Revolution in the Terra do Sol

Sarah Sarzynski's innovative study examines rural mobilization and repression in northeastern Brazil in the years surrounding the 1964 military coup, as well as the subsequent memorialization of political struggle. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the region's rural poor organized for greater access to land and political inclusion, challenging centuries of slavery, latifundia, political violence, and corruption. Brazil's postwar oligarchic pact continued to suppress popular empowerment through legal restrictions on suffrage and rural unionization, which insulated the political dealmaking critical to advances in import-substitution industrialization. Yet by the early 1960s, political tensions had begun to chip away at the pillars of power in the northeastern region. Rising land values and land speculation prompted sharecropper and tenant evictions, rending the traditional patron-client bonds of rural society. Growing exodus to the cities magnified the cries for social change, the constituencies for populist politicians, and the visibility of marginalized populations through mass media. Agricultural output lagged behind urban food consumption, auguring worrisome bottlenecks for economists' developmentalist model and voter discontent for politicians. Visions of radical transformations in landholding and political power blossomed throughout Latin America in the Cuban Revolution's aftermath. Thousands of northeastern peasants and rural workers joined the Peasant Leagues, and labor unions organized by the Communists and the Catholic Church, to demand social justice and agrarian reform, “by law or by force.”Northeastern Brazil's radicalization during the João Goulart era (1961–64) has garnered ample scholarly and journalistic attention, yet Sarzynski's incisive analysis adds to the standard approaches of political science and rural sociology. Whereas prior studies focused on nordestinos’ struggles for land and rights, Sarzynski showcases how actors from across the ideological spectrum deployed well-worn images of the region for political battle. By analyzing the historical narratives and cultural tropes that suffused political and popular representations of the Northeast, she critically adds to traditional historiographical emphases on peasant mobilization and counterinsurgency doctrine. In tracing the broader historical arc and cultural framework of northeastern Brazilian power struggles, she demonstrates the methodological value of an interdisciplinary approach to the history of Cold War Latin America.Sarzynski builds on the work of Durval Muniz Albuquerque Jr., whose pioneering intellectual history The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast (1999) explored how the region's so-called cultural essences were depicted by writers, artists, and intellectuals, and how this othering operationalized regional elites' political gambits in an emerging southern-dominated national order. While Albuquerque's analysis cleaves to high cultural production, with scant consideration of particular policy implications, Sarzynski explores images of nordestinos in commercial and documentary films, conservative newspapers and Peasant League publications, chapbooks and oral histories, and Brazilian and US government reports, underscoring their impact on public perceptions and political outcomes.Sarzynski skillfully unpacks how Brazilian conservatives and progressives, pressed to narrate sweeping social change in the Northeast, recycled or reinterpreted histories of latifundia, rural bossism, social banditry, millenarianism, and marronage. Sensationalism also sold, as evinced by the numerous Nordestern films and shock-value documentaries richly analyzed by Sarzynski. Although both the Left and the Right often drew on common cultural stereotypes of northeastern primitivism, religious fanaticism, racialized expression, and hidebound traditionalism, the political spin differed. Conservative fearmongers transposed the so-called barbarism of the Northeast's legendary messianic leaders and rural outlaws onto the Peasant League organizers, rural union leaders, radicalized clergy, and their followers. They resurrected turn-of-the-century entrepreneurial bosses such as Delmiro Gouveia to spotlight modernizing elites. Progressives, on the other hand, reclaimed historical and cultural patterns of defiance to slavery, coronelismo, and social injustice as symbols of moral superiority, masculine virtue, and popular resistance, precedents for contemporary social movements. Sarzynski's chapter on the instrumentalization of religious politics by conservatives, liberationist clergy, and commercial filmmakers is particularly exemplary in its source analysis.Sarzynski then jumps forward to redemocratization to explore the memory of the Peasant Leagues. State repression ensured that the Northeast never became the Cold War's “next Cuba”—in fact, Sarzynski examines conflicting assessments of the leagues' ties to the Fidel Castro regime—but the region would symbolize resistance to Brazil's oligarchic, authoritarian order and inspire current-day rural social movements. The book concludes with an extensive oral history with Zito de Galiléia, an organic intellectual and former league organizer committed to preserving the peasant movement's historical documentation and memory. Although Sarzynski might have provided more direct testimony from and discourse analysis of her informant rather than summary, she broadens the temporal scope in juxtaposing “outsider” and “insider” representations of the leagues and thus allows us to reflect on historical narration as a form of palimpsest (p. 252).In northeastern Brazil, Cold War counterinsurgency doctrine could be readily vernacularized thanks to long-standing canards of cultural atavism and social pathology. Such notions, Sarzynski compellingly shows, were deeply rooted in concepts of race, gender, class, religion, and environment. Rural social movements sought to convert such concepts into ideological weapons, but they proved no match for the real ones wielded by security forces and landowners' thugs

Agrarian reform · Agrarian society · Democracy · Economic history · Land reform · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Radicalization · Sociology · Suffrage · Universal suffrage · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Brazilian cultural history and politics · History · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America