In Amazonia (10 page)

Papai
always said: “One hand washes the other, and both wash the face.” So if you help me, I'll help you. In those days when he was helping [his fregueses], papai understood that everybody needed each other. There's no mystery in this.

Reis continues his discussion by outlining another characteristic of the patrão: his violence. This was a politics repudiated by the Viega family. In a well-run community, there is no need for heavy-handed enforcement. Yet, in describing this side of what he effectively conveys as the self-fashioning dualities of the emergent peasant boss, Reis throws light on Octávio da Gama's account of undifferentiated rurality:

We need to understand the social milieu from which [the patrão] came and in which he lived. In contact with only men, subject to the anguish that comes from isolation in the forest, he is hardly going to be the drawing-room type, with refined gestures and perfect manners…. He has to be dynamic, crude, perhaps tyrannical. Any weakness, any indecision could spell disaster. He needs to exercise power without the least hesitation.

… When we are trying to understand him, we need to remember that he generally has little education, and has not spent time in refined environments…. He is a friend to his
companheiros
. He stands shoulder to shoulder with them in difficult times. He feels their problems, problems he himself experienced when he too was a simple worker. Brave in the times of most uncertainty, he knows how to face the natural and social world [o meio geográfico e social].
¹¹

This is the expressive ambivalence of the “simple man,” the
pessoa simples
, the salt of the earth. It is a masculine idiom with strong regional roots, through which many successful traders I met in Macapá define themselves, at least in commercial contexts. Used by middle-class urbanites in relation to the ribeirinho, it has a sentimental flavor implying an artless honesty coupled with lack of education. Used by ribeirinhos to describe city-folk, it is a categorical compliment, though with the potential for the ironic deflation of those who imagine they can rise above their class without compromise. Used by self-fashioning urban merchants to construct their own identities, it enables the simultaneous assertion of authenticity and rurality against the fact of urban prosperity, affirms their ability to communicate with the ribeirinho man to
man, and announces their willingness to engage faithfully in the personalist obligations of aviamento economics.

Viega's surviving family emphasize his roots in poverty, and the selfless devotion and love for place, the
carinho
, that tender affection through which he built up Igarapé Guariba and, with it, the lives of his fregueses. In these accounts, the index of devotion is the obstacles overcome, and the greatest of these was Amazonian nature. Dona Rita, Raimundo's wife, told me that when she first went to Guariba, “there wasn't even a stream there. It was just forest and dense grassland.” Lene, her daughter, picked up the theme:

When papai bought that land it was
mata virgem
, virgin forest. It was really wild, dense forest, so dense that a person couldn't penetrate it. There was an area of thorny scrub that would just cut you up all over…. All the boats had to stop at the entrance [to the stream] because they couldn't get in. It was closed, so narrow that there was no way for a large boat to get down—only those tiny little canoes that you can take right into the forest, bending down and dragging them. That's what it used to be like.

We already know something about how Raimundo Viega and his fregueses remade the nature of Igarapé Guariba. In the process, the patrão built a store, a school, and a chapel out of the commodified resources taken from the forest and rivers. And he blessed his
vila
, the commercial complex at the river's mouth, with electric light. Incrementally, steadily, Igarapé Guariba seemed to be finding its way onto the maps of modernity. Yet the apparent success of the Old Man's project only masked the contradictions that were finally to drive him out. The social contract collapsed. The Macedo family—ribeirinhos, emblematic pessoas simples who had come from Afuá to work with their patrão on his new property—changed the rules. Viega's community came crashing down, and the meaning of place and nature in Igarapé Guariba was revealed as bitterly contested and disturbingly ambiguous.

P
LACE-MAKING,
N
ATURE-MAKING

So how
did
this place come into existence? I have to say that it was all about work, the work of place-making and, inseparably, the work of
nature-making. Some of this has to do with belonging, with finding ways to become local and with getting caught up in the elaboration of what Raymond Williams called a structure of feeling.
¹²
Much of this is the work of discursive practice, in this case, of the stories people tell over and over again that reinforce personal connections to this particular local.

