‘Awakening the Sleeping Beauty’: Brazil’s vision of a modern agriculture and the Role of the Office of Inter-American Affairs under Nelson Rockefeller

Authors

  • Ursula Prutsch Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/dl.v30i.128039

Keywords:

Office of Inter-American Affairs, Brazil, United States, Amazon, agriculture, frontier

Abstract

This article discusses the role of the U.S. war institution Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-45) in the modernization policies of Brazil during the first government of Getúlio Vargas. The first section analyses - based on Brazil’s modernization utopias since the late 19th century - the concept of nation-building with its “March to the West”, the integration of the hinterland into the nation. The second section describes the structure and strategies of the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) and its goals to mobilize as many natural resources for the war effort as possible. Providing food supply for Allied Forces and US troops in Brazil, and for miners and rubber collectors comprised the most eminent tasks of the OIAA, whose agricultural policies in Brazil are the topics of the third section, while the last section highlights that the US policies of agricultural modernization in Brazil went far beyond World War II.

References

Abreu, João Capistrano de. 1997. Chapters of Brazil’s colonial history 1500-1800. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berger, Marc T. 1995. Under northern eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. hegemony in the Americas 1898-1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Campos, André Luiz Vieira de. 1997. International health policies in Brazil: the Serviço Especial de Saúde Pública, 1942-1960. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin.

Campos, Maria José. 2005-2006. “Cassiano Ricardo e o ‘mito da democracia racial’ uma versão modernista.” Revista USP 68: 140-155.

Cramer, Gisela; Prutsch, Ursula, 2006. “Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-1946) and Record Group 229.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 86 (4): 785-806.

Cramer, Gisela; Prutsch, Ursula (eds.). 2012. Américas Unidas! Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-46). Madrid & Orlando: Iberoamericana Vervuert.

Cunha, Euclides da. 2013. Krieg im Sertão, mit einem Nachwort von Berthold Zilly. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

Cytrynowicz, Roney. 2000. Guerra sem guerra: a mobilização e o cotidiano em São Paulo durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. São Paulo: EdUSP.

Dalrymple, Martha. 1968. The AIA Story: two decades of international cooperation. New York: American International Association for Economic and Social Development.

Franz, Nayara Régis. 2016. “Walt Disney, o bom vizinho: a recepção da animação fantasia no Brasil em 1941.” Revista Urutágua 33: 66-80.

Garfield, Seth. 2013. In search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States and the nature of a region. Durham: Duke University Press.

Garfield, Seth. 2001. Indigenous struggle at the heart of Brazil: state policy, frontier expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988. Durham: Duke University Press.

Griffing, John B. 1940. “Natural eugenics in Brazil.” The Journal of Heredity 31 (1): 13–16.

Hentschke, Jens (ed.). 2006. Vargas and Brazil: new perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Herring, Hubert. 1941. Good neighbors: Argentina, Brazil, Chile & seventeen other countries. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Keller, Olivier. 2019. Disney-Propaganda für Lateinamerika. Die Zusammenarbeit des Office of Inter-American Affairs mit den Walt Disney Productions (1941-1945). Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Zurich.

Kraus, Theresa Louise. 1986. The establishment of United States Army Air Corps Bases in Brazil, 1938-1945. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

Lenharo, Alcir. 1986. Sacralização da política. Campinas: Papirus.

Leonard, Thomas M. 2000. “The new Pan Americanism in U.S.-Central American relations, 1933-1954.” In Beyond the ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American affairs, edited by D. Sheinin, 95-113. Westport, CT & London.

Lochery, Neill. 2014. Brazil: the fortunes of war: World War II and the making of modern Brazil. New York: Basic Books.

Lübken, Uwe. 2014. Bedrohliche Nähe. Die USA und die nationalsozialistische Herausforderung in Lateinamerika, 1937-1945. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Maia, João Marcelo Ehlert. 2019. “Fronteiras e state-building periférico: o caso da Fundação Brasil Central.” Varia História 35 (69): 895-919.

