Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
dian tribes, and its refugees from climatic disaster who extracted tree gums through pre-
capitalistlaborregimeswithStoneAgetechniquesinvolvingknivesandsmoke,wasem-
barrassing and hardly fit with the sleek Europeanized version of themselves that south-
ern Brazilians had fashioned. Southern Brazil's European immigrants (meant to whiten
and “improve” the mestizo population), its emerging industrial economy, and its stylish
urbanismmimickedcontinentalfin-de-siècletastesandmodernism.TheAmazon,onthe
other hand, seemed atavistic: instead of advancing out of slavery into wage labor and
industrialization as had southern Brazil, it appeared to have regressed from agriculture
to extractivism and had reinvented slavery in the primitive modalities of debt peonage,
dirt farming, and Indian terror. Amazonia seemed, actually, to be evidence of all the hy-
potheses of racial and climatic degeneration. The development discourse and political
identity that worked for the South involved a rejection of most of the social and natural
attributes of the North. If the ideas of modern southern Brazilianness were taken as the
norm, Amazonia would seem less of a Brazilian place, since it lacked similarities with
the rest of the country. This cultural disjuncture would make western Amazonia more
liable to appropriation, and this had not been helped by lax attitudes toward the region
among the foreign ministers who preceded Baron Rio Branco.
DaCunhahadtoblurtheobviousdifferencesbetweenAmazoniaandtherestofBrazil
by invoking its national kinship shaped through common mythologies: the
bandeirantes
who bound the North to the South through their epic travels; the ideas of an emerging
Civilization in the Tropics—an aspiration that had especially animated Brazilians since
Pedro I's “Tropical Versailles”; the heroic travels of the Northeast's
sertanejos
, weav-
ing the Atlantic Coast to the Amazonian hinterlands, all within a Brazilian version of
manifest destiny. With Os
Sertões
da Cunha had, after all, given the blankness of the
backlands ahistorical andcultural animation as part ofanational saga within the peculi-
arities of a powerful and distinctive Brazilian nature. His task was now to do this for the
Amazon.
This was all allied to the deep logic of
uti possedetis.
Certainly
Os Sertões
's “Land, Man, and History” served as a template in the produc-
tion of the background documents. These began in the mapping of mythical realms that
gradually are transformed into a national epic not by warrior kings but by a massive, in-
choate diaspora. Here the drama of the voyage, the heroic combat against the unknown
(whether of scientific mysteries or personal destinies), would substitute for the spectacle
of battle at Canudos, shaping the dynamic landscape as metaphor and historical theater.
Instead of suffering bloody defeat as at Canudos, the
sertanejos
, his “bronzed titans,”
would emerge as history's heroes, the protagonists of da Cunha's next, but never fin-
ished, “avenging book,” the “Lost Paradise.”
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