Military Struggle and Identity Formation in Latin America: Race, Nation, and Community During the Liberal Period

8. Illustrating Race and Nation in the Paraguayan War Era: Exploring the Decline of the Tupi Guarani Warrior as the Embodiment of Brazil

8 Illustrating Race and Nation in the Paraguayan War Era Exploring the Decline of the Tupi Guarani Warrior as the Embodiment of Brazil Peter M. Beattie Brazil is not a serious country. —Attributed to French premier Gen. Charles de Gaulle For nationalists across the globe in the nineteenth century, war invited competitive assessments of national honor, virility, “race,” and “seriousness .”1 In this sense, the War of the Triple Alliance (better known as the Paraguayan War in Brazil, 1864–70) is not unique, but Brazil’s racial heterogeneity presented paradoxes for its nationalists. While serious attempts to square Brazil’s national and racial myths of origin and destiny have inspired scholarly interest, less attention has been paid to humorists who exploited anxieties over them. This chapter examines this conundrum through heroic and humoristic representations of “race” and nation.2 Many of these depictions are offensive, and I in no way promote racist humor under the cover of scholarship; rather, I assert that humor and the heroic are interconnected battlefields in which the memory of traumatic events are shaped, challenged , and recast. The classic political theorist Thomas Hobbes postulated that humor was one’s realization of their innate superiority over another. Others have stressed humor’s subversive nature. In Brazil, scholars have focused on the parodies of Carnival, portraying them as a form of popular criticism or resistance to powerful actors and forces in society.3 Humor traced a reversed outline of what was heroic. Indeed, Thomas Carlyle conceives the “heroic” as an idealized form of manhood defined mostly by a virtuous seriousness or “sincerity.”4 I take the perspective that humor and the heroic are malleable, and they can serve a variety of purposes, intended and 176 / Peter M. Beattie unintended. Humor and the heroic are dynamic phenomenon whose nature defies easy categorization, but to be effective, they must use and mold a language of signs and symbols recognizable to their intended audience. HumorousdepictionsofblacksandIndiansintheAmericasoftenmarked the distance between mostly “white” elites and subordinate nonwhite inhabitants , and they shaped the elite’s changing “visions of liberty.”5 I argue that the Paraguayan War experience contributed to the decline of the Tupi Guarani Indian’s popularity as a way of representing Brazil in certain political circles (although Indianist nationalism would see subsequent revivals ).6 I also contend that racial humor diminished the patriotic sacrifices of veteran Brazilian enlisted men of all races. The conflicts over these humorous images had serious implications for the Brazilian Empire’s policies and legitimacy. The Dilemmas of Distilling a National Racial Identity in Brazil Many Brazilian nationalists spoke of their population as a branch of the Latin race although most conceded that France was the “flower” of this “race.” Nationalists such as Sílvio Romero lamented that Brazil had the misfortune of being founded by the Portuguese: “We are descended from the most degenerate and corrupt branch of the old Latin race, to which were added two of the most degraded races in the world—the coastal Negroes and the American redskins.” Despite Romero’s passion for Brazilian folklore , which he recognized had been positively influenced by Africans, Indians , and their descendents, he expressed pessimism about Brazil’s racial heterogeneity: “The senility of the Negro, the laziness of the Indian, the authoritarian and miserly talent of the Portuguese had produced a shapeless nation with no original or creative qualities.”7 As Thomas E. Skidmore shows, this sense of a shapeless national character haunted the literary ruminations of Romero’s generation, which came of age during the Paraguayan War.8 If Brazilians were a Latin race, then what distinguished them from other nations colonized by Romance language empires? This question was mostly left unanswered, but referring to Brazilians as “Latin” diverted attention from African and Indigenous heritage without specifying the Portuguese. Brazilians remain unique in the Americas in that popular jokes about their imperial mother country’s people stress their lack of culture and intelligence . Nationalists’ pessimistic depictions of the Portuguese derived from the most powerful unifying force among Brazilians before and after The Decline of the Tupi Guarani Warrior as the Embodiment of Brazil / 177 Independence: Lusophobia (fear of the Portuguese). Resentment toward the Portuguese could unite the Brazilian-born across racial and class divisions . Portuguese merchants and retailers continued to be a prominent force in postindependence Brazilian commerce, a fact that many Brazilianborn citizens resented. Nationalists also feared British and Vatican influence , but resentment toward...