Tales Of The Transamazonia Analysis

Tales of the Transamazonian: Hopes and Disillusions on a Route of Ecological Migrations
Tales of ecologically driven migrations populate Brazilian culture since the existence of writings about national identity and history. Whether describing the extension of the agricultural ‘frontier’ or the ‘adventurous’ search for precious natural resources, they make up the myth of a country realizing itself through a march from the coast to the interior. This article studies the impact of the environmental crises of the twentieth century in updating, reinterpreting and contesting this national narrative, in the context of the country’s industrialization and growing awareness of its ecosystems’ fragility.
We focus on narratives of ecological migration
The highway’s launching was underpinned by governmental propaganda stressing ecological contrasts between the Amazon and the Northeast: ‘men without land’ facing a ‘land without men’, droughts as opposed to abundance, self-destruction (of the old sugarcane society) versus construction (of a new Brazil in the ‘virgin’ forest). In our analysis, we explore how the Brazilian State used the (acute) climatic crisis in the Northeast to attract hundreds of thousands families towards a (fantasized) green paradise in the Amazon. We study how this propaganda dialogued with Northeastern popular culture (e.g. the rural ‘sertaneja’ music, the small booklets ‘cordel’ literature). Finally, we analyse how, in the context of the rise of the rain forest to a global ecological symbol, tales of abundance were deconstructed by an environmentally critical poetry, expressed in literature, cinema, and songs, about the Transamazonian as the route of all disillusions.
Representations of the Amazon by the mid-1970s already tended to converge towards a storytelling of vanishing nature, fed by the migrants’ encounters with decaying Amazonian native villages, eroding soils, land conflicts
Even before the arrival of the Portuguese, Campos and Studard point out that indigenous populations often migrated in the zone as result of the phenomenon, signifying the lasting contours of this climatic feature (page). Brazilian intellectuals have often examine the drought as a problematic feature for Northeast’s development. Euclides da Cunha described these drought cycles as “an eternal and monotonous novelty” (38), and, since it was so predictable, he defended a perennial governmental strategy to fight it, using engineering and scientific knowledge as tools (40). In his book Nordeste, Gilberto Freyre presents an ecological study of the impact of sugarcane slave plantations in the region around the bay of Bahia that impoverished the soil, preventing, according to the author a healthy economical development (79). For him, if the zona da mata (seaside) sub region could be “developed”, the sertão (dry lands) region must be helped by state policies (page). Likewise, Celso Furtado in the 1950s presents the region as a technical and political problem that required state