THE CITY IN BRAZIL AMERINDIAN CITY, NEO-INDIGENOUS METROPOLIS I will try to give, oh very powerful lord, a brief account of the greatness, wonders and oddness of this great city of Tenochtitlan. This town is founded in a lagoon, and from the dry land to the center of the city, wherever one enters from, it's two leagues in width. This city is as large as Seville and Cordoba.
The main streets are very broad and straight. Every street, from time to time, is crossed by a water course. There are many squares, where there are continuous markets and points of trade.
All sorts of goods known on the face of the Earth, from jewelry made of gold, silver and copper, to chickens, doves and parrots. There are vegetables of all kinds, bee honey, cotton yarns for weaving, deer leather, colors to dye fabrics and hides, high-quality dishes, maize, either in grains or already made into bread of an excellent flavor. Considering these people barbarians, and so estranged from the knowledge of God, it's admirable that they have all things.
Unlike the Spanish, who, upon landing in the Americas, faced spectacular cities, com cidades espetaculares from the Aztec capital to Cusco, the Portuguese didn't find urban centers on Brazil's Atlantic seaboard. But, if it's true that coastal or immediately from the countryside Tupis and Tapuias failed to create a social order that transcended the horizon of the camps and villages, we shouldn't say that our Amerindians, as a whole, have entirely ignored urban forms of life. Although with caution and caveats, it's accepted today the thesis of the existence of ancient cities or of certain types of city settlements, in the Amazonian space that's currently Brazilian now.
Both in the Amazon floodplains as in the Xingu regions. Settlements that can even serve us to stretch or even subvert the Western, modern concept of city that's certainly unable to account of the spectrum of facts and aspects found in the universality of the urban experience. What happened was that these cities disappeared, before the conquest and colonization processes could reach the spaces they'd inserted themselves into.
We have a kind of Tupiniquim syndrome, those societies with cities, temples, with large buildings, in the pre-colonial past, before the Europeans' arrival, only existed in the Andes or in Mesoamerica. It's either the Aztecs in Mexico, or the Incas here. And this idea that our Indians don't have a past or that the forest remains virgin, untouched and inhabited by isolated small groups lasts to this day.
And there's a reason for this. First, a reason in the colonial ideology itself, that the natives are inferior, that they didn’t know how to build towns or temples, etc. , and they're small and don't have a past.
And second, the idea that nothing's preserved in the Amazon, isn't it? The forest's eaten it all up, etc. For a long time, we had some myths, sometimes, of the lost Amazonian city, of a lost civilization in the Amazon.
. . That's already made it into the headlines sometimes along the 19th, 20th century.
And this is actually an idea é uma ideia that a civilization, a city, that they can only be built with rocks and limestone. And archaeology today is deconstructing this discourse and finding these cities. Only that they aren't of rock, nor brick, nor limestone.
They're made of dirt, they're made of wood and they're of imperishable materials, but they leave great marks that we're now recovering. Actually, we have records of such large settlements, back from the first chroniclers who wrote on the Amazon. Orellana's own expedition, which went down the Amazon by accident, kind of in a rush, the reports we have from Carvajal, the one with the friar, the official chronicler, he says of large population contingents.
These ethno-historical reports were discredited by scientists, who took a more scientific approach in the 1950s, saying they wanted to impress the kings of Portugal, so they'd tell exaggerated tales. And today we see this isn't so exaggerated. Of course that, ever since, these peoples have been dislocated, many of them went upriver, didn't remain by the Amazon river, they fled, or were decimated, or made prisoners to become slaves, anyway.
. . What came afterwards is only bad things.
And today the Amazon scenario o cenário da Amazônia is completely different, an Amazon we estimate to have been inhabited by six million people, more or less, when the Europeans arrived. Then there are landfills, "tesos", roads, ditches. .
. What's being called geoglyphs, which are these trenches like the Nazca Lines, only in geometric shapes. There are megaliths in Amapá, which seem to have been cerimonial sites, with burial grounds beneath them.
So there's a number of constructions and, above all, of much dirt being moved to build these places, this absolutely cultural landscape, which I think takes us to our subject here, which is "well, then, how to think the city in these Amerindian cultures of the Amazon or the tropicals, and how these things we're seeing challenge us to think what a city is, what's like to have all these people tinkering with the landscape and living together, in the same place. Marajó is an island, the largest of Brazil, which suffers greatly with the tide. There are the famous "tesos marajoaras".
What are the tesos marajoaras? They're landfills. And what the Indians did?
They dug land from streams, from the Amazon streams, and increased these already natural islands, and, at the same time, controlled the tides. They had enormous fish reservoirs. The capital of resources was huge.
They had that incredible pottery. cerâmica incrível. Superfancy, superworked ceramics, with a very complex iconography, entirely ritualistic, in the sense of producing images that make you see other things, really ritualistic, in a way, like taking a hallucinogen.
I think it's an incredible lesson to be learned today about sustainability, forest preservation. . .
They managed to live there, thousands of years, and preserve the forest. It isn't a virgin, untouched forest. It's a handled forest, but it's still there with a lot of interesting products, for the human being, that they didn't deplete.
On the contrary, they increased biodiversity and raised the amount of the most interesting products. I think it's a huge lesson we have to respect today, get to know more about, research and try to apply in the preservation of our forests today. After that, we can talk about, at least, three fundamental moments of the history of the city in the Amazon.
