Frontier Goiás, 1822 – 1889

Abstract

In Frontier Goiás, David McCreery takes up the challenge of writing the history of an isolated backwater. In a field dominated by studies of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, this study of a “periphery of a periphery” is a refreshing change. It contributes to a small but growing literature on rural Brazil and on nineteenth-century state building. McCreery’s Goiás is remote, relatively impoverished, and underpopulated. Landlocked, it attracted mostly poor, colored, landless migrants who then clashed with a widely dispersed indigenous population. However, settlers with capital, influence, and slaves also peopled this remote frontier, thereby replicating social hierarchies prevalent in Brazil’s core regions.McCreery apologizes, though he need not, for the descriptive nature of this study. The basic narrative of many rural regions of Brazil is still poorly understood. This empirical grounding alone provides a valuable contribution. But McCreery does much more than that. First, he conceptualizes the frontier in interesting ways. Rather than a continuous boundary, he sees Goiás as an archipelago of urban nuclei amid vast underpopulated expanses. Its isolation from effective state control was both its danger and its appeal. And Goiás was not particularly dangerous. Because there were so few resources to fight over, frontier violence was relatively modest. In fact, an ongoing lack of resources was critical to the maintenance of Goiás’s frontier status. McCreery concludes: “the ‘frontier’ is a process or a condition, a changeable construct of what people can think conjugated by their material possibilities. A ‘successful’ frontier destroys itself, whereas Goiás repeated the experience for over a half century” (p. 208).Second, McCreery provides a convincing portrait of the limitations of state building in rural Brazil. He addresses the tension between a nineteenth-century top-down political reality and a modern scholarly bias to view nation building from the bottom up. In so doing, he takes the middle ground, neither romanticizing the poor nor vilifying rural elites. Politics instead become pragmatic, commonplace, the stuff of everyday life. This is not to say that the lack of an effective state presence was an unmitigated good. Most administration was handled by incompetent locals, when it was staffed at all. Private influence and patronage routinely trumped enforcement of public law. The inability to tax effectively ensured that infrastructure would be deficient or nonexistent, thereby perpetuating economic underdevelopment. The state never resolved “the Indian problem,” further undercutting its legitimacy. If one accepts McCreery’s criteria of “the separation of public from private resources and the depersonalized exercise of state functions according to established norms” as the “spine of the nation state,” then Imperial Brazil failed (p. 206). Nevertheless, Goiano society seems to have prospered in its modest way.McCreery’s discussion of agregados (rural dependents) provides a much-needed analysis of an understudied group. His findings suggest not excessively exploitative relationships between patron and dependent, but rather a reasonable trade-off of relatively modest labor demands in exchange for security and protection. Moreover, the state was sufficiently weak that indebted dependents could migrate with little fear of reprisal. However, few agregados were likely to enjoy social mobility, even cowboys that were paid with a share of the herd at roundup time.The work is enhanced by McCreery’s attention to ecological and environmental factors that contextualize seemingly irrational economic choices. For example, ranchers did not scientifically “improve” their livestock because hardy local breeds were well adapted to the Goiano environment. By correlating estate size, size of herds and environmental constraints, McCreery is able to calculate the carrying capacity of Goiás’s marginal lands. A low population density helps to explain why most Goianos did not bother to formally register the land they occupied, even when the state provided the opportunity for squatters to do so. And the much-derided “laziness” of the local population makes sense when one realizes that there was little incentive to work beyond subsistence needs on the dry, isolated frontier.The environment becomes a central historical actor, as does the state. Individual historical actors are relatively few; and at times one wishes for more people and fewer cows. And while McCreery makes abundantly clear the limitations of nineteenth-century statistical data, one wonders if his impressive attempts to draw conclusions from flawed data are worth the effort. Those minor quibbles aside, this is an excellent study of an understudied region, written in prose that is simultaneously clear, economical, and engaging. Phrases like “a jail incapable of holding any but the most cooperative prisoner” (p. 11) linger in the mind and make the ordinariness of Brazilian rural life extraordinary and worthy of scholarly notice.