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Tapping Masculinity: Labor Recruitment to the Brazilian Amazon during World War II

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2005-004

1527-1900

Seth Garfield,

Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

Between 1942 and 1945, more than 32,000 male migrant workers were transported to the Brazilian Amazon from the country’s Northeast, in the largest state-sponsored relocation of free labor in Brazilian history. These men were charged with supplying the United States with latex tapped from wild rubber trees, as part of a wartime campaign underwritten by the U.S. government.1 This essay investigates how notions of gender shaped the formulation of the wartime migration project, the formation of regional labor markets, and the historical experiences of the migrants.Interregional migration is a key factor in understanding major changes in late-twentieth-century Brazil, including industrial development, proletarianization, frontier expansion, shifting patterns of political participation, and the transformation of individual subjectivities. Between 1960 and 1980 alone, 29.4 million Brazilians — a population larger than most Latin American nations — migrated from the countryside to the cities, in the process transforming Brazil from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban country.2 Another migration pattern since midcentury has been relocation to the central-western and Amazonian frontier: between the 1940s and the 1990s, the population of the Amazon skyrocketed from 2 million to 13 million (although it, too, is now predominantly urban).3The process of internal migration in Brazil has been studied more extensively by social scientists and demographers than by historians.4 Economists have traditionally emphasized structural factors in explaining migration — the push of lower wages reflective of labor surplus in sending regions and the pull of higher wages in areas of labor scarcity. Migratory flows, however, are determined not only by market forces but also by state policies that encourage or inhibit migration and by the cultural predilections of those who formulate or are targeted by these policies.5 One such mediating factor is gender — the normative roles for men and women that are implicated in the construction and signification of unequal power relations in society.6 Neither uniform nor immutable, gender ideologies — fractured by class, race, sexuality, and age — are historically contingent, fluid, and contested.In placing gender at the analytical foreground in understanding wartime migration to the Amazon, I do not propose to discount the centrality of socioeconomic inequalities in the sending regions of rural Northeastern Brazil, which have been historically exacerbated by cyclical periods of drought. Nor can we downplay the geopolitical factors that set in motion the transnational rubber campaign. Gender ideologies are contoured precisely by such structural factors, even as they have served to reinforce or to challenge them. Rather, a gendered lens can enhance our analysis of this historical episode by prompting different types of questions: How were gender ideologies harnessed or reworked by state officials and intellectuals during World War II to promote the migration of northeastern men to the Amazon? How were nordestino identities racialized in elite discourse? How did the perception of the migrants’ masculinity mediate their incorporation into Amazonian labor markets? What was the relevance of official gender ideologies to the historical experiences and political identities of the migrants themselves? By shedding light on these issues, I hope to contribute to an extensive multinational literature that explores the relationship between gender ideologies and political mobilization during World War II.7First, a brief overview of the wartime rubber campaign is in order. After the Japanese occupied the rubber-producing regions of Southeast Asia in February 1942, the Allies were cut off from 92 percent of the traditional sources of latex.8 Rubber was vital for military vehicles, as well as to outfit the tires of 30 million American automobiles. In a March 1942 report, the U.S. War Production Board estimated that at the current rate of use, the Allies would exhaust rubber stockpiles by March 1943.9 To meet the gap between the 125,000 tons of crude rubber available and an estimated annual requirement of 1.2 million tons, the U.S. government endorsed various measures: the immediate development of a synthetic rubber industry, drastic conservation and utilization of reclaimed rubber, and the maximum development of wild rubber in Africa and Latin America.It is noteworthy that the wartime rubber shortage in the United States, like most social crises, was not inevitable, but rather the consequence of political factors: the short-sightedness of American government officials and their complaisance with business practices that promoted corporate profits over national security. In June 1940, with war in Europe