Working Almost as Slaves?

In the collective memories of the Lower Amazon maroons, the decades after emancipation are remembered as a period when “the people were oppressed” by Brazil nut merchants, who “enslaved” the blacks of the region. However, a number of individuals also relate memories of merchants who “helped the people,” who “gave goods for the saint patron’s parties,” and who acted, in the words of a Trombetas River maroon descendant, as “fathers of the people.” To reconcile these perspectives I argue in this chapter that these conflicting stories reflect two spheres in the relationships between black peasants and Brazil nut merchants. While the first one was characterized by domination, a few individuals successfully accommodated to, and even collaborated with, the newly arrived commercial houses. In both spheres, Afro-descendant forest specialists and explorers were fundamental to the merchants’ penetration into a world where the mocambeiros had hitherto ruled. In the end, the loss of autonomy and quality of life in the 1910s and 1920s shaped the maroon descendants’ social memory for the rest of the twentieth century, filling it with narratives of poverty, dispossession, and the speech figure of the “new slavery.”

I Do Not Buy My Freedom Because I Am Not a Fool

The first part of the chapter analyzes the different paths by which slaves acquired environmental knowledge: importing skills and strategies from equatorial Africa, acquiring knowledge when doing agricultural work in plantations and farms, and maintaining interethnic contacts with Indians. As they learned the ways of local peasants, the enslaved gradually built entire parallel economies with vigorous ties to the expanding network of commercial houses that existed in late nineteenth-century Amazonia. Instead of using the term “internal economy of slavery,” I conceptualize them as an economy that ran parallel to that of their masters, given the size and complexity of the commercial networks in which the slaves participated. The chapter also describes the process of community formation inside the slave quarters at the time of Amazonia’s rubber boom, which had both a positive and negative impact on the prospects of Amazonia’s black slaves. On the one hand, it made it possible for them to expand their parallel economy. On the other hand, that slaves could carry out such a broad scope of activities meant that the slaveowners could adapt to the changes of the era. In Amazonia slavery was just like rubber: flexible and adaptable to multiple conditions – hence its durability.

Killing the Big Snake

This chapter takes the story of the Big Snake, a famous oral tradition among maroon descendants in the Trombetas river (called mocambeiros in the region), as a symbol of their relocation to new residential spaces below the waterfalls, where they would fully enjoy their hard-won freedom right after abolition. The chapter places the narrative in conversation with “outside sources that can be checked and certified as independent,” such as police and governmental reports, travel accounts, genealogical trees, and interviews with the mocambeiros. With this I seek to generate a dialogue between narrative and written sources and to dig as deep as possible into its key natural and topological symbols. I considered the tradition of the Big Snake a “hypothesis,” a source that could enter into dialogue with, and even correct, “other perspectives just as much as other perspectives [could] correct” it. The story of the Big Snake also uses the river’s natural geography to sustain an interpretation of the maroons’ origins that emphasized autonomy and community. Finally, it bears witness to the sheer centrality of the natural landscape for the viability of maroon communities in Amazonia.

Introduction

The introduction argues that despite the changes set in motion by the constitutional Article 68, passed in 1988 in Brazil to recognize black rural communities as the recipient of special rights and recognition, a number of discourses and practices inherited from past generations continue to be a source of identity for the black peasants of Brazil. Dating from the era of slavery, such traditions have subsisted embedded in the landscape in the form of agro-ecological strategies, political discourses, and even relationships with political and economic elites. They have not resulted in hard ethnic boundaries sharply separating black peasants from other rural Brazilians, but rather have been part of a flexible toolbox of strategies and narratives inscribed on the landscape and used in moments of conflict over land, labor, and citizenship. While the relationships between black rural communities and the natural world have been largely overlooked as a vehicle for the maintenance of an Afro-Brazilian identity, this book is devoted to unearthing their existence, interrogating their relevance, and putting them in dialogue with the broader history of slavery and its legacies in post-emancipation Brazil. Finally, the introduction also outlines the basic data and chronology of the slave trade to Amazonia.

Conclusion

The conclusion formulates three arguments. First, it reinserts Afro descendants into Amazonia’s history, especially in the periods immediately before and after the rubber boom. Second, it argues that natural landscapes represented a vehicle for the genesis and the evolution of an Afro-descendant identity among Pará’s black peasants. And finally, it holds that, while Article 68 sparked a process of black ethnic reconfiguration in the 1990s, the emphasis on the novelty of such identities has inadvertently obscured the vitality of black political traditions. In sum, as The People of the River shows, the political actions of the 1990s were just a new iteration of a much older tradition of black peasant politics dating at least from the era of slavery. While discourses defending the rights of citizenship for Afro-descendants were revamped to accommodate to the new era that Article 68 inaugurated, they continued to refer to environmental tropes used in previous conflicts. Black peasants continue to assert their rights as Brazilians through multiple dialogues, but their voice has always found in nature a vehicle to maintain a singular identity along the way.

After the Reign of Terror

This chapter examines the agricultural strategies used in Amazonian cacao and sugar plantations. Cacao is a tree native to the region whose fruit was exported since the colonial period. Producers relied on the river tides for soil fertilization and combined its cultivation with the exploitation of wild groves. Sugar producers adopted a similar approach, using tidal energy as a natural fertilizer and as a source of energy to propel their mills. Amazonia was able to successfully develop a slave economy that produced tropical crops for markets overseas. It also discusses the impact of Cabanagem on the region’s slaveholding properties is more complex than previously thought, as this chapter shows. While the loss of slaves in prime working age naturally affected the output of local plantations, the Cabanagem revolt also reinforced the trend toward a sexually and ethnically balanced slave population inherited from the pre-Cabanagem era, which was key to the natural reproduction of the enslaved population in later decades. Despite the damage caused by the rebellion, then, the post-Cabanagem slave demography of Paraense plantations turned out to be favorable to the reconstruction of the state’s plantation sector and to the natural reproduction of its enslaved laborers as well.

The People of the Curuá River

In 1921, the village of Pacoval, located not far from Santarém on the northern shore of the Amazon River, was in turmoil. In August the state government sent a special envoy to ascertain if the purchase and demarcation of Brazil nut groves were being done by the book and whether permitting its privatization was a wise policy. The protests that ensued represented a new episode in the history of black struggles for citizenship in post-emancipation Brazil, and this chapter analyzes three of their core elements. First, the Pacovalenses presented themselves as “the people of the Curuá” River and fought to keep it “free,” locating the rights of citizenship yet again in the natural landscape. Second, they tried to protect the networks of economic and political patronage that they had built since the time of slavery, which had provided a precarious but real degree of institutional leverage. Finally, in their encounters with public authorities the black peasants also portrayed themselves as “good Brazilians,” a nativist claim that mirrored Afro-Brazilian discourses in other states in those years.

Citizens of Tauapará

Taking an oral tradition conveyed by a slave-descendant from the municipality of Vigia (Pará), this chapter argues that black peasants merged slavery-era traditions embedded in the landscape with discourses of legal access to landownership learned in freedom to form a single but multifaceted discourse of citizenship. It examines two processes. The first relates to the changes in the landscape that took place as the Campina sugar plantation became a farming community between 1862 and 1944. I discuss Campina's “golden age” as a slave plantation, the end of slavery in 1888, and the transition to free peasantry in the early twentieth century. The sequence of these three moments illuminates the social and economic changes the slave-descendants experienced, and constitutes the material basis for the second part of the chapter. That part turns to the ideological and cultural origins of the construct of citizens of Tauapará by interrogating popular understandings of landownership, relationships with patriarchal landowners, and the imagined life of legal documents.