Cycles of drought and images of human suffering, starvation, and displacement have animated Brazil’s national identity since the nineteenth century. Yet, though the tragic effects of drought extend to every geographic region of Brazil, literary and cultural representations of drought remain firmly tied to the Brazilian Northeast.1 Indeed, drought and its human costs have in large measure defined Brazil’s Northeastern geographic and cultural identity. In his thoroughly researched study Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America, Mark Anderson notes that over a fifty-year period, from roughly the 1880s to the 1930s, “the nation undertook a process of assessment that classified the Northeast and its residents as a security risk, a threat to its program of modernization, and an economic liability” (58). Unquestionably, literary production helped galvanize the identification of the Northeast with drought,2 yet one consequence of this literary and cultural tradition is that drought has been consigned to the Northeast—that is, literature and other media often present drought as an unavoidable natural occurrence that, while tragic, remains distant, remote, and otherwise removed from the concentrated population centers of the Southeast.3 Nevertheless, the real effects of drought impact other regions of Brazil as well. For example, severe dry weather resulting from an El Niño phenomenon in 2014–17 led to a devastating drought in the states of São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul, delaying or greatly reducing planting and agricultural operations.4 This drought similarly crippled the city of São Paulo, the metropolitan and financial capital of the country, by reducing the Cantareira Reservoir system, which provides greater São Paulo with the majority of its water, to its lowest levels on record. These acute effects ask us to consider the scarcity of literary representations of drought and its causes and effects that are situated in Brazil’s Southeast region.