and Asia disrupting commodity flows, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the chairman of the government’s credit agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), to set up the Rubber Reserve Company as a subsidiary for the purposes of stockpiling natural rubber. Chairman Jesse Jones, a fiscal conservative, grossly underestimated the potential rubber crisis. By early 1942, he had spent only $3 million of an authorized budget of $500 million to develop raw material resources in Latin America.10 In the critical period bracketed by the Nazi invasion of western Europe in the spring of 1940 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Rubber Reserve had let itself be outbid on rubber — sometimes by less than one cent — by foreign bidders, including the Japanese. Rubber Reserve also permitted massive rubber imports by private U.S. tire companies, even during the period when the government agency was supposed to be aggressively stockpiling strategic materials for national defense.11Rubber Reserve also failed to advance the government’s synthetic rubber program. In May 1941, the U.S. government signed agreements with leading producers of rubber, chemicals, and petroleum products for the construction and operation of synthetic rubber manufacturing facilities with a total annual capacity of 100,000 tons. But U.S. congressional hearings later revealed that a cartel agreement between I. G. Farben of Germany and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey barred Standard from participating in the development of petroleum-derived synthetic rubber. The New Republic pointed out that Standard Oil was more loyal to international business than to the U.S. government and was still doing business with Hitler until March 1942. Furthermore, Standard (like other powerful corporations) had representatives working for the War Production Board who had participated in the government’s synthetic rubber councils and allowed Jones to dawdle while Japan seized the prime sources of natural rubber in Southeast Asia.12After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government, seeking to increase synthetic rubber production capacity to a minimum of 700,000 tons annually (including production by privately owned facilities), began construction on additional facilities, with $600 million from RFC earmarked for these plants.13 But U.S. planners affirmed that synthetic rubber alone could not meet the wartime demand; natural rubber was required for critical war materiel such as truck tires, which relied on 30 percent to 65 percent of natural crude for mixture with synthetic. U.S. officials leaned on Latin American nations to fill this gap.14 Between March and October 1942, the U.S. government signed rubber agreements with all 16 producing countries in Latin America. The Amazon accounted for less than 1 percent of the global rubber supply at the time of Pearl Harbor, but as the ancestral home to millions of wild rubber trees, U.S. officials viewed the forest as a critical source of latex.The story of the Brazilian Amazon’s legendary rubber boom and bust is well known and need only be briefly summarized here. Between 1850 and the 1910s, the Amazon commanded a near monopoly of the world supply of rubber, witnessing spectacular economic and demographic growth as a result.15 During this period, the Amazon absorbed an estimated 300,000 migrants from Ceará and other northeastern states, driven out of their homelands by the inequitable distribution of land, the expansion of cash-crop agriculture, greater population density, and catastrophic series of droughts that struck the region’s backlands in the late nineteenth century.16 According to official census data, the population of the state of Amazonas, for example, ballooned from 57,610 in 1872 to 363,166 in 1920 — a 530 percent increase over the period.17But the reign of Amazonian rubber proved ephemeral. Although native to the Amazon, rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) in that region grew dispersed in the forest over great distances and were ravaged by leaf blight when cultivated in plantations. Furthermore, most wild rubber grew upriver in the Amazon, some 2,000 to 2,500 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Tapped under insalubrious and exploitative conditions, bedeviled by poor transportation networks and limited credit mechanisms, and lacking adequate local sources of surplus labor, Amazonian rubber lost its competitive edge to British plantations in Southeast Asia by the 1910s. With the Amazonian rubber trade in stagnation between 1920 and 1940, some 14 percent of the population left the rubber zones. Many returned to the Northeast or else swelled the cities of Manaus and Belém.18The upriver rubber properties were also historically marked by a notable gender imbalance. During the classic rubber boom, bosses purportedly preferred to contract unaccompanied male migrants because they were reluctant to multiply financial risk by advancing passage to dependents. Bosses also assumed that solitary men