In
The Deepest Wounds, Thomas D. Rogers traces social and
environmental changes over four centuries in Pernambuco, Brazil's
key northeastern sugar-growing state. Focusing particularly on the
period from the end of slavery in 1888 to the late twentieth
century, when human impact on the environment reached critical new
levels, Rogers confronts the day-to-day world of farming--the
complex, fraught, and occasionally poetic business of making
sugarcane grow.
Renowned Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, whose home state
was Pernambuco, observed, "Monoculture, slavery, and
latifundia--but principally monoculture--they opened here, in the
life, the landscape, and the character of our people, the deepest
wounds." Inspired by Freyre's insight, Rogers tells the story of
Pernambuco's wounds, describing the connections among changing
agricultural technologies, landscapes and human perceptions of
them, labor practices, and agricultural and economic policy. This
web of interrelated factors, Rogers argues, both shaped economic
progress and left extensive environmental and human damage.
Combining a study of workers with analysis of their landscape,
Rogers offers new interpretations of crucial moments of labor
struggle, casts new light on the role of the state in agricultural
change, and illuminates a legacy that influences Brazil's
development even today.