The first one concerns the European penetration in that world of waters and lands and the consolidation of the territorial occupation. It's the time of the birth of São Luís, ending the French invasion to the island of Maranhão, and from Forte do Presépio of the city of Santa Maria do Belém do Pará, followed by the rise of the initial center of what's today the city of Manaus, the old Barra do Rio Negro. About a century later, we'd watch an intense regional urbanization process, with the Pombal villages.
In the short span of four years, in the 1750s, circa 60 settlements were created in the Brazilian Amazon. That's why today we have a perspective that comes from the ancient Amerindian cities to the current mingled metropoles, the caboclo cities of the Amazonian tropics. Belém is the main city in Polynesia.
The migration wave of Malaysians came this way and in the span of the mango trees Belém do Pará was born. It's funny that we imagine, at every turn, that we live in Brazil, but it's fantastic the feeling of being in Cairo. I can't get a grip why.
Mango trees. Cairo doesn't have mango trees evaporating in the streets. I've been enjoying it too much.
Belém was made for me, and we go hand in hand. In Belém, the heat dilates the skeleton, my body gets the exact same size as my soul. In Manaus there are indigenous neighborhoods.
And maybe one of the most famous is the one of the Sateré-Mawé. Sateré-Mawés are an ethnic group, who, by the way, are the discoverers of guarana, they incursed towards Manaus and settled there. It's an interesting thing because these neighborhoods have a.
. . a constant movement of coming and going to the villages, that is, they feed each other.
And there's another curious phenomenon in Manaus, which is the following: everybody wants to be an Indian now. Due to the following. There is a competition, quite old, even, the so-called "naked", a soccer competition.
It was created for the Indians some years ago, an "indigenous naked" in Manaus. It turns out that these two competitions converge towards a general cup. Only the Indian competition has less stages until the finals.
So the soccer players want to join the Indians' group for there are fewer obstacles to get to the finals. Conclusion: It's full of neo-Indians, soccer players who're claiming participation in the "indigenous naked", understand? What I think has changed is that indigenous self-identity is no longer a stain.
Time and again I think this to be the product of the indigenous mobilization, majorly, people now see the Indians agora veem o ser índio as a nice identity, an identity that's valued, a recent thing, relatively recent. The military dictatorship was never concerned about economic development. It really was a movement that saw the forest as an enemy.
The forest as an obstacle to development, integration, a very militaristic, geopolitical vision of the Amazon. Much income concentration was made. The population of the Amazon is as poor as northeast's, northeast's countryside.
All social indicators are among the worst in Brazil. So this model can't go on anymore. que não pode mais perdurar.
But I think it's important that we realize that our disaster, of an extremely mercantilist and highway-oriented city causes Belém do Pará or Manaus, for example, 100 meters away from Rio Negro, to be a complete disaster. with all due respect to the manauaras, to the people here, it's a total train wreck. Euclides da Cunha, in the early 20th century, however positivist his vision was, at the margin of history, he talks a lot about the danger of the green desert, if we don't stay tuned to a clear investment in infrastructure, in people's dignity.
I think this is one of the things we have to rethink when seeing today's Amazonian cities. Belém, Santarém, Manaus are cities that have that periphery which are entirely disorganized, they're ugly, it's all deforested. And, in fact, the Amazon is deforested, it all turns to sand.
Miraculously, due to the old kind of occupation prevailing since 1850, until 1920, approximately, the Amazon region remained as the largest domain of tropical nature, with biologically diverse forests, of all the face of the Earth. Unfortunately, in the last 30 years, 40 years, many approach techniques on the Amazon have been adopted and there certainly was, in some places, a negative action due to the combination of the degradation along highways, arms of creeks. .
. And as the ravages extend laterally to a highway, a branch or sub-branch, they combine with the devastations and there's little left in the end. There's an isolated center in Manaus that's another attempt of development, an industrial model in Manaus Free Trade Zone, but it's a model the whole country pays for, subsidizes.
Many people defend the free trade zone model, but it's an anachronistic model for it isn't cutting edge industry and, basically, it depends on tax incentives. Starting a new game isn't dropping all that's been done. It's stopping the agricultural frontier, and really starting developing the Amazon with the resources of its immense biology, of its immense biodiversity.
Maybe we should resume não deve voltar, não é, using these indigenous knowledge, maybe on a large scale? With the knowledge not only of architecture, of the settlements, but also of the use of the forest. .
. Obviously, there's our best example, which has reached global scale: açaí. In the Amazon, traditionally, a common dish is açaí with cassava flour.
This is the dish of the Indians' base food that later went down the riverside populations. Over 15 years ago, açaí became a Brazilian consumption product, and today açaí has reached the global market. There are over 40 products based on açaí, not all are for dietary purposes.
Today açaí's already passing wood as the second economic source for the Amazon. It's already over two billion dollars a year in the Amazon. After it's multiplied, it's worth much more.
Who manages açaí agroforestry systems has a middle class rentability. de classe média. Açaí, then, is the example that you can have a product of the Amazonian biodiversity that hits global markets.
Brazil is G1 country of biodiversity. The model we granted to the Amazon's science and technology revolution is that of the bioindustries. I mean, it's the link of industrialization with bioeconomics of the present and the future.
So, this is the vanguard. I think the whole potential is there. The traditional populations, logically, have developed a way to live along well with the forest, with the rivers, with water, with the animals.
. . Therefore, they have an enormous potential of really being the holders, the leaders at the end of the system, in the forest, along with it, in the small communities, in the small towns spread all over the Amazon.
They have quite an enormous potential of being the first elements of this new production chain of knowledge and of stored biology, incredibly rich, in the forest, in the rivers.