McCann, Frank D. 1973. The Brazilian-American alliance 1937-1945. Princeton: Princeton Legacy Library.

McCann, Frank D. 2018. Brazil and the United States during World War II and its aftermath: negotiating alliance and balancing giants. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

McNeill, John R.; Engelke, Peter. 2014. The Great Acceleration: an environmental history of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Menezes, Maria Lúcia de Pires. 1999. Parque Indígena do Xingu: a construção de um território estatal. São Paulo: Imesp-Unicamp.

Moog, Clodomir Vianna. 1978. Bandeirantes e pioneiros: paralelo entre duas culturas. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacão Brasileira.

Moraes, Antonio Carlos Robert. 1991. “Notas sobre identidade nacional e intitutionalização na Geografia no Brasil.” Estudos Históricos 4 (8): 166-176.

Nehring, Ryan. 2016. “Yield of dreams: marching west and the politics of scientific knowledge in the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa).” Geoforum 77: 206-217.

Pandolfi, Dulce (ed.). 1999. Repensando o Estado Novo. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas.

Prutsch, Ursula. 2008. Creating Good Neighbors? Die Kultur- und Wirtschaftspolitik der USA in Lateinamerika, 1940-1946. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Prutsch, Ursula. 2018. “Labour policy, Germanness, and Nazi influence in Brazil.” In Nazism across Borders: the social policies of the Third Reich and their global appeal, edited by Sandrine Kott and Kiran K. Patel, 309-336. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ricardo, Cassiano. 1940. Marcha para Oeste. Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio.

Sá, Magali Romero; Sá, Dominichi Miranda de; Silva, André Felipe Cândido da (eds.). 2020. As ciências na história das relações Brasil-EUA. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad.

Rowland, Donald. 1947. A history of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs: historical report on war administration. Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Sadlier, Darlene J. 2012. Americans all: good neighbor cultural diplomacy in World War II. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Santos, Sílvio Coelho dos. 1973. Índios e brancos no sul do Brasil: a dramática experiência dos Xokleng. Florianópolis: EDEME.

Secreto, Maria Verônica. 2007. “Capistrano de Abreu and J.F. Turner: a national historiography and an environmental history.” Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura 3: 2-10

Seitenfus, Ricardo. 2000. A entrada do Brasil na Segunda Guerra Mundial. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS.

Silva, Claiton Márcio da. 2018. “Between Fenix and Ceres: the Great Acceleration and the agricultural frontier in the Brazilian Cerrado.” Varia Historia 34 (65): 409-444.

Silva, Claiton Márcio da. 2013. “Nelson Rockefeller, a Associação Americana Internacional (AIA) e a ideologia da modernização em busca de novas fronteiras (1946-1961).” Tempos Históricos 17: 171-184.

Silva, Sandro Dutra e. 2018. “‘Heroes’ of the sertão: the bandeirantes as a symbolic category for the study of Brazilian West colonization.” Revista Territórios & Fronteiras 11 (1): 60-76.

Silva, Sandro Dutra e. 2017. No oeste, a terra e o céu: a expansão da fronteira agrícola no Brasil central. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad.

Tota, Antônio Pedro. 2014. O amigo americano: Nelson Rockefeller e o Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1893. “The significance of the frontier in American history (1893).” American Historical Association. Available at: <https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-(1893)>. Last accessed: 20 February 2021.

Wallace, Henry A. 1943. The century of the common man, ed. Russell Lord. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock.

Weinstein, Barbara. 2019. “Filming modernity in the tropics: the Amazon, Walt Disney, and the antecedents of modernization theory.” Intimate frontiers: a literary geography of the Amazon, edited by Felipe Martinez-Pinzón and Javier Uriarte, 193-207. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Downloads

Published

2022-07-24

How to Cite

Prutsch, U. (2022). ‘Awakening the Sleeping Beauty’: Brazil’s vision of a modern agriculture and the Role of the Office of Inter-American Affairs under Nelson Rockefeller. Diálogos Latinoamericanos, 30. https://doi.org/10.7146/dl.v30i.128039