There is, for example, the one about a huge snake, an anaconda, that was killed in 1993 during the demarcation of land controlled by the newly formed Residents' Association. It was long enough for the large group of men hacking a trail through the swampy grassland with the land reform agency official to stand in a line and fix the moment—posing for a photograph, one behind the other, with this monster held up, stretched above their heads in dramatic gesture, using a moment of assertion over landscape to draw the boundaries of difference that excluded unwelcome nature and uninvited land grabbers.

With José Macedo as president and Antônio, his brother, as secretary, the Association was an explicit institutional consolidation of a de facto political leadership. Backed by the Rural Workers' Union of Amapá, it emerged as residents temporarily cohered to challenge the right of Raimundo Viega's heirs to cut heart-of-palm on what both parties considered their land.
¹³
The implications of legal victory and the act of boundary-drawing that followed were not entirely satisfactory to all the people living in Igarapé Guariba. Accustomed to hunting and fishing freely over a large area, residents were now under court order to restrict their activities to the demarcated area or else be reclassified as invaders and poachers. The anaconda, the most hostile, the least transformable to economy of the landscape's animal occupants, became an appropriately ambivalent metaphor for a victory that created a new set of concerns and initiated a new series of external definitions of “community.”
¹⁴

Ten years previously, a bitter saga of confused land dealings, contested indemnification, and the threat of physical violence had led everyone to abandon their homes and gardens on the north bank of the river and relocate to the south side, ferrying over what they could in canoes and motor-launches. Viega had recently died, and his children, squabbling over their inheritance, went back on a commitment residents claim he had made: within months of their father's death his heirs had sold the land on which his fregueses were living, leaving these caboclos no choice but to move.

People sometimes dramatized this history by showing me the structural beams of their new houses, decay-resistant wood they brought with them from Afuá forty years earlier and which won't grow in swampy Igarapé Guariba but which provides imaginative and emotional continuity within a narrative of dislocation. These knotted beams have come to express the persistence of place, even as they embody the trials of eviction and forced mobility. In this story, so different from Octávio's, locality resides in people rather than in economy or geography. And it is rooted in shared experience.

Although shared, it's no surprise that this story of departure from what people always call “the other side” has no unified consensual narrative: it is always crosscut by a language of betrayal and opportunism, and it continues to conjure bitterness in its telling. People talk diplomatically about their
falta de orientação
, their lack of political sophistication at the time. But it's hard not to hear this as coded critique of those who broke ranks first and set sail across the river. These memories are profoundly diagnostic of local division, and whatever shared-ness there is in the experience seems to have settled in as a shared shame, continually fueled by the proximity of the formally inaccessible opposite bank, where their fruit trees have long since been cut down and their gardens gone to seed, just there, across the river.

That shame can be tied up in local subjectivity is hardly surprising for a class of people who are popularly known in Amazonia by the pejorative term “caboclo.”
¹⁵
Caboclo is often wielded with assertive irony in Igarapé Guariba, but the pervasive awkwardness in this narrative of eviction allows no such play. Instead, these memories become a stick with which to beat the present community leaders, people then active in union politics but nonetheless ineffective, and whose families, some imply, were the main beneficiaries of the indemnification. In this way, through their circulation and repetition, people use such stories to intervene in the often acrimonious politics surrounding the Association, and to advance arguments for the pursuit of one out of several potential futures. The conflictual and ongoing work of place-making is here expressed through the idiom of shared pasts.

Stories of this type call on nature to reinforce belonging, and they anchor place, yet dispute its meaning. Another, the story of the remaking of nature in Igarapé Guariba, the story I introduced in
Chapter 1
, describes an originary moment in local history. And it involves, in radical form, the imprinting of locality on landscape.

Raimundo and Rita Viega bought the area that included Igarapé Guariba in 1941. By this time, Raimundo was a well-known businessman who owned a large store in Macapá that sold hardware and the tools needed for settlement in the interior. He had three or four boats, a venture close to the port of Santana where he processed rice, and several landholdings on the islands that form the municipality of Afuá. When you look at him in photographs—smartly but casually dressed, taller and more powerfully built than his companions, his whiteness accentuated by his shiny bald skull—you meet a self-assured patrão who stares straight into the lens with the combative proprietorial eye of the man of action evoked by his son Nestor.

