Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and reclaimed their national heritage in a novel and heroic way, extending the fatherland to the new
territories that they occupied.
Open the last municipal reports of Acre. In its pages we are dazzled less with the transformations
that are documented there than by the inchoate and utterly informal manner in which the occupation
of the region is still carried out. Today as a generation ago, absent traumatic droughts and disasters,
we see the immigrant's advance without the least vestige of official assistance. The transplanted pop-
ulations settled, sank their roots to the soil, in an astounding demographic advance—from the head-
waters of the Juruá to the confluence of the Abunã—and extended the promised lands of the northern
frontier, more sought after with each day that passes.
. . .
What a contrast to the traditional colonial pattern! What a blow to the myths of its fatal climate! The
story of Acre, a story that is still unfolding albeit at a slower tempo, is that telluric selection that
Kirchhoff speaks of, a sort of natural triage imposed by nature herself on those who seek her out,
and conceding the right to live only on those she favors. But there is a more general process. In all
latitudes, the original elective affinity between man and nature has been vital. Those who survive are
those who best balance their personal characteristics with climatic factors. The subtle etiology of ad-
aptationiscombinedinphysicalandmoralattributes,thatreactionbetweenthemosttangiblethermal,
barometric,andhydrographiccomponentsofenvironmenttothemostsubjectiveimpressionsofland-
scape—from actual resistance of cells and muscles to strength of character in all its complex refine-
ment. Prior to hereditary transfer of these qualities of resistance, the acquired ones guarantee indi-
vidual integrity with the racial adaptation itself, and the process of selection is advertised in statistics
of life expectancy and ineluctable, necessary death. All acclimatization of this type is a permanent
plebiscite imposed on outsiders: Who will live? Who will die? In the tropics, it is natural that biolo-
gical scrutiny takes on a more severe character.
There are no ways to cheat. All fall equally under the same incorruptible inspection: the con-
sumptive gulping for air that is caustic, too poor in oxygen, the outcome of unbridled wantonness;
the heart felled by the drop in arterial pressure; the alcoholic as a perpetual candidate for all sorts of
edemas; the lymphatic immediately snapped up by anemias; along with the glutton, the sleepwalker
in the winding sheets of his own insomnia; the indolent, rotting in enervating naps. And the choleric,
the neurasthenics, tremble immoderately in our electrified airs and strangely refracted light until the
paroxysms of tropical dementia suddenly explode in a sort of sunstroke of the soul.
Each physiological or moral collapse is offset by a corrective physical reaction. What one calls
insalubrious is but a purification, a sweeping elimination of the unfit. In the end, we come to the con-
clusion that it is not the climate that is bad but man himself.
This is what transpired in Acre. The groups occupying the area—ignorant of what awaited them
and traveling in deplorable conditions—suddenly arrived only to be plunged into a social order that
would do nothing but exacerbate instability and weakness. What always awaits them, and what al-
ways will await them, is the vilest organization of labor ever conceived of by human egoism and
greed. The sertanejo incarnates a social paradox that we cannot emphasize enough: man works there
to enslave himself.
When the Italian immigrant relocates from Genoa to São Paulo and then to the most remote coffee
plantation, he does so under the paternal eye of our social agencies. The exile from the Northeast has
no helping hand and is basically forsaken by one and all. His is a far more arduous voyage, and he
Search WWH ::




Custom Search