The Deepest Wounds

A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil

Thomas D. Rogers

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780807871676, 9780807834336
• eBook ISBN: 9780807899588
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In The Deepest Wounds, Thomas D. Rogers traces social and environmental changes over four centuries in Pernambuco, Brazil’s key northeastern sugar-growing state. Focusing particularly on the period from the end of slavery in 1888 to the late twentieth century, when human impact on the environment reached critical new levels, Rogers confronts the day-to-day world of farming — the complex, fraught, and occasionally poetic business of making sugarcane grow.

Renowned Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, whose home state was Pernambuco, observed, “Monoculture, slavery, and latifundia — but principally monoculture — they opened here, in the life, the landscape, and the character of our people, the deepest wounds.” Inspired by Freyre’s insight, Rogers tells the story of Pernambuco’s wounds, describing the connections among changing agricultural technologies, landscapes and human perceptions of them, labor practices, and agricultural and economic policy. This web of interrelated factors, Rogers argues, both shaped economic progress and left extensive environmental and human damage.

Combining a study of workers with analysis of their landscape, Rogers offers new interpretations of crucial moments of labor struggle, casts new light on the role of the state in agricultural change, and illuminates a legacy that influences Brazil’s development even today.

PART I The Landscape of the Zona da Mata to the 1930s

ONE An Eternal Verdure

The Longue Durée of the Zona da Mata

Gazing around the forest on an excursion to a sugar plantation in the 1810s, the French cotton buyer L. F. Tollenare described the surrounding forest as “an eternal verdure, an active vegetation that knows no rest, fruits and flowers one on top of the other without end, adorning the hills to their peaks.” The trees appeared to him so massive, and the undergrowth so thick, that he found Pernambuco’s “sublime and virgin nature” to be almost mystical.¹ By the time of Tollenare’s visit, the area of Pernambuco’s coastal lowlands he saw had been a site of sugarcane cultivation for more than 250 years. His impression speaks to the richness of that region and to the limits of sugar’s reach despite its long tenure. Already subjected to long-term human impact, the landscape Tollenare saw would continue to be transformed over the next two centuries. In order to grasp the dynamics of social and environmental change in the twentieth century, it is important to look first from this long-term perspective.

This chapter describes a space, a terrestrial zone in the tropical latitudes lying along the eastern coast of South America. From the earliest arrival of humans migrating down from the land bridge connecting the continent with North America to the spread of European colonists and African slaves to the impact of comparatively dense Brazilian population today, this area was molded into a landscape. As people shaped the landscape physically, they also added contours of meaning and understanding. The physical processes take precedence in this chapter, which describes colonization, the beginning of sugar production and its rapid growth, the later spread of cotton farming, and finally the expansion and renewed emphasis on sugarcane at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the first section of the chapter, I examine the natural history of the coastal strip of Pernambuco that came to be called the zona da mata, or forest zone. In the second, I show the changes the zona da mata underwent in the first three centuries of European colonization. In the third, I address a moment of transition when sugar retreated and cotton briefly took root. This episode was followed by a resurgence of cane fueled by new mills and the railroad, and the addition of these technologies tipped the balance between “nature” and a society of humans bent on agricultural exploitation decisively toward the latter.²

From Forest to “Forest Zone” (Zona da Mata)

A wooded promontory greeted the first visitors to the stretch of northeastern Brazil that would become Pernambuco. After crossing the equator, European sailors expected to cover the eight degrees of latitude to Pernambuco in a couple of days, at which point they began looking for the cape “known throughout the world as Santo Agostinho” that would guide them toward the port of Recife, twenty kilometers back north along the coast. A reliable point of reference because of its elevation, unmatched by any hills along the nearby coast, Cabo de Santo Agostinho may well have been seen by a Spanish sailor several months before Pedro Cabral’s “discovery” of Brazil in 1500. With the cape guiding boats in toward the natural harbors of the Pernambu-can coast, those on board could begin to make out the rest of the coastline, also wooded for the most part and interspersed with low swampy areas.³

Forests meet in Pernambuco. The forest covering Cabo de Santo Agostinho formed part of the northern extreme of the great Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlântica), which at the moment of European contact covered some 1 million square kilometers of the east coast of South America stretching from Cabo to the twenty-eighth southern parallel. The Atlantic Forest reached about one hundred kilometers inland from Cabo and was a mostly broad-leaved, rain-loving, semideciduous forest. North of Cabo, the forest took on a somewhat different character, with deciduous trees becoming more abundant and clustering more closely together than the larger, faster-growing species to the south. At several points deep in its history the Atlantic Forest reached far enough to connect to its massive northern sibling—the Amazonian forest—as the latter stretched southward from its shallow drainage basin. The forests north of Cabo are equatorial formations, remnants left by the Amazonian forest as it receded thousands of years ago. From Cabo south, the eastern or Atlantic formations dominate—a wet and exuberant forest, dominated by large trees with dark green foliage and flled with vines, thick undergrowth, and epiphytes.⁴ This broad ecological distinction between the wet south area and the drier north would have social consequences in the twentieth century.