with less time to hunt, fish, and cultivate crops for subsistence were more likely to incur debt at the trading post.19 Even after the bust, men significantly outnumbered women in upriver regions such as the territory of Acre. In 1923, Tastevin found that of the estimated 1,979 individuals living along the Muru River (an affluent of the Tarauacá), 915 were men, 345 women, 370 boys, and 349 girls.20 In the upper Tarauacá, he noted that out of 1,500 adult men, a scant 400 lived in families.21 As he noted, men emigrated from the Northeast to the Amazon “only in order to return home and marry after acquiring a small capital in Acre.”22 Indeed, as late as 1950, Acre had a population of 62,612 men and 52,143 women, reflecting these gendered migratory patterns.23To be sure, state officials had long encouraged the settlement of families in the Amazon as a strategy to colonize the frontier. Under the Directorate, instituted in the Amazon by the Marquis de Pombal between 1758 and 1798, the Portuguese crown rewarded marital unions between Luso-Brazilian men and indigenous women as a mechanism to ensure a more durable form of settlement in the region.24 And during the turn-of-the-century rubber boom, a number of Amazonian politicians and elites had endorsed the resettlement of families as a means to encourage homesteading, diversify agricultural production, and stabilize a “rootless” male population.25In a historic visit to Manaus in October 1940, Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas proclaimed the commitment of the federal government to the Amazon’s socioeconomic rehabilitation. While praising the original nordestino pioneers in the Amazon, the Vargas government denounced the historic evils of extractivism and the “nomadic” lifestyles of rubber tappers.26 The authoritarian regime endorsed policies promoting colonization, scientific agriculture, and public-health campaigns in the Amazon. Seeking to capitalize on the growing international demand for rubber, in 1940 the federal government instituted an annual subsidy of four thousand ship passages for Nordestinos and their families to relocate to the rubber properties of Amazonas and Acre.27 Under the plan, devised by the Conselho de Imigração e Colonização, migrants would be screened and selected in the Northeast by officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, while the Ministry of Labor’s Departamento Nacional de Imigração (DNI) would oversee transport by ship from Ceará to the Amazon, where they would be placed on the seringais (rubber-producing properties).28 Moreover, in December 1941, Vargas created the Colônia Agrícola do Amazonas to promote agricultural smallholding in the Amazon.29 As Péricles Melo Carvalho of the DNI noted, the creation of agricultural colonies, in conjunction with the subsidized transport of thousands of migrants, would allow the new wave of nordestino families to settle in the Amazon.30 These policies signaled the Vargas regime’s commitment to state-sponsored colonization of the nation’s sparsely populated hinterland as a mechanism to combat latifundismo, increase production of agricultural staples, defend Brazil’s unfortified borders, and stanch burgeoning urban poverty and labor unrest.31 Northeastern migrants had, in fact, increasingly moved southward as the expansion of industry and state agencies in cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro offered promises of social mobility. Between 1934 and 1939, approximately 212,000 Nordestinos entered São Paulo, with Bahia supplying the overwhelming majority of 151,236 and Ceará sending 5,195.32In March 1942, U.S. and Brazilian officials signed a series of agreements for the mobilization of Brazil’s strategic raw materials in exchange for a $100 million line of credit from the Export-Import Bank, including the establishment of a $5 million fund by the Rubber Reserve Company (later Rubber Development Corporation, RDC) for the intensification of rubber production in the Amazon.33 The agreement between the United States and Brazil provided for the sale of all exportable surplus of crude rubber at a fixed price until December 31, 1946. But officials recognized that a fixed price alone would not guarantee adequate rubber production. One of the most serious limitations to increased output was the shortage of willing labor in the rubber-producing areas of the Amazon. The Brazilian Amazon occupies more than 1.5 million square miles, but in 1940 it was home to less than 2 million of the nation’s 40 million residents.34 American officials estimated there were 34,000 active tappers in the Amazon, based on the region’s average annual output of only 16 – 18,000 tons in the early 1940s.35 Many tappers who remained in the rubber-producing regions after the rubber bust had come to rely more heavily on subsistence agriculture, hunting, and fishing to compensate for reduced supplies from merchants or to avert the accumulation of debt at the commercial trading post.36 Government officials viewed them as incapable or unwilling to meet the need for