The People of the River

This book excavates a deeper history of black political struggle in the Brazilian Amazon, beginning long before 1988. This year was when Article 68 of Brazil's new constitution provided a legal avenue for the descendants of maroons (i.e., runaway slaves) to obtain collective title to their lands. But black peasant communities, and particularly maroons and their descendants, have been making political claims and defending their rights to land and resources for centuries. In The People of the River, Oscar de la Torre traces these struggles back to the time of slavery, through the period of abolition, and into the twentieth century. In doing so, the author makes an important contribution to our understanding of how Afro-Amazonian communities preserved their autonomy over time.A central insight of the book is that the natural landscapes of Amazonia helped make marronage and other kinds of freedom, even within slavery, possible. While policymakers bemoaned the temptations offered by the extractive economy, slaves and maroons learned how to use the forests and the rivers to their advantage. De la Torre describes this as a process of “environmental creolization,” whereby Afro-Amazonians developed mastery in the skills and lifeways of the tropical lowlands. Slaves learned, for example, where to find the groves of wild Brazil nuts, became skilled hunters of monkeys and tapirs, and served as river and forest guides for traveling naturalists and explorers. In effect, they developed a “parallel economy,” based on illicit trade and unsupervised movement via dugout canoes and narrow foot paths; these activities extended far beyond the confines of the plantation and thrived out of the masters' sight. Runaway slaves also made the natural world their own, relying on their growing knowledge of riverine and forest escape routes and utilizing geographical features like waterfalls to evade their pursuers. After abolition, these river- and forest-based skills enabled maroon descendants to maintain their hard-won autonomy, even as they moved closer to regional towns and commercial outposts.Environmental creolization, de la Torre argues, was also a cultural process. Black slaves, maroons, and free peasants developed mythical and historical narratives around features of the landscape that had become important to their survival. This is where de la Torre's innovative approach to oral history sources comes to the fore. In chapter 2, for example, he analyzes narratives about the Big Snake of the Trombetas River, putting these in conversation with fascinating archival evidence about the development of communities of escaped slaves along the river during the nineteenth century. The maroons combined West African and Amazonian myths and symbols as a way of remembering their passage through a new and often-forbidding landscape, their eventual triumph over those who sought to recapture them, and their forging of new networks, families, and communities along the rivers and lakes of the region.In the reminiscences of black peasants today, de la Torre finds layers of historical memory that go back to the time of slavery. In interviews that the author conducted in and around the lower Amazonian towns of Vigia, Alenquer, Oriximiná, and Santarém, maroon descendants and other rural black informants link long-past experiences of slavery and escape with more recent forms of exploitation and resistance. Chapter 4 is especially rich, revealing the narrative merging of conflicts around the privatization of Brazil nut groves in the early decades of the twentieth century with struggles for freedom in the preceding century. Many of these informants take pride in the self-sufficiency of their communities; at the same time, however, they emphasize their long-standing relationships with local patrons, employers, traders, and politicians. The complex and varied nature of these relationships is corroborated by the extensive regional documentation gathered by de la Torre, which includes land possession deeds, notarial records, and wills.That indigenous peoples make only fleeting appearances in the book seems purposeful, as the author aims to put Afro-Amazonians at the center of a regional history from which they are usually excluded. It would have added another layer to the analysis, however, to explore how the maroons and their descendants competed, collaborated, or forged kin relations with autonomous indigenous groups, fugitive Indians, and native villagers of the region. Yuko Miki's recent book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (2018), shows what can be gained from bringing these groups more fully into the same frame of analysis.For Afro-Amazonians, knowledge of the environment developed out of long, often-painful experiences—seemingly endless treks, seasons of hunger, and encounters with enemies both human and nonhuman. But as The People of the River reveals, this knowledge was also coproduced. It emerged from the common project of generations of Afro-descendant peoples, to build autonomous communities in landscapes imbued with their own history

Amazon rainforest · Archaeology · Constitution · Creolization · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Historical ecology · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory · Anthropology · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management · Ecology · History · Law

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