Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence by Tracy Devine Guzmán (review)

TRACY DEVINE GUZMÁN frames her 2013 publication, Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence, with a description of the popular television personality Xuxa and one of her more famous clips, “Vamos brincar de índio” (“Let’s play Indian”). In a performance that helps the reader situate tensions explored throughout the book of where Indigenous people fit within Brazilian culture and politics, the blonde Brazilian bombshell/entertainer’s “brincar de índio” has Xavante Indians stand in the middle of a crowded stage, disengaged from an over-the-top performance “celebrating” the Indian. These Indians, according to Xuxa, are “living nature” (2), forming an important part of Brazilian culture, central to the popular imaginary as a primitive living past. While Xuxa proclaims the importance of the Indian, the Xavante on stage stand to the side, noticeably uncomfortable and out of place—politically and socially marginalized—drawn out from the jungle to demonstrate their difference.

Xuxa’s appropriation and misrepresentation of the Xavante in “playing Indian” serves as a jumping-off point in Devine Guzmán’s study of cultural and political production surrounding Indigeneity in Brazil from the mid-nineteenth century until the present day. This anecdote not only highlights the tenuous position of the Indigenous population but works as a thread throughout the book—how dominant Brazilian society has used Indigeneity as a popular trope while ignoring Indians as citizens or even human beings. Within this larger thread is the question of Indigenous authenticity—how Indigenous peoples can self-identify in an increasingly modernized world that calls for a certain performance of Indigeneity itself.

Through five chapters, Devine Guzmán skillfully demonstrates the importance of a cultural studies approach that privileges not only literature but film, history, maps, popular culture, and a multitude of cultural iterations revolving around Indigeneity.

Chapter 1 explores “inclusion through exclusion”—the move toward a measured incorporation of Indigenous populations by the Brazilian government through the creation of various organizations such as the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI), later becoming the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI). Beyond critiquing these governmental measures, Devine Guzmán works to complicate the idea of Indigeneity across multiple contexts—citing sources as varied as David Stoll and Paulo Freire, and ultimately critiquing appropriating Indigeneity for an academic audience as well. This shows a refreshing sense of self-awareness that is apparent throughout the book.

Chapter 2 centers on popular romantic representations of a somewhat “noble savage,” examining the well-studied Il Guarany and Iracema. Devine Guzmán argues that these incredibly popular emblems of “operatic and literary Indianism” worked to destroy Indigenous lives through an increased belief in a “benevolent colonialism” during a critical moment in which whitening processes were becoming an established part of policy designed to eliminate the Other through miscegenation and extended periods of violence against the Indigenous population (67).

Devine Guzmán’s argument becomes most compelling in chapters 3 and 4, where she explores international designs on the Amazon rain forests’ resources and the Indian as one of the fundamental pillars of Brazilian national identity. By beginning chapter 3 with a now famously fake map of a U.S. plan to take over the Amazon rain forest, Devine Guzmán expands on policies laid out in chapter 1, and spatially frames how education was used as a tool to harness Indigenous labor in an increasingly industrialized and internationally exploited Amazonia.

Chapter 4, perhaps the most intriguing, examines “O caso Diacuí,” in which the growing gap between ideals about Indigeneity and actual political practice came to a head when a rubber-tapper made national headlines for his marriage to a Xavante woman. During the 1950s when this case came about, the Indigenous population were still considered wards of the state, making a marriage between a Brazilian and Indian technically illegal. While intense public scrutiny of this dramatic love story played out, years of cultural production and political repression were brought to...