populations had a genetic
advantage in malarial upriver settings where disease mortality was very high and rubber
forests were quite rich. 107 Prior to emancipation, in some cases it may have been effect-
ive for quilombos to simply contract themselves as a community to one rubber baron
to forestall chattel enslavement and the dispersal of their families, as happened in some
communities near Mazagão in Amapá. These strategies were described for a Bolivian
quilombo and some cases in the upper Trombetas. 108 Arnous de Rivière, traveling in
Bolivia, noted that some quilombo villages were integrated into the rubber trade, based
on contract exchanges as well as barter. 109 He thought that free American blacks might
use quilombos as a model for new American black colonization in Amazonia.