Everyday Forms of Empire - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 339

“tropicalist”literattiandfolklorists—Veríssimo,HenriqueCoelhoNeto—whowantedto
create a national literature and aesthetic to express the culture of an emerging tropical
civilization, not some temperate-zone overlay on tropical latitudes. Da Cunha did not
much care for the whitening discourses that were widely popular at the time and under-
pinned the massive migration of European immigrants to Brazil. He would argue that
through hybridization and acclimatization Brazilians had evolved the “race” best adap-
ted to the tropics, the one that offered the most promise of an advanced tropical civiliza-
tion, one superior to that of European colonials.
Clash of Empires of the Amazon: Peru versus Brazil
There were many reasons why Peru might have prevailed in the boundary negotiations
with Brazil, as we have seen. Brazil did seem more revanchist—it had only just become
a republic, one with a strong authoritarian streak, and had been the last nation in the
hemisphere to give up slavery. It was full of mixed-race populations with all the de-
graded subtext they implied; it barely hung together as a country. Both Peru and Brazil
were in the tropical latex trade in an Amazonia divvied up with dusty treaties and ques-
tionable maps and generally egregious labor relations. What da Cunha would do was pit
the two “tropicalisms”—the widely known white and black legends—against each other
in order to assert the Brazilian “moral landscape” as well as its notion of progress. Da
Cunhaframedhistropicalistargumentsinformsofnationalcharacterandwhatwemight
now call political ecology: an early use of comparative economic logics, labor deploy-
ment, resource use, occupation patterns, ecologies, and environmental destruction. He
also invoked the “black legend”: brutalities of Peruvian Amazonia in the most atavist-
ic and savage of tropicalities, nomadism, primitiveness, moral corrosion, cruelty, sexual
profligacy,ephemeralsettlement,andunderpinningitall,thecounterfeitparadise—what
seems fecund and productive, generating riches, is illusory in the arc of Peruvian plun-
der. All this explains why the Peruvians could never usher in a civilization in the trop-
ics: they were only “builders of ruins.” Their “primitivism” reflected the DNA of con-
quistadors, looters par excellence who were satisfied with pillage and never engaged in
a destiny greater than plunder. At a time when development questions were infused with
assumptions about progress and hierarchical social evolution, situating Peruvians in a
kind of cultural and genetic stasis or nomadic retrogression was a powerful critique, es-
peciallyinlightofthe“fact”thatevenimmigrantswhomightbepossiblesourcesofcul-
tural progression were captured by the primitive Peruvian character and customs. 17 This
did not bode well for the future of the huge continental mass being claimed by Peru.
Da Cunha's next argument was racial: “Any street in Lima displays the most varied
ethnographic gallery on earth.” Thus, if the arguments against Brazil's capacities in the
Amazon were tobemade onracial grounds,similar arguments wouldhavetobeapplied