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1 – Freyre indicts the brutal, race-based system of bondage and the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a powerful and avaricious few as destructive forces in his region’s past. But he felt that the ills of monoculture—the extensive cultivation of a single crop—exceeded either of these. Sugar, not the people who profited from it, brought slavery and required production on a large scale, foreclosing on the emergence of a balanced, diverse agricultural society.
2 – Still, his observations offer revealing insight into the region’s past and prompt important questions. What damage did monoculture do, and how did the exploitative agricultural and labor systems that he highlighted for the colonial period remain relevant in the twentieth century? Did the wounds he described remain open, continuing to harm the landscape and the people? Centuries of cane agriculture and repressive labor regimes did shape the landscape of the sugar-growing region of Pernambuco, frequently called the “forest zone” or zona da mata. This book examines these legacies, through a narrative of labor and agro-environmental history. This approach highlights new facets of the relations between workers and planters and casts new light on the role of the state in agricultural change. Incorporating the intellectual and cultural as well as material dimensions of the environment, it focuses on those most intimately involved in environmental change: workers. It is a labor history viewed through the lens of agroenvironmental change rather than a labor history of a community, union, or productive unit.
3 – The book then tightens the focus in the 1930s, moving forward to examine new perspectives brought by agronomists, social scientists, reformers, and bureaucrats. These groups’ increasing interventions impinged on the basic social structure balanced between planters and workers, introducing new dynamics in this story of labor and agro-environmental change in the zona da mata.
4 – Studies of these major rural labor movements in Pernambuco have tended to analyze their political dynamics while leaving largely unexamined their agricultural contexts. The influence of reformist and activist elements within the Catholic Church played their roles, as did Communists and technicians from the military regime. But the expansion of cane fields from the 1930s onward, the introduction of a new cane variety in the 1950s, new payment schemes for cane cutting, and other key changes influenced workers’ dayto-day lives. This book explores these crucial but overlooked aspects of the period, bearing out Steve Marquardt’s argument that “the entanglement of nature and labor can make a difference at the macro-political level of labor movements and even states.”
Despite the clear links between the environment and rural labor, and despite the fact that social relations with the environment have been on the intellectual agenda in Pernambuco for years, scholars have yet to construct a satisfying framework for analyzing the two in tandem.
5 – Concurring with her judgment, I also ground social relations and expert debates in their agro-environmental reality. The pressing materiality of the agro-environment, and of people’s ideas about and relations to their landscape, signals that the lens of class relations and social structures does not see everything in history.
The planter discourse was dominant, which makes sense considering their greater power, but even as the workers’ language of captivity reflected this discourse it also opened possibilities to contest the elite view. In addition, the interventionist state of the military dictatorship introduced a new landscape discourse into the region also marked by the assumption of control but reliant on the transforming power of science and technocracy. I call on these schematic outlines of the planter discourse of landscape, the workers’ iteration, and the state discourse as explanatory variables at various moments during the narrative of the region’s history and describe how they changed. The processes that drove the history of the region were indissolubly bound to discourses and metaphors of the landscape.
The concept of landscape is marked by a fundamental duality: it is at once an idea—a panorama associated with particular meanings—and an environment with a “consuming materiality.”17 It is what we see and the way we see it. This rich “enviro-cultural” quality makes the concept especially valuable for the study of agricultural environments. The landscape of the zona da mata has been and continues to be both a place and a diverse set of discourses about that place.
Environmental history as both past material reality of a place and as a discourse about that place
7 – The concept of landscape has its skeptics. Some critique historians’ use of the idea, charging that they fail to clearly connect it to historical causality.23 Does a landscape make change, and if not how does it matter to history? Others feel that landscape is only a way of seeing common among tourists or outsiders and that it fails to capture “natives’” apprehension of their surroundings.24 They suggest that landscape implies a privileged view, a view from a position of power, and therefore only some people “see” landscape.
8 – The Brazilian Northeast’s sugar region was a landscape of labor and a labored landscape. In the minds of the planter class, it was a laboring landscape: the landscape itself labored for planters, as they saw no distinction between land and labor
8-9 – What lies at the center of this book’s narrative, workers or their environment? I argue that the answer can be both—that by examining processes of agricultural change, the stories of workers and the environment can be told together. Indeed, it is one story. In human relations to the environment generally, “our own bodies and our labor . . . blur the boundaries between INTRODUCTION 9 the artificial and the natural,” and the history of an agro-ecosystem such as a sugarcane region is “made from and inscribed on the human body.”