systematic tapping demanded by the wartime crisis. As the U.S. consul in Belém noted, the rural Amazonian population was primarily composed of “individuals who perhaps have tapped rubber in the past and gave it up for farming, fishing, or just plain loafing.”37 Notwithstanding their general condescension, government officials acknowledged that the local tapper was reluctant to step up production efforts because “deep down in his heart he has the idea that no matter how hard he works that the patrão [boss] will get all his money anyway.” For this reason, one American rubber technician noted that bosses favored migration from the Northeast, since “a surplus of labor would give them a chance to pick and place the best thereby getting more efficiency.”38The initial government agreement aimed to transport families to the Amazon from the backlands of Ceará and neighboring northeastern states. These regions had been stricken by drought in 1941 and 1942, propelling 20 – 30,000 refugees to the coastal city of Fortaleza. Between April and July 1942, the DNI used funding from Rubber Reserve to transport over five thousand workers and their families to the Amazon, and by February 1943 it had moved 14,484 people, including 7,435 men. The DNI’s emphasis on the resettlement of nordestino families stemmed not only from the humanitarian crisis but also from the government agency’s policy encouraging the colonization of the Amazon by families.39But by late 1942, the American government’s appeal for increased rubber production, conjoined with wartime strains on Brazil’s vulnerable transportation sector, prompted the Vargas regime to amend its Amazonian colonization project. In August 1942, Brazil declared war on Germany, cementing the alliance between the Vargas regime and the American government. Although the DNI continued to relocate northeastern families to the Amazon throughout the war, difficulties in mass transport — exacerbated by fuel shortages, limited shipping space, and German U-boat attacks on Brazilian coastal transport in 1942 — would lead the Vargas government to prioritize the rapid deployment of unaccompanied male workers. Maximizing the number of tappers was seen as key to meeting American requests for rubber yields of 60,000 tons in 1943 and 100,000 tons in 1944.40 Under the terms of a bilateral agreement signed on December 22, 1942, the Brazilian government’s Serviço Especial de Mobilização dos Trabalhadores para Amazônia (SEMTA) was entrusted with transporting 50,000 male laborers from northeastern Brazil to the Amazon by the end of May 1943. Of these, 70 percent were to be single men without families and 30 percent unaccompanied married men.41 Brazilian authorities continued to target the sharecroppers, tenants, and rural smallholders of Ceará. In return for a two-year stint in the rubber zone, the Brazilian government exempted migrants from military service. The RDC subsidized the entire operation at a cost of $100 per man accepted at Belém, the port of entry to the Amazon — a total liability of $5 million.The rush to acquire natural rubber for the critical year of 1943 had necessitated rapid, mass migration to the Amazon, overtaxing the capacity of U.S. and Brazilian government agencies. It also led to the overwhelming masculinization of the initial resettlement plan. For example, port authorities at Manaus recorded the arrival of 17,928 men and 9,023 women in 1942; in 1944, the number of men that disembarked at Manaus jumped to 27,139, while the number of women had climbed to only 10,287.42 To be sure, not all of those who arrived at the port of Manaus during the war years were directly involved in the rubber campaign, but the figures certainly reflect the demographic shifts prompted by official labor migration schemes. The emphasis on transporting unaccompanied male workers would also lead the Vargas regime to recalibrate the gendered timbre of official propaganda.In promoting wartime migration to the Amazonian rubber estates, U.S. and Brazilian officials vowed to regulate work conditions in a trade long associated with debt peonage. Because tappers enjoyed considerable autonomy over the means of production (due to the geographic dispersal of rubber trees), bosses historically sought to subjugate workers through control of the means of exchange. Advancing credit for the purchase of supplies, food, industrial goods, and alcohol at highly inflated prices, bosses saddled tappers with onerous debt.43 In addition, poor epidemiological conditions caused high rates of morbidity and mortality among the local population. The Vargas regime, with the backing of New Dealers from the Board of Economic Warfare, instituted mandatory wartime recruitment and employment contracts for migrant tappers. Under the recruitment contract, SEMTA was to provide free transportation, lodging, medical care, startup tapping supplies, a small daily wage, and “religious support” to migrants en route to the Amazon.44 Upon arrival, the worker would sign a two-year standard contract with the operator of the rubber property, in