Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
pathetic ear. They were recounted around smoky fires against the stark
backdrops of squatter camps, under tarps, and in scraps of brush and mud
huts on overcrowded missions, far from the deep forest they figured. I
remember those scenes now as a series of disjointed images of brown
skin and muscle cramps and biting flies and acrid smoke and tepid water
and earnest voices, but more than anything I remember how the stories
of a vanished world were invariably suffused with a dignity impossible
to convey or forget.
I've since discovered that many of my recordings are inaudible,
drowned out from time to time by blaring disco music and barking dogs
and screaming children and roaring motors. Usually the narrators were
facing an old age that was precarious at best and often cruel. Many of
them were starving and sick. Nearly all have since died. The contrast
between the degraded conditions of their everyday lives and the utopian
scenes they described was so great that it often strained my capacity to
understand even as the same tension reflected what I wished so desper-
ately to encounter and to believe. Oddly enough, the stories became ever
more real for me the more predictable they became, the more fully they
faded into memory. I thought I could sense the brown bodies and red
firelight and hushed voices and epic tales of bravery and betrayal and
revenge. I was haunted by the past I could only imagine. It was impos-
sible to separate my own sense of loss from the tones of nostalgia and
escapism that saturated these stories of a clouded place of pleasure and
peace and eternal youth last visited decades before. As I pondered these
stories and their stakes, as I listened to them over and over, Echoi began
to take on the shades of a lost paradise, even though it was never entirely
clear for whom.
A Lost Paradise
Colonial archives revealed that Echoi has long figured within frustrated
Euro-American geographies of desire and redemption. Although many
early modern European scholars imagined this area and all American
tropics as the benighted domain of savagery, others argued that the Gar-
den of Eden was located remarkably close to the area called Echoi.
As historian Heidi Scott has described, jurist Antonio Pinelo de León
popularized this thesis in his mid-seventeenth-century text titled
Paraíso
en el nuevo mundo
, or “Paradise in the New World.” For Pinelo de León
and his later interlocutors, it was a crucial argument for the develop-
ment of a
criollo
consciousness. Known as “the American thesis,” this
