Caboclos are by and large descendants of Amazonian indigenous peoples who now speak only Portuguese, are integrated into the regional economy, and consider themselves Brazilians rather than members of a tribe. The Pirahãs call caboclos xaoói-gíi (authentic foreigners; the suffix -gíi means “authentic” or “real”). Americans and other foreigners, including Brazilians from the city, are simply *xaoóì.*The Pirahãs relate better to the caboclos because they see them more often and because they and the caboclos share the same environment and many of the same skills of hunting, fishing, canoeing, and knowledge of the jungle.
Caboclo culture has impinged on the Pirahãs almost daily for more than two hundred years. It is a macho culture, not unlike the cowboy culture I was raised in. But it has another side, an aspect of stoicism, almost fatalism, that is hard to find in most U.S. subcultures.
The Pirahãs’ knowledge of the outside world is almost exclusively gained from their contact with caboclos. Americans and caboclos have very different values. And the Pirahãs see these differences, usually favoring the caboclo view because it is more like their own.
For example, Americans and caboclos see the human body differently. Caboclos are more uniformly judgmental about laziness and being overweight than Americans. In general, caboclos believe that working hard is a sign of health, good character, and stewardship of God’s blessings. If you are healthy enough to work, God must be watching out for you. Fat means corruption to most caboclos. Overweight people are lazy idlers who take more than they need for themselves. Hence, even among fairly well-off caboclos (and there are a few), there is a strong work ethic. It is common to find caboclos who never need to work again clearing their own fields, swinging a machete, or going into the jungle to search for products with their employees. These values are to some degree shared by the Pirahãs—leanness, toughness, knowledge of the jungle, hunting, fishing, and self-reliance.
To understand the Pirahãs’ view of outsiders and where I fit in, I realized that I would need to understand caboclos. But since I was not going to build a house and live among caboclos, my knowledge of them would have to come from occasional personal contact. And the most common contact with caboclo culture occurred during river travel.
One trip in particular stands out. I was taking a dentist and my cousin, who was trained to check vision and fit glasses, to visit the Pirahãs, to offer dental assistance and (free) eyeglasses. At the dock in Porto Velho, I saw a boat that I hadn’t noticed before. It was a large, newish-looking vessel with a sign that announced trips to Manaus and Manicoré, the latter a small town near the mouth of the Madeira. These boats were nearly the only means of long-distance transport known by the caboclo population of the Amazon River system.
I descended the riverbank, steep during this dry-season month of July, and walked the narrow plank onto the boat. I asked for the dono (owner).
A bare-chested, bald man about forty-five years old, five feet ten, approached and declared, “Eu sou o dono” (I am the owner).
Like all men working the Amazonian system, he was strong, and his skin was weather-hardened and tan. Like most donos, his body showed that he enjoyed easy access to food and drink. He was wearing white but soiled bermuda shorts and flip-flops—the ubiquitous footware of the Amazon.
“When are you leaving for Manaus?” I queried.
“A gente vai sair lá pelas cinco horas da tarde” (We are going to leave about 5 p.m.), he answered politely and confidently.
On our way to town, I highlighted the pleasures of traveling by recreio on the Madeira River for my traveling companions.
“You guys are gonna love this! The breeze from the movement of the boat, the birds and wildlife, the jungle, one of the biggest rivers in the world, and Brazilian cooking!”
About 3:30 p.m., thanks to my prodding, we got to the boat and all of us crossed the plank, enthusiastic and joking. We did notice that several trucks were still being unloaded into “our” boat, but assumed that this work would be done soon and that we’d be under way as promised by five o’clock. After hanging our hammocks, we bought some ice-cold fresh coconuts, with straws in openings in their tops to drink their sweet liquid. Refreshed and relaxed, we talked about the upcoming trip, watching the stevedores toil in the waning sun, under their burdens of boxes, butane bottles, and bananas (tons of them) on their way to market in Manaus. We expected them to finish soon, because it was now after five. There did seem to be a lot of trucks, though—too many I thought to be unloaded in an hour, but that was OK. Being an hour or so late is common in the Amazon. Six o’clock came and went. I went to the dono and asked when he expected to leave.
“Daqui a pouco” (Shortly), came the jovial reply.
I informed my traveling companions. The dono said he would supply a free dinner to all of us. That was a good deal, I thought, because on these trips there was generally no dinner served the first night. Then I noticed something curious: no more passengers had come on the boat in all of this time, except for one lean, muscular, and quite drunk fellow, wearing a cowboy hat over his face as he snored in his hammock.
After dinner, cargo from a number of trucks was still being loaded below the decks and on the lower deck of the boat. It was almost comical. How much could this boat carry? It already had about twice as much as I would have imagined possible. Seven o’clock came, then eight. At 9:30 I asked what the hell was going on.
“Oh, sorry. We cannot leave tonight; I’m still waiting for more shipments,” replied the dono matter-of-factly.
There was no other boat leaving. We had no car to return to the SIL center. The mission had already picked up the kombi (Volkswagen minibus) we had rented. We had to make the best of it. Bugs were out, especially mosquitoes. We got in our hammocks and spent a predictably unpleasant night. I remembered then, too late, that Brazilians who travel the rivers avoid boats they don’t know. Since this boat was new to the Porto Velho–Manaus route, people were avoiding it until they had a chance to know whether it was reliable, safe, inexpensive, served good food, and so on. Or so I figured.