which the boss agreed to furnish the tapper with foodstuffs, clothing, medicine, and tools without deriving undue profit from these sales. The operator further agreed to help the tapper construct a barraca (shack) and a defumador (smokehouse for curing rubber), to provide cleared trails granting access to rubber trees, and to credit tappers upon the sale of rubber the value corresponding to a minimum of 60 percent of the official price. Disputes between bosses and tappers regarding contract violations were to be adjudicated by the newly created federal labor court, the Justiça do Trabalho.45 The Superintendência do Vale Amazônico (SAVA), created by the Vargas government to transport the migrant workers from Belém to upriver recruitment camps, was to enforce price controls on goods supplied to local merchants and bosses. Finally, the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) funded an extensive public-health program to combat malaria, infectious disease, and malnutrition in the Amazon.46Wartime officials aimed to promote nordestino labor migration not only by modifying the conditions of labor but also by transforming its social significance and meaning. The Brazilian and American governments proclaimed that under the aegis of the welfare state, the Amazon would be thoroughly transformed and the migrant tappers remade into proud men, model workers, and patriotic citizens. Gone was the Green Hell of the Amazon projected by intellectuals in Latin American “jungle novels”: the embodiment of natural and human brutality.47 Gone were the images of the Amazon as a penal colony for criminal men, a death trap for military recruits, and a den of wayward or trafficked women.48 Employing massive propaganda, the binational wartime campaign showcased the economic promise of the Amazon and the patriotic importance of rubber tapping.49 The OIAA collaborated with Vargas’s Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda to popularize the rubber campaign through the mass media, while SEMTA had its own propaganda division that designed posters and flyers targeting the nordestino population. In the rural Northeast, the Brazilian government worked closely with the Catholic Church to promote migration to the Amazon. Wartime print media, radio, and film in both countries trumpeted not only state efforts to salvage the Amazon but also the heroic migrants bound for the region.50Rubber-campaign propaganda monumentalized the masculinity of the Nordestino. Recruitment material enshrined diverse masculinist tropes: the northeastern man exercising the traditional role of breadwinner and protector, the intrepid frontiersman whose independence ensured financial success and social prestige, and the worker whose newfound wartime obligations were critical to national defense. Casting a patriotic light on a livelihood marked by privation, disease, violence, and solitude, the Vargas regime dubbed the migrants soldados da borracha (rubber “soldiers”), transforming the marginal male populations of the Amazon and the Northeast into national heroes with special rights and duties. The propaganda was also racially inflected, since elite discourse defined the rural Nordestino’s essential character as the distinct product of the mixed white and indigenous ancestry that marked the backlander (sertanejo).Like many of the images popularized by the Vargas regime, the celebration of nordestino aptitude in braving the Amazon repackaged classic images, regional lore, and popular ideals. Touting the money to be made in rubber tapping, Brazilian and U.S. government propaganda stressed the responsibility of the Nordestino to sustain his household. Such patriarchal roles were codified in the rural Northeast and were most likely shared by many of the migrants themselves in one variation or another: whether the head of household who smarted under the tenancy or sharecropping arrangements common in the region or the adult son of a smallholder whose autonomy was kept in check by an overbearing father or elder male — even if these roles did not exhaust all of the meanings of being a poor Nordestino.51 Such was clearly the case, for example, of Espedito Pimentel Madeiro, age 22, who was looking for work in Fortaleza to support his widowed mother and sisters in the interior of Ceará when a private labor contractor offered to advance his passage to work in the Amazon.52 Yet if Brazilian and American government officials did not invent these roles for Nordestinos, they clearly preyed upon the men’s anxieties to fulfill them. In a poster produced by the OIAA to encourage rubber tapping, the Amazon was portrayed as a fabled El Dorado. One side the poster showed piles of latex; on the other side were the fruits of the hardworking tapper’s labor: china, utensils, and a sewing machine that he could provide for his wife (figure 1). Likewise, a small cartoon-format booklet told of the adventures of a brave cowboy from the northeastern backlands who worked for a powerful landowner. One day, he decided to try his luck in the Amazon. Although