A Quilombo Called Canudos - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 54

labor groups, religious festivals, and patronage combined into a significant sub-rosa so-
cial glue within the idioms of Catholicism. Between holocaust and diaspora, natives and
Africans hadagreat deal ofsocial reconstruction toattend toandused whatever cultural
means they could to achieve this. 66
In Rebel Lands
Much of the history of nineteenth-century Brazil could be written through its uprisings.
A listing of them reveals a combination of slave revolts, urban insurgencies, secessional
movements, rebellions of political reform, and attempts at revolution. A listing does not
by any means exhaust the number of revolts but gives a sense of the frequency, geo-
graphic sweep, and widespread nature of insurgency: Bahia, 1809, Pernambuco upris-
ing, 1824, Cabanos revolt (Pernambuco), 1832-35; Rio de Janeiro, 1831; Recife, 1831;
Cabanagem revolt in Amazonia, 1835-40; Salvador, Malês revolt, 1835; the Sabinada
Revolt in Bahia, 1827-38, the Balaida revolt in Maranhão, 1838-40; the Farrapos War
of Rio Grande do Sul, 1835-45; São Paulo and Minas Gerais, 1842; Praeira Revolution
in Pernambuco, 1842; the Ganhadores strike in Bahia, 1854; Pernambuco, 1850; Viana,
1867; Quebra Quilos revolt, 1874-75; Vintem Revolt in Rio, 1880. As Schwartz puts
it, “Many revolts produced quilombos , to the degree that fugitive rebels sought to avoid
capture and punishment while cultivating in their new hideouts the seeds of future res-
istance movements.” 67 Uprisings produced flight and new hidden polities.
Slave revolts whose purpose was to proclaim a new state, like the Muslim Malês
whowantedaBraziliancaliphate,wererelativelyrare.Overtly“statist”projects,likethe
Malês, Cabanagem, or the Farrapos War (these last were stimulated by the examples of
Caribbean revolutions, as we will see further on), which imagined revolution, stand in
contrast to the far more general practice of creating spaces of cultural autonomy outside
the labor relations and circumstances that defined the world of slavocracies. These res-
istant populations moved relentlessly into the interior and can be seen as Brazil's true
colonizers of the vast continent. Flight and fight could be predicated on economic con-
ditions, intrusions of the state and local powers into customary practices (like loss of
grazingorcollectingrights),resistancetomilitarydragoons,changingsocialrelationsof
production (alteration of the terms of work, the rise of capitalist forms of labor deploy-
ment, new forms of access to land, etc.), but mostly the social turmoil and evasion took
place below the surface. 68 For each documented insurgency, hundreds of small acts of
resistance and liberation occurred. As anthropologist James Scott argues, these “small
arms” in class warfare were much more widespread and less noted but defended both
dignity and survival. 69 When pushed too far, people “voted with their feet”: they fled to
quilombos .