The Environment of Wartime Migration: Labor Transfers from the Brazilian Northeast to the Amazon During World War II

Subsequent to the Japanese invasion of the Malayan peninsula in February 1942 which severed access to traditional latex markets, the United States subsidized mass labor transfers from the Brazilian Northeast to the Amazon forest to increase rubber output. The regime of Getulio Vargas, which favored Northeastern migration as a geopolitical measure to occupy the frontier and as a safety valve for the drought-stricken backlands, promised protective measures and financial gain to workers. Whereas postwar revisionist scholarship has tended to view migrants as stupefied by drought and duped by regime propaganda, this essay argues that labor flows to the Amazon must be understood in the context of broader historical patterns of Northeastern migration to the Amazon; the socioeconomic inequalities of the Northeast and the differential impact of drought on its peasantry; state policies to manage social crisis; wartime dislocations and opportunities; and the gendered and generational norms inflecting Northeastern migration. Enveloping populations at the margins of the Brazilian nation-state and Allied military theaters, Northeastern wartime migration to the Amazon reveals the interplay and tensions among local, national, and global factors that shape “personal” decisions and historical outcomes.