The Brazilian Northeast has for long captivated the imagination of artists, journalists, scholars, social activists, and political leaders, not only for its foundational role in national history and its cultural richness but also for its poverty, inequality, and violence. This image congealed with the publication of Euclides da Cunha's masterpiece Os Sertões (1902), a detailed account of the Northeastern backlands and its downtrodden rural inhabitants, and the rise there of a messianic religious movement that led to a bloody confrontation with the nascent republican government in the 1890s.
Succeeding generations of cultural producers and political elites employed similar images and narratives that constituted what Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. called the “invention of the northeast” in a classic study published in 1999. Building on the insights of Durval Muniz de Albuquerque, as well as those of Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, Sarah Sarzynski develops an incisive critique of these regional tropes, defined as “entrenched stereotypes,” that defined nordestinos as “the backward, nonwhite, folkloric, impoverished, and violent Other threatening the modern Brazilian nation” (17). She engages a wide range of texts, visual representations, and films that reinforced these stereotypes even as they supported the struggles of the rural poor.
Sarzynski's study focuses on the Cold War period, especially the 1950s and 1960s, when the Brazilian Northeast, with its iron-fisted local bosses—the coroneis—and their massive latifúndios, became a focal point for agrarian reform efforts, spurred on by progressive state governors such as Miguel Arraes in Pernambuco, the Brazilian Communist Party, progressive Catholic movements, and for a time in the early 1960s, the left-populist president João Goulart. Described by Newsweek as a “Texas-sized slum” (125), the Brazilian Northeast was targeted for US aid relief by lawmakers worried that it would become the “next Cuba.” Landed elites represented dispossessed peasants as both lazy and menacing while resorting to deadly violence to prevent them from organizing. Landowners were particularly hostile to the Ligas Camponesas, a social movement that emerged in Pernambuco in the mid 1950s calling for the expropriation of latifúndios and end to coercive and uncompensated labor.
Led by a young charismatic lawyer from Recife, Francisco Julião, the Ligas captured the imagination of the rural poor throughout the Northeast with appeals to tropes of rebellion, such as the cangaceiros, the backlands bandits that roamed the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the cangaceiros were politically ambiguous (some had even been employed by landowners), the Ligas regarded them as a symbol for the struggle for agrarian reform (98). The most famous of the cangaceiros—Lampião and his wife—have been memorialized in countless cordel poems, popular songs, and visual renderings, as well as several films produced in the fifties and sixties. So great was the mixture of fascination and fear they provoked among authorities that their severed heads were for decades kept on display at the Federal University of Bahia as specimens to be examined by criminologists. Sarzynski interprets this ghoulish display as an exercise in bio-power designed to make visible the punishment for rebelling, while also suggesting the racial degeneracy of the cangaceiros (86).
Sarzynski later devotes an entire chapter to the racialized representations of “mixed- race” rural nordestinos, an often-overlooked dimension of regional discourse. Even though the Ligas Camponesas never organized along explicitly racial lines, they frequently compared the latifúndio to chattel slavery (157). Drawing from newspaper articles (most notably from LIGA, the newspaper of the Ligas), cordel poems, illustrations, and popular songs, Sarzynski shows how the Ligas successfully linked the struggle for agrarian reform to the movement to abolish slavery during the previous century, thereby making agrarian reform a patriotic and moral imperative, in addition to one motivated by social justice (162).
The US-backed coup of 1964 brought to power a right-wing military regime allied with moneyed and landed interests that moved quickly to quash rural movements struggling for agrarian reform. Sarzynski concludes her study with two chapters about how the Ligas Camponesas were memorialized following the return to democratic rule in the 1980s, most notably in Eduardo Coutinho's legendary documentary Cabra marcado para morrer. With these efforts, the repertoire of tropes associated with the Nordeste expanded to include resistance to the military dictatorship (241).
