Thomas Rogers' Deepest Wounds undertakes a history of a ‘laboring landscape’ (p. 45), by which the author means a region's linked cultural and material environment. The focus is on changes in land use and labour for sugar production in Brazil's north-eastern state of Pernambuco. Although Pernambuco has grown the crop commercially for close to five centuries, Rogers argues that its impacts on the ‘laboring landscape’ remained limited until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when progress arrived not so much as a consequence of the abolition of slavery, largely an economic non-event in the state, but with the new central mills, usinas, which promised mechanisation and new efficiencies – commitments left largely unfulfilled. In the 1930s and 1940s new cane varieties and agricultural sciences tempted some planters out of routine, and events in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s revolutionised the relations between employers and workers and between both and the land. By the 1980s a new world emerged, but still a world of sugar: even today ‘cane dominates life so completely that [cooperative] workers, like their elite ancestors in the region, cannot imagine a future without sugar’ (p. 215).
The author divides the book into three parts. After a brief but useful introduction and a first chapter that surveys the colonial history and the geography of the coastal zona da mata, the state's sugar-producing area, chapter 2 examines discourse on work and environment from around the turn of the last century. Not surprisingly, elite appraisals are easier to find. The memoirs of Joaquim Nabuco, for example, evidence a nostalgia for the paternalistic stability of the traditional estate, while the novels of José Lins de Rego bemoan land and labour degraded by capitalist efficiencies; Gilberto Freyre sees the usinas as an assault on a landscape already scarred by sugar and slavery at the same time as he rejects theories of cultural degradation rooted in race or climate. Workers' views of their ‘laboring landscape’ are harder to ascertain, but in both literature and interviews the author discovers a clear narrative of ‘captivity’ (p. 89). Socialised into an apparent natural order of absolute planter power, coercion, poverty, and class and race discrimination, most workers could at best hope for the tenuous security of a tenancy on plantation land and a stand-alone dwelling, and these were still dependent on the owner's whim.
By the 1930s social scientists were surveying the horrendous living and working conditions of cane-field labour while agricultural scientists advanced ideas to modernise sugar production. These are the subjects of part II. Although adoption of new varieties and expanded areas of production increased not only cane output but also employment opportunities, a shift from tenancy to wages, manipulation of a task system, and problems with food costs and availability eroded the workers' well-being. For example, a case in which workers apparently struck for lower wages was, the author argues, actually a struggle for control of their labouring conditions. Apart from strikes, largely ineffective before the 1960s, workers sometimes turned to sabotage, and in chapter 5 Rogers engages what he calls the ‘incendiary language’ (p. 145) of fire. While this is an interesting effort and an idea worth developing, the problem ultimately is that cane fields are fired for many quite different reasons, and it is often impossible to know the who or the why in a specific case.
Although Pernambuco's rural inhabitants began to organise in the late 1950s, first in Miguel Julião's peasant leagues and then in unions led by communists and the Catholic Church, real change commenced in 1963 when the Goulart government's Estatuto do Trabalhador Rural (Rural Worker Statute, ETR) extended to agricultural labourers rights that industrial workers had enjoyed since the 1940s. Cane workers were now to be registered (fichado) and to have access to Brazil's system of labour courts. For their part, planters found that more cane did not necessarily translate into more sugar, and their situation continued to deteriorate relative to that in São Paulo and the south in general. When employers resisted wage demands workers struck, and the disruption these activities entailed helped to prompt the military coup in 1964. But, to the surprise and dismay of employers, and unlike most military governments of the period, instead of destroying unions Brazil's military worked to control and manipulate these to serve a programme of national development. Again effectively barred from striking, union leaders and lawyers instead became adept at leading their members through the labour courts. Plantation owners responded by expelling registered workers from their properties and relying more and more on unregistered (clandestino) labour. Proletarianised workers retreated to the many small towns in the region, casting their new situation optimistically as an escape from captivity.
The new military regime provided Pernambuco with technical assistance and subsidies meant to stimulate cane production for ethanol, especially after the oil shock of the early 1970s: plantings expanded up easily eroded hillsides, forests fell, and mills dumped huge quantities of rubbish into streams and rivers, polluting the water and adding to seasonal flooding. As for labour, by the late 1970s union lawyers had developed strategies that allowed agricultural workers to strike successfully. The military had imagined that their policies would promote increased production while at the same time managing the ‘laboring landscape’. Instead, Rogers argues, they got unprecedented pollution and environmental damage, together with an increasingly sophisticated rural workforce whose resistance contributed to the military's eventual retreat from power. Pernambuco's rural workers, Rogers concludes, developed class consciousness and strategies of effective class action, not through struggle with capitalists but against a state that imagined itself paternalistic.
Much of Deepest Wounds is straightforward labour history, and well done, but Rogers' effort to put this together with environmental history, his ‘laboring landscape,’ is interesting and certainly an approach to be developed. The research in printed sources and in interviews which he scrupulously documents is impressive. Deepest Wounds is an important contribution to the history of Brazil's north-east and a model for turning a dissertation into a book.
