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fatehbaz · 6 months

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[In] the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the Northeast of Brazil [...] the transformation of the city was predicated on [...] [a] notion of whiteness that required the enclosure of wet, amphibious space to make dry land. [...] Racialised groups – of black, indigenous, and mixed heritages – and the houses, marshlands, and mangroves where they lived, were subject to eradication [...]. [F]rom the 1920s to 1950s, during the rise to hegemony in Brazil of [a form of nationalism,] [...] [the] idea's heartland [was] the Northeast. This period gave birth to Brazilian urban modernity [...]. [F]orests, wetness, and the spectre of commonly held land were understood as threats to whiteness and its self-association with order, purity [...]. To answer the question of why the racial division of nature was so important, [...] turn to the hygienic, boundary-making practices of the Brazilian Estado Novo [...] [and its] eugenic visions [...].

Nature is deeply imbricated in the processes of white supremacy [...]. Recife is one of the largest cities in Brazil, and one of the oldest. [...] Recife is also a centre of Brazilian black culture [...]. One of the key sites in Brazil's slave and sugar trades [...], the city was [...] [a] hub. Many of these people lived in what came to be called mocambos, a word that designated an informal dwelling, but came to mean much more. The population of the mocambos included not only black Brazilians, but sertanejos from the backlands, black and indigenous caboclos, and others [...]. Enclosure was the crucial mechanism of this division.

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The Recifense geographer Josué de Castro contended that the mangroves were a kind of commons [...]. Zélia de Oliveira Gominho (2012) characterises the city's transformation [from 1920 to 1950] through the oscillation between its twin faces of “mucambópolis” and Veneza Americana (the Venice of the Americas). [...]

Mocambos were seen as [...] the place where exploited labour was kept out of sight. [...] They were also [...] the inheritance [...] of the quilombo - the community of escaped slaves. [...]

Gilberto Freyre was perhaps the single most influential figure in producing this defining national myth in Brazil. In 1936, he wrote a book on the Mucambos do Nordeste [...]. Josué de Castro wrote very differently about the mangroves and mocambos. [...] He analysed Recife as “amphibious”: built half in and half out of the water [...]. When Josué de Castro [...] [wrote] in the early 1930s, the city was in the midst of political turbulence. As land values increased, the city expanded, and [...] [oppressive] politics intensified [...].

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With the installment of the [...] [oppressive] Estado Novo regime in 1937, and its project of creating a “new man,” hygienist modernisation gathered speed. In July 1939, the proto-fascist administration [...] of Agamenon Magalhães, put in place by Getúlio Vargas' repressive Estado Novo, launched the Liga Social Contra o Mocambo (Social League Against the Mocambo, LSCM). The League emerged out of a tellingly named “Crusade” against the mocambos. [...]

Mocambos were characterised as repellent, unhygienic, and dangerous: “the mocambo which repels. The mocambo which is the tomb of a race … a sombre landscape of human misery … which mutilates human energy and annuls work [...].

The LSCM couched its civilisational, modernising mission in the conjuncture of techno-scientific discourses of medicine and planning with clear eugenic tones [...]. [T]he LSCM commissioned a fresh census of the 45,000 mocambos in the city. They brought the mocambos/mangroves into being as objects of knowledge on behalf of the economic elite and local, national, and international capital. In the 1923 census in Recife, “of 39,026 dwellings surveyed, 51.1% were considered ‘deficient’ mocambos.” [...]

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These were the decades of the embranquecimento of the Brazilian population through public policies of immigration, miscegenation, and sterilisation [...]. This white supremacist ideology was inseparably a politics of nature. Magalhães wrote:

The idle life, the life that the income of the mocambos provides, is a life without restlessness and without greatness. It is a life of stagnant water. … [that] generates in its breast the venom of larvae, which are the enemies of life. Enemies of life, as are the mocambos and the sub-soil of cities, where the polluted waters contaminate pure waters, which come from the deepest layers of the earth. (Magalhães, 1939c, n.p.)

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Attempts to “cleanse” the city functioned through a distinct process: aterramento, the making of land. [...]

Or as 1990s mangue beat [mangrove beat] musicians [...] put it, “the fastest way also to obstruct and evacuate the soul of a city like Recife is to kill its rivers and fill up its estuaries” [...]. This racial division of nature - in alliance with, bound up with, a racial division of space - facilitated the production of spacialised white supremacy.

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All above text by: Archie Davies. "The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Volume 46, Issue 2, pp. 270-283. First published 29 November 2020. [Bold emphasis and paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for teaching, commentary, criticism purposes.]

#forests #abolition #imperial #colonial #ecology #medical #caribbean #landscape

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