Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I: Sugarcane and Brazil's Agricultural Modernization -- 1. Indigent Pariahs No More: Agriculture in Brazilian Development, 1918-1960 -- 2. Alternative Revolutions: Imposing a Developmental Model, 1960-1975 -- 3. Ordering Proálcool: The Arc of the National Alcohol Program, 1975-1990 -- Part II: Proálcool's Consequences -- 4. How Brazil's National Alcohol Program Made a Meal of Rural Workers -- 5. The Unnecessary Destruction of Our Rivers: Water Pollution and the Environmental Politics of Ethanol Production -- 6. Food and Fuel: Agriculture's Hunger -- Epilogue: Agriculture's Renewed Energy? -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

"Thomas D. Rogers's history of a modernizing Brazil tracks what happened when a key government program -- created in the 1970s by the nation's military regime -- aspired to harness energy produced by sugarcane agriculture to power the country's economy. The National Alcohol Program, known as Proálcool, was a deliberate economic strategy designed to incentivize ethanol production and reduce gasoline consumption. As Brazil's capacity grew and as international oil shocks continued, the regime's planners doubled down on Proálcool. Drawing financing from international lenders and curiosity from other oil-dependent countries, for a time it was the world's largest oil-substitution and renewable-energy program"--

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. 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.

This volume compiles the papers given at the 2010 iteration of an annual conference held at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego. That year, the conference convened "environmental experts"and anthropologists who carried out research in various parts of the Amazon basin. The editors note in the short introduction their aspiration that the book will contribute to a "heightened consciousness about what is happening in and with Amazonia."This is quite a general goal and it's true that the twelve chapters range widely across topics and national boundaries.

AbstractRural sugarcane workers in the Brazilian Northeast negotiated with planters in 1963 to establish guidelines for measuring jobs, producing a document they called the Task Table. This article situates the Table in historical context, placing it in a long-term process of agricultural rationalization that generated struggles over flexibility, control, and freedom on the job. The Table emerged at one moment in these battles and since conflicts like these over productivity, efficiency, and control are common to industrial and agricultural work alike, analyzing the Table offers insight into a broad struggle between workers and employers over the conditions and regulation of labor. For a region of hundreds of thousands of sugarcane workers, the Task Table reflected and facilitated the transformation of labor relationships, views of the working environment, and worker consciousness.

This article draws primarily on interviews with two union leaders from the sugarcane region of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco to demonstrate the role of race in their experiences over the past forty years as well as how they navigated and interpreted questions of authority, respect, and conflict in a landscape marked by frequently rigid conceptions of hierarchy. The article analyzes particular stories these men told and describes the background to their storytelling. It places the interviews with the two leaders in the context of a larger chorus of cane workers' voices from the region, testimonies that are crucially valuable sources for understanding what remains a largely oral culture. They provide answers to questions on topics that would otherwise remain outside the reach of historians, from the complexities of class relations and the dynamics of conflict to such subtle issues as slavery's legacies. The article approaches these issues in three sections: the first charts the two leaders' lives in the context of the cane zone's history; the second addresses race and respect; and the third discusses violence, voice, and authority.

Vincent Peloso's new edited volume, with thirteen empirical essays and three synthetic chapters, positions itself in an ongoing debate within labor history. Peloso argues in the introduction that using identity as an organizing theme springs from "the historian's turn from economics to culture in the study of Latin American labor history" (xiii). In a 1990 article Ronald Chilcote lamented that "classes and class struggle are being displaced by an emphasis on political pluralism, political organizations, and interest groups." However, as political scientist Kenneth Roberts observes in the volume's final chapter, recent years have seen "a modest revival of interest in class relations and class actors in Latin American scholarship" (324).

AbstractDrawing from case file records generated in rural labour courts in Brazil's north-eastern state of Pernambuco between 1965 and 1982, this paper demonstrates how these forums reified class-based exploitation, even as they purportedly protected workers' rights. The paper focuses on two districts in the state's sugarcane-growing region, both of which reveal a clear pattern of inferior treatment for rural as opposed to non-rural workers. Interpreting the evidence as a function of long-term patterns of social and economic relations in the region, the paper also sets this case in a larger context of rural labour history around the world.