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Hispanic American Historical Review 83.2 (2003) 223-253



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Stilt-Root Subsistence:
Colonial Mangroves and Brazil's Landless Poor

Shawn W. Miller

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In 1677, the Jesuit prelate in Rio de Janeiro, Father Silveira Dias, summarily excommunicated every distinguished member of the city's municipal council. Although priests frequently quarreled with local officials over such issues as control of indigenous labor, marching order in annual processions, or the extent of clerical exemption from municipal taxation, only in the most extreme scuffles did clerics make heretics of the local elite. In this case, the Jesuits exercised excommunication, their ultimate weapon, in defense of a fetid mangrove swamp. 1

This was not an isolated instance. In the next decade, the Benedictines and individual landholders, with respective threats of excommunication and arrest against trespassers, pursued exclusive claims to the mangrove forests that bordered their lands on Rio's extensive Guanabara Bay. 2 As a result, the bay's wretched free poor—abruptly barred from a resource that had supplied much of their food and had been traditionally open to all—appealed to the municipal council for redress. Despite strong ties to landed interests, the council challenged all corporate and private claims to areas seaward of the high tide. With crown support, the council reaffirmed the mangroves' public status, holding that, as in Portugal, tidelands were state property and open to the use of all. In a colony where forest and field were generally hoarded by fidalgo, priest, and [End Page 223] king, Brazil's tidal forests—due in part to their brackish location—escaped elite monopolization.

This study investigates the relationship between two peripheral populations: the mangroves at the fringes of the colonial landscape, and the peoples at the margins of the plantation economy. 3 Brazil's rural poor, landless due to latifundia and wageless due to slavery, prioritized subsistence in their economic life and engaged various strategies to evade the prospect of hunger. These strategies, of course, included subsistence planting on plots granted at the landholder's consent, but sources suggest that where possible the rural poor preferred hunting, fishing, and gathering from nature's abundance. While many explained these activities as unproductive and the result of the free poor's lazy disposition, the drive to eat seems to best explain the poor's unique set of "indolent" strategies. Subsistence security—having enough to eat—was at the center of their economic life, and it outweighed all other ambitions.

The ruling elite acknowledged the poor's basic right to eat and defended a primitive moral economy by reserving some mangroves for the exclusive use of the poor. Hence, by the coincidence of the poor's hunger, the state's paternalism, and the mangrove's own unrivaled fecundity, mangroves outside immediate urban areas survived the onslaught of colonization. Today mangroves still grace as much as one-third of Brazil's coastline. Conservation can only take a portion of the credit for mangrove survivals, but what is exceptional is that, at least in some areas, strict conservation policies were shaped not by the commercial interests of the elite but by the subsistence requirements of the poor.

The mangrove forest was commonly deprecated as the epitome of wilderness, the antithesis of civilization, and the primary breeder of tropical disease. 4 But recurring conflicts evidence the mangroves' role in meeting the subsistence needs of the poor and the commercial interests of the elite. 5 Due to the [End Page 224] mangroves' many extractives (including firewood, timber, lime, clay, tannin, fish, shellfish, and feathers) and its easy access by water, these swamps of rank muck and impassable tangles were among the colony's most exploited resources. Baltasar da Silva Lisboa, formerly the colony's highest forest official, opined that, had the king granted the Jesuits exclusive control over Rio de Janeiro's mangroves in 1677, he might as well have given them the city and captaincy as well, "for all of their inhabitants would have been sold to the avarice of great corporations, which would have become the rulers and only lords of the...

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