The forests flled early European visitors with wonder. The trees appeared so tall that one hyperbolic text from the early 1600s claimed that even an arrow launched from a sturdy bow by a strong arm would fail to reach their crests, and so broad that they must date from the time of the biblical flood.⁵ The colors dazzled—the brazilwood’s bright red flowers; the hulking blue and green macaw; and the red, white, and black igbigboboca, a snake longer than a man is tall.⁶ Comparing Pernambuco to alpine European landscapes, Tollenare observed that “if the nature here is calmer and more silent, its decoration is also more brilliant; the opulence of the vegetable luxury compensates for the lack of topographical extremes.” The steamy forest edges hosted countless birds, many with gaudy plumage and of impressive size. In the comparatively cooler, humid interior of the forest, birdsong dwindled and nocturnal species were more common. Reaching the forest interior, visitors reported feeling wonder and dread equally. In many places, crisscrossing vines and creepers created networks so dense they impeded human passage.⁷

The Atlantic Forest is typically rich for a tropical forest, and the profusion of species confounded Europeans seeking to make sense of the whole. Indigenous names unwieldy to the ear had to suffice for European chroniclers’ bulging catalogs of trees, bushes, herbs, birds, snakes, mammals, fish, and sea monsters. The range of trees alone was impressive: araticú, riacho das serras, mamajuba, acicapugá, visgueiro, sopocerana, iribica, camassar, páu d’arco, genipapeiro, pau ferro, tatajuba. Tollenare recorded each of these (and many more) because of their specific utilities—particular strength being useful for mill axles, resistance to water being convenient for sugar boxes, or an organic tint being useful for yellow dye.⁸ Europeans found ombú, a fruit that tasted like figs and “makes one lose one’s teeth”; acajú (cashew), a nut so tasty and rich it was “better than any in Portugal”; gibóia, a snake that could eat a deer whole and travel through the treetops “as if it were swimming in water,” faster than a man could run. The Jesuit Fernão Cardim flled many pages with these sorts of observations, a valuable record of the environment he explored in the late sixteenth century.⁹

The Portuguese encountered peoples from the broad Tupi-Guarani language group, which had spread outward toward the coast from the continental interior around the end of the first millennium.¹⁰ These societies practiced a shifting slash-and-burn agriculture that centered around the forest edges and along the watercourses leading inland.¹¹ The Portuguese soon called the inhabitants of this wooded land the Caeté, which means true or virgin forest.¹² With this eponymic connection between the people and the trees, the identification of the forest with the region was also complete: the Portuguese called it the zona da mata, or forest zone. This name remained apt for hundreds of years, as the lush forest continued to be the region’s dominant feature. Only much later, and certainly from our current vantage, does the name seem a glaring anachronism, applied to an agricultural expanse that has been almost completely deforested.

The abundant and diverse trees took their cues from the soil and water available. From Cabo southward regular hills break up the landscape, divided from one another by shallow rivers that empty into the Atlantic at regular intervals. This is the geological formation known as the “sea of hills,” characterized by evenly spaced, uniform hills known appropriately as “half-oranges.”¹³ Largely sedimentary in character, the hills were formed by water finding courses through the sediment during the slow drainage of the area in the Quaternary period. Formed in three stages, the hills are most heavily eroded in the zona da mata itself, while less eroded, less evenly formed, and higher hills march into the interior. The hills closer to the coast range from one hundred to six hundred meters above sea level, tending in general toward the lower figure.¹⁴ On the sides and tops of the hills the soils tend to be deep though not particularly fertile, sandier than the clay-rich valley floors, and well drained. Between the hills, in the areas called várzeas, soils are deep and enriched by the organic matter deposited by numerous streams. Like the rest of the region, they tend toward slight acidity.¹⁵ The most highly prized soil was that of the rich, wet várzeas called massapê—“dark soils, and strong,” according to one agricultural manual of the late seventeenth century, “which are the most excellent for cane.” Into the nineteenth century, cane was almost exclusively a product of valleys.¹⁶ The sweetness and fertility of the lands of massapê would be canonized in regional mythology, and planters sought out land most favored with this fruitful soil.¹⁷