he pined away for his sweetheart, good fortune smiled upon him in the form of an experienced tapper who taught him how to extract rubber. His earnings multiplied, and soon the migrant was able to send for his beloved. The strikingly robust and elated couple married in a festive ceremony, and neither ever wished to leave the rubber region (figure 2).53Images of the virile Nordestino who penetrated the “virgin” forest were standard in both classic literature and frontier legend. In the early twentieth century, Brazil’s renowned intellectual Euclides da Cunha wrote a series of essays on the Amazon, lauding the Nordestinos who braved the forest in search of rubber. He remarked, “[T]he people that populate it are marked by their bravery. They do not cultivate or beautify it, they dominate it . . . they are taming the desert.”54 In his “Poema da Seringueira,” published in 1927, Pereira da Silva (himself a nordestino migrant to the Amazon) hailed the intrepid tapper, with “a bush knife, a rifle, and a small ax / with muscles of steel and strong chest / with a fast eye.” These brave workers emerged from the twisted paths in the jungle with “a pail full of milk [latex] . . . of gold / dreaming of a fortune” and his triumphant return to the Northeast. Pereira da Silva also referred to the rubber tree as a “charitable endowed mother” who offered her “full breasts” to the “drought refugees / the desperados.”55 In local Amazonian history, of course, the heroism of the Nordestinos during the classic rubber boom was legion: the migrants’ relentless push into the rubber-rich Bolivian region of Acre in the southwestern Amazon had allowed for Brazil’s ultimate annexation of the territory in 1903.56 As the newspaper O Acre noted in 1943, the Cearenses who came to the Amazon fleeing drought in their home region had written “the most glorious and heroic pages of our history with their blood.”57In affirming the Nordestino’s natural vocation for rubber tapping, state officials and intellectuals invoked tenets of racial and climatic determinism. For example, in 1940, Brazilian anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto countered the belief that miscegenation led to racial decline by pointing to “the population of Northeastern Brazil (Ceará, etc.), a region of big and strong families of courageous and active men, conquerors of the Amazon forest, all with some Indian and white blood.”58 Or as a 1939 treatise on nordestino racial typologies noted, “The sertanejo is a defined ethnic type. He has amalgamated in his psyche the Indian’s characteristics of resistance and environmental adaptation with the boldness of the white colonist.”59 A magazine describing migrants awaiting transport from Fortaleza to the Amazon expressed admiration for “the strong bodies and bulging muscles of these men from the interior of the states of the Northeast, accustomed to the rigors of the tropical sun, accustomed to ‘earning their bread with the sweat of their brow’ as the Bible says.”60 Moreover, the mixed-blood nordestino migrant would not “perturb” the process of ethnic formation in the Amazon, since the migrants were “mestiços just like the caboclos they encountered.”61The zeal of Brazilian officials in racially classifying the nordestino male is evident in the anthropomorphic surveys of migrants carried out by government medical teams. Administered as part of the mandatory physical exams prior to embarkation to the Amazon, these studies categorized recruits according to so-called biotypes, denoting their skin color, head size and shape, and stature.62 Thus, racial theories served to reinforce essentialist ideas about rural nordestino men. The shift from “harder” scientific theories of race to “softer” cultural interpretations was not a seamless transition.63Alongside traditional tributes to the jungle hero and self-made man, government wartime propaganda redefined rubber tapping as a manly duty to protect the nation and defend freedom worldwide. The government recruitment brochure “Rumo à Amazônia: Terra da fartura” (“Bound for the Amazon: The Land of Plenty”) proclaimed Nordestinos’ “obligation” to fight for world freedom “in the blessed lands of the Amazon, extracting rubber — an indispensable product for victory, like bullets and rifles.”64 Newspaper propaganda cheered the thousands of nordestinos working feverishly in the rubber estates, “these anonymous heroes confronting all types of danger in the ferocious jungle . . . the soldiers of liberty like your brothers who fight in the trenches, upon whom collective hope rests,” fighting for the “liberation of enslaved peoples.”65 Visual images were widely used to target a population with a high illiteracy rate. One OIAA publication, for example, showed a panicky, diminutive Hitler being overrun by an enormous tire and enjoined the tappers to “rub him out with rubber!”A number of scholars who have analyzed Vargas-era political propaganda have emphasized the authoritarian regime’s efforts to militarize Brazilian society in a fascist mold.66 The denomination of tappers a