Everyone who knew Igarapé Guariba in these early years agrees that its attractions were obvious. The woods were packed with valuable timber, and the river was teeming with fish and wildlife. When you set fire in the fields, “turtles ran from you like cockroaches,” one longtime resident told me. The chatter of scarlet macaws and the bellowing of howler monkeys were so intense you might not get to sleep. “You just had to lean down and dip a basket in the river to bring it up full of heavy, fat fish.”

But at first this abundance was only potentiality. What dominates accounts of those days is wilderness, the menacing wild forest into which only the very brave would venture and into which strode Raimundo Viega, a patrão driven by a transformative vision.

There was a long period during which he did little with the land. A guard was living at the mouth of the stream, and Viega's boats sailing between Macapá and Afuá stopped off with supplies to keep him going. Viega took out timber now and again, and the guard tapped rubber and grew bananas. But the Old Man was just letting Guariba tick over. His real interest at the time was in the next river, the Rio Preto, purchased in the same deal, where he had a rice plantation employing 140 wageworkers.

It was only when the project on the Rio Preto faltered that Viega turned his attention to Igarapé Guariba. He harvested just one crop of rice and then had his workers plant pasture for cattle. His men cut narrow trails through the forest and savanna and drove the animals to pasture, close to what was then the creek at Guariba. Then he began recruiting fregueses from his land on Afuá.

It was 1958 when the Viegas finally arrived in Guariba. They built a tile-roofed house on a low bluff at the mouth of the river, and they
brought in their son Chico, a man of imposing bulk, to uphold their law. They built a warehouse to receive forest and agricultural products, a store which, as somebody in this roadless world joked, sold “everything except cars,” and they assembled the single-blade sawmill. Their boats began stopping off with manufactured goods bought on credit from one of the Viegas' own patrões in the city of Belém, up to seven days by sail across the bay. And after stocking the store, the boats would head off with the contents of the warehouse, making a circuit of the couple's properties and trading in Macapá on their way back across the estuary.

Four families moved at first from Viega's properties on Afuá to Igarapé Guariba. They included Benedito and Nazaré Macedo and their eight children. They built a house near the store and cleared a garden. They planted their first year of bananas and watermelons. They mapped out new rubber trails, and they worked in the forest, hunting, collecting oilseeds, and cutting timber. It was not that different from Afuá. Igarapé Guariba, though, Benedito Macedo remembers, was
farto
, a land of plenty. There was more timber, as much fish and meat as you could want, and the soil was fertile. The Macedos settled once more into the type of clientelist arrangement that had spread through the Amazon during the nineteenth-century rubber boom and that is still a widespread form of social organization. As their fregueses arrived, the Viegas advanced them materials to build, hunt, and farm. In return, they would sell all the products of their labor only through the Viegas and their agents. Anything these clients needed to purchase, they could find in the store, available on terms of exchange that were monopolistic but not unusually punitive.

Longtime residents describe the Rio Guariba of the early 1960s as a
besteira
, a joke, a silly little thing. It was a short and narrow river, probably about 50 to 75 yards wide at its mouth, where it met the Amazon, and shallow and safe enough for children to wade or swim across at low tide. It ended in a waterfall—a feature usually described in the diminutive, a
quedazinha
, a
cachoeirazinha
. Hunters would haul their canoes over or around the rocks to arrive in the midst of an open grassy landscape of flooded savanna. Such areas are often dominated by the papyrus-like
pirí
, from which people in poorer families in Guariba make mats that sell in bundles of ten for R $1 (then U.S. $1) to the Macedos and other local boat owners. Above the waterfall, the pirí formed a dense barrier, a
pirizal
, in association with
aninga
, a woody
aroid that can easily stand 6 or 7 feet high. The pirizal was near-stationary, shallow, and entirely dried out in summer, yet residents called it a lake, the
lago
.
¹⁶