In Amazonia Read Online Free

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