Not far west of Recife, the higher hills leading to the interior begin to break up the half-oranges of the coast. These far-reaching foothills precede a north-south range roughly paralleling the coast, though reaching in a shallow V-shape toward Recife. They recede inland dramatically toward the south of the region and somewhat less so to the north. These hills are the eastern edge of the Borborema Plateau, which is itself on the eastern rim of the massive interior plateau that dominates northeastern and central Brazil. This semiarid expanse to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east form the boundaries of what came to be known as the zona da mata, though the western boundary was largely imaginary and irrelevant for the purposes of the colonists who clustered along the coast for several hundred years, content to “scuttle along the seashore like so many crabs” in the words of the seventeenth-century friar Vicente do Salvador.¹⁸

Recife marks the rough midpoint of the region, the boundary between the northern and southern portions of the zona da mata, which are known respectively as the mata seca and the mata úmida (the dry and wet forests). The dry mata experienced less erosion in the years following the Tertiary period, with tablelands and broad, flat ridges characterizing the landscape rather than the half-oranges more typical in the wet mata.¹⁹ The rivers of the north are smaller and less regular, with a higher incidence of seasonal flow. And the trees lose their leaves collectively, while in the semideciduous forests of the south tree species lose leaves individually during the course of the year.²⁰ As is obvious from their respective names, rainfall varies considerably between the two regions. While the south maintains averages well above two thousand millimeters annually, some parts of the north receive as few as seven hundred millimeters in a year.²¹

Despite this variability, the zona da mata as a whole receives abundant rainfall, with the regional average reaching almost two thousand millimeters a year. Some areas soak up more than twenty-five hundred millimeters.²² The rainy season between May and August results from the most northerly advance of the prevailing southeast wind that pushes up Brazil’s southern coast year-round. As the northeasterly winds lose power during this period, the polar winds from the south make more progress up the coast and meet eventually with the tropical air. The resulting instability produces the predictable winter showers that increase in frequency to an average of twenty-five days of rain in July, before tapering off in August. The coming of the rainy season is signaled by a switch in the prevailing winds, easily noticeable on the breezy littoral. As planters looked out to sea during the dry season, the breeze would brush their left cheeks. When they felt the wind on their right, the towering cumulous clouds and heavy rains were not far behind. And they could expect the months of the rainy season to bring almost 80 percent of the year’s precipitation. Much of the rest comes in the “first rains” or “cashew rains” that last for several weeks in January, after which the region is typically dry again for months.²³

The abundance of water on Brazil’s coast fascinated the Portuguese from their first encounters with the new land. Among the men who arrived with Cabral in 1500 along the coast of what is now southern Bahia, Pero Vaz de Caminha left a written record of the event. “So pleasing” is the land, he wrote to his king in what has become an oft-cited claim, “that if one cares to profit by it, everything will grow in it because of its waters.” Padre Cardim gushed in his sixteenth-century account of Pernambuco that the land was “blessed with many waters, from rivers and the sky alike, as it rains very much.”²⁴ The sailors who spotted the Brazilian coast on their way to India came from a dry and comparatively deforested country.²⁵ Early Portuguese experiments with sugar cultivation in the Atlantic islands had revealed only too quickly the ecological limitations of St. Helena, Madeira, and the Azores, none of which are hydrologically well endowed. Experts in long-distance navigation, the Portuguese were also well aware of the challenges of storing fresh water at sea and finding more when necessary.²⁶

The sea breezes that bring the rains in the winter and push dry air down from the north in the summer do much to mitigate the unrelenting heat of this stretch of land lying between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. In the seventeenth century, the Dutchman Joan Nieuhof gratefully acknowledged the relief the wind granted from the scorching and sultry...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Deepest Wounds
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION The Wounds of a People and a Landscape
• PART I The Landscape of the Zona da Mata to the 1930s
• PART II Opening up the Zona da Mata, 1930—1963
• PART III The Dictatorship Commands the Zona da Mata, 1964-1979
• CONCLUSION Power, Labor, and the Agro-Environment of Pernambuco’s Sugarcane Fields
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX