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is chastening is not so much the prodigious labors of colonial medicine to adapt the col-
onizer to the environment, but rather the slow unraveling of the most tenacious efforts.”
He contrasts European colonial states with completely disorganized and chaotic migra-
tions to Acre. “Here was no crisis of growth, nor an excess of population flooding to-
ward the frontiers, marching to fresh horizons, embodiment of the triumphant March of
the Races. Rather, it reflected dearth, and utter defeat by natural catastrophe.” Da Cunha
describes the coast as haunted by “terrifying starvelings, burning with fevers and pox,”
and a government whose only concern was “to free themselves as soon as possible of
the invasion of moribund savages. . . . So they sent them off to Amazonia—that vast,
empty unknown—to exile in their own country. . . . No government agent, no doctor ac-
companiedtheexiles,whosesoleandpainfulmissionwastodisappear.”Andamazingly,
“100,000 men, risen from the dead, sprang from nowhere and reclaimed their national
heritage in a novel and heroic way, extending the fatherland to the new territories that
they occupied.”
In sharp contrast to racialist debates of the day, where mixed bloods were pictured
as “ugly, indolent, slothful, and inert,” 20 and to commentators who viewed Amazonia's
onlyreasonablefutureasonebasedonwhiteoccupation,daCunhadescribesprosperous
yeomen communities with “well-tended orchards and prudent husbandry.” He turns the
racial environmental determinist discourse on its head: it is the adaptation of the Brazili-
an mestizos, the “civilizing molecule,” accompanied by other ethnicities and histor-
ies—the Syrians, the Germans, the Italians—who shape the region. With discussions of
thefailuresofEuropeancolonization, heinvertstheconventional socialDarwinist racial
order.
This diverges from the primitive culture of plunder, the nomadism, and all the other
elements of tropicality that da Cunha invokes against violent Peruvian occupation and
the pathetic arrogance and ineffectiveness of white colonialism. For him, the tropics are
a place of habitation, a place of history and civilization. His texts on the Amazon, and
especially these on comparative colonialisms, could be seen as elaborated texts on Luso
tropicalism,animperialideologythatsprangfromatropicalhearth,fromthepracticesof
unknown“bronzedtitans”ratherthanthemandatesofproconsuls.Thetriumphachieved
by the mestizoized “bedrock of our race” was perhaps the story of the “lost paradise”
he meant to tell in his companion volume to Os Sertões through their (and his) odyssey
through a land as rich in travails and triumphs as any Homeric epic.
“Among the Caucheiros 21
On the right margin of the River Ucayali, that softly undulating land that embraces the headwaters of
theJavari,theJuruá,andthePurús,anewsocietyappearedabout50yearsago.Itdevelopedcovertly.
Lost in the depths of the forest, for a long time its existence was known only to a few traders in Pará,
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