Everyday Forms of Empire - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 340

to Peru, with its “uncountable forms of mestizos: from the mulattos of all bloods . . .
Thesealsofindtheiralienatedexpressioninthepillageofhistoryandlandscape.” 18 This
all produced a “perennially incipient national culture . . . a mingling of races without
forming a People.” That is, they would have no capacity for a civilizational project. In
Brazil,bycontrast,the sertanejos convertforeigners“toourlanguage,ourways,andour
destiny,” and to the “dominant components of our nationality,” and in their hybrid vigor
are “the bedrock of our race.” He would explain this in socioenvironmentalist terms: the
form of occupation interacting with environment would generate the vibrant pioneer.
Da Cunha was also writing about relations with nature. While Amazonia could
provideanewculturalandhistoricalphaseforPeruvians,perhapstransformingtheircul-
ture through the discipline of cultivation, the Peruvian caucheiros were “reanimating an
apprenticeship to calamity” because they never formed a “brotherhood with nature nor
ennobled it with cultivation.” When finally Peruvians arrived in the Amazon, according
to da Cunha, they dedicated themselves to nomadic extraction, expressing their inher-
ent indifference to place through killing caucho trees and perpetrating the most violent
form of terror slavery on Indians. Their cultural regression to nomadism was fueled by
an economic logic wed only to private gain—unlike, in da Cunha's seringueiro version,
where even a questionable form of settlement led to a husbandry that was the first step
of a consolidating nationhood.
In the essay “Among the Caucheiros ” da Cunha articulates all the classic elements
of “black legend” duplicity: the enslaved Indians, the caucho mansion with a veneer of
civilization overlaying its fundamental barbarity, the casual betrayal of women, and the
fleetingnatureofsettlement,withpeoplestayingjustlongenoughtoplunderaplaceand
then moving on. The driving force behind the caucho barons is not some noble civil-
izing mission but greed for wealth that is to be hedonistically squandered in European
capitals. Then there is the moral decay: a novel evolution of a type where the elements
of character do not blend but exist in disruptive unity side by side, elegance and brutal-
ity inhering in the same character, and a complete indifference to any project other than
their own individual gain. Sexual immorality is also commented upon: women as trade
goods and chattel, multiple wives and lovers. In short, someone who would elsewhere
be an admirable bourgeois becomes in the Peruvian Amazon a lascivious reprobate.
This vision of a chaotic, plundering culture is contrasted with turbulent yet ultimately
stable occupation by mixed-blood caboclos and the emergence of the Brazilian city of
Lábrea on the far reaches of the Purús. The Brazilian occupation, besides being extens-
ive and progressive, involves the “improvement of the world.” Rather than rape and no-
madic pillage, it is husbandry and settlement, the “civilizing molecules,” the aspirations
that inhered in its place-names, that define Brazilian domination.