9 – In agricultural settings, shifts in crops (or varieties), technology, or scale catalyze social transformations. In “agricultural capitalism generally,” Marquardt observes, “environmental change and change in labor process are inextricably entangled with one another at the point of production.”31 A clear example comes from the massive expansion of straight-line grain crops in the North American plains, which decimated prairie grass at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, producing an explosion in wheat and corn production and then, in the 1930s, the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl. Even when agricultural change does not have such massive and transparent effects, we should be attuned to the social changes linked to agriculture.
10 – By accommodating these different periodizations, from the longue durée to the “history of events,” we can resolve stable phenomena such as a class’s culturally influenced view of the landscape while also grasping the immediate import of a major event such as a strike.33 Reinaldo Funes Monzote has provided a masterful example of this method in his recent study of how forests gave way to sugarcane in Cuba. Funes Monzote explicitly acknowledges the role of attitudes and ideologies in structuring various actors’ treatment and exploitation of the environment, and he tracks debates over resource use and agricultural development in Cuba across centuries.
12 – Brazilian environmental history, and the field in Latin America more generally, is at a comparatively early stage of development. Excellent models appeared in the early 1990s, including Warren Dean’s masterful “biography” of the Atlantic Forest. With José Augusto Pádua’s important work, we have new insight into environmental and conservationist thought during the late colonial period and the nineteenth century. Funes Monzote’s long-term recent study of Cuban forests and sugarcane is a welcome environmental perspective into sugar studies. And a new cohort of young environmental history scholars has been energized recently by a series of four international conferences.43 Much of the work contributing to Latin American environmental history has focused on commodity-specific studies, forest issues, urban environments, and the histories of conservation and environmentalism. In this study, I focus on omissions that remain in the field, including perceptions of the environment and interactions between populations and their states.44 Using a unique narrative mixing labor and agro-environmental histories, I attempt to shed new light on major political events in the region.
33-34 – One measure of the forest’s embarrassment of riches was the degree of specialization associated with ox cart, sugar box, and engenho construction: massarandûba for the engenho superstructure, sapucaia for the grinder axles, sapupira for the gears of the grinder, páu de arco for the waterwheel, sapupira-merim for the ox carts, and on and on.74 34 THE LANDSCAPE OF THE ZONA DA MATA Only a very diverse forest could provide the timber variety for such exact matching of wood type to construction purpose.
53 – Nabuco’s writings range from full-throated abolitionism to nostalgic memoir. But consistent in his writing is the idea that slave labor shaped and left its imprint on formless nature. It specifically molded the Northeast that he knew and loved, producing a discrete landscape.
61 – “The regional environment tends . . . to make the man, the group, the human culture in its image,” Freyre writes, “but, for its part . . . the human culture acts on the regional environment, altering it in some cases profoundly.” He described his own work in Northeast not as geography but as regional or ecological sociology, the best of which he said “never discounts the ‘qualities’ of a landscape.”
How does this compare to contemporary environmental history?
64 – For members of the sugar elite, the landscape they created was deeply influenced by experience with and assumption of the right to command. They expressed command as an ethic, or a guiding code of conduct on the engenho. This understanding helped shape a particular planter habitus, which in turn provided the foundations for the elite’s discourse of the laboring landscape.
The laboring landscape was a portable, communal, and durable discourse; it was shared by more than one person, was persistent over time, and was seen throughout the sugar zone.
The will to command was reinforced through violence, but it was also assumed by planters as a class prerogative. It may be that further research will demonstrate the concept’s applicability in the Caribbean and other sugar-growing areas or places of dense plantation cultivation generally. My point here is not to argue for the distinctiveness of this tradition of seigniorial authority but to emphasize its relationship to the crystallization of a particular discourse of landscape during a period of crisis and transformation in the cane zone.
68 – The roots of the elite’s landscape discourse become clearer when we reverse one of Bourdieu’s formulas. The process at work in the sugar zone can be perceived not only as history turning into nature but also as nature turning into history. The ways the members of the elite took the “nature” around them and incorporated it into a particular history helped structure their memories of the environment and their disposition toward the elements of their personal stories. They embedded in the sugar fields around them a history of their own naturalized power and the subjugation of African-descended workers and the environment. Power operates through “nature” just as it operates through race, class, and gender, since environmental change and the effects of environmental constraints on human beings have consequences that are levied on societies in close accordance with power differentials.