When morning finally came, I noticed that other passengers had come on board—as though everyone except us gringos knew that the boat would only leave in the morning. So much for my vast experience. About 10 a.m., after a breakfast of syrupy-sweet, extremely strong coffee, hard crackers, and canned butter (I really like it), we were finally off. My small group went to the top deck and enjoyed the breeze, talking comfortably two decks above the boat’s loud motor. We were under way! All of us eventually settled into our hammocks to read and relax in the shade and breeze.
At about 4 p.m., though, the boat came to a sudden stop. The other passengers informed me that we had run aground on a sandbar—again the crew’s inexperience was showing. For the next twenty-four hours the captain worked to get us off the sandbar. After hours of trying to move us with a combination of the boat’s own engines and his outboard motorboat, he sped off in the late afternoon. At about 3 a.m. he returned with two other larger boats, though both were considerably smaller than our boat. My traveling companions woke me up.
“Dan, we’re in danger!”
They motioned me to follow them. I went to the first deck and looked through an opening in the floor to see the dono and the captain trying to fix the steering. Water was coming in slowly where they were working (because they had loosened gaskets). “We’re going to sink, Dan,” my friends exclaimed.
“We are sunk,” I responded. “We’re sitting on a damned sandbar. We cannot sink further.”
The new passengers that had boarded after us were all poor. Anyone with any money, unless they were going to visit the Pirahãs, would have either flown to Manaus or not made the trip at all. Though tourist brochures touted this kind of trip as a pleasure cruise, one glance at any recreio was enough to put the lie to this claim. These were almost all precarious-looking vessels, worn and abused. The poor used them for lack of other options. Passengers were wearing flip-flops, with a few pairs of cowboy boots and Nike and Reebok footwear scattered here and there. Most women wore tight shorts and halter tops, a few jeans and blouses. Many of the men wore long pants, though most wore shorts; some were bare-chested, but others wore T-shirts with political slogans, polo shirts, or brightly patterned short-sleeved shirts. They all looked fit and tan and spoke animatedly to one another. Brazilians are talkative and always fun on such voyages, the pleasure of the trip and freedom from their routines combining to raise their awareness, humor, and the enjoyment of interaction with strangers, even unusual-looking gringos.
We chatted with some of the passengers, though the fellow from the night before wearing a cowboy hat was beginning to annoy me. He was still drunk. He was about fifty, but very fit. He kept trying to speak Spanish with me (many Brazilians know that Americans are much more likely to understand Spanish than Portuguese). Even though I answered him in fluent Portuguese and told him that I had made this trip many times before, he kept poking me in the chest aggressively and telling me things like “This boat goes to Manicoré; you have to sleep in hammocks on this boat; everyone here speaks Portuguese,” and other trivialities. I would try to walk away but he kept following me about. This continued for several hours—extremely irritating. People noticing strangers and harrassing them is a growing phenomenon in northern Brazil.
An experience that reveals to some degree the essence of being caboclo happened during a visit long ago on the Marmelos. I was traveling down the river in the rain with my family. We were leaving the Pirahã village after several months. Our trip would take us first to the Auxiliadora to board the recreio to Porto Velho, where we would catch a plane to São Paulo so that I could resume my doctoral studies at UNICAMP. This route, which we had taken to evacuate Keren and Shannon when they were stricken with malaria, had now become part of our yearly routine and we had come to enjoy it. People who had seemed strange in that first emergency trip with Keren now were acquaintances whose friendship we cherished.
As we approached the settlement of Pau Queimado, I saw a woman on the shore beckoning to us to stop. I didn’t really want to stop because of the rain, but I knew that Amazonenses (Brazilians from the state of Amazonas) don’t bother you unless there is a serious need. So I turned toward her; within a couple of minutes, the motor was off and we were paddling into shore.
“What is it?” I asked.
“My dad is very sick. Please come look at him.”
We tied the boat to the shore. The same steep bank was between us and the houses that had been there when I was so desperately looking for help and feeling lost. Now it was our turn to be of service. Keren got our medicine kit, and with our kids trailing behind, we started up to the house.
The house was dark inside, the walls a combination of boards and poles from jungle trees. The roof was palm thatch, like most roofs in the area. The floor was wood, with large spaces between the boards, large enough to allow various reptiles and bugs to slither or crawl into the room. Indeed, the ubiquitous Amazonian cockroaches were to be seen in several dark places in the corners, large beetles over three inches long—the kind that spurted out white gunk if you stepped on them.
Unusually, since almost all caboclos in the Amazon sleep in hammocks, there was a homemade double bed in the corner with a mosquito net suspended above it, to be lowered at night. The bed was made of boards and palm wood poles, with a simple foam-rubber mattress on top, stained with years of droppings and drippings of substances I was not curious about. On the bed was the old man that everyone knew as Seu Alfredo (Mr. Alfred).
Alfredo was a master canoe maker, and his sons had learned the craft from him. Everyone in the area came to him for canoes. He made large canoas with a solid base of itauba wood and sides of four-by-one-inch boards, caulked like larger boats. And he made cascos (shells)—dugout canoes of solid itauba. No one made canoes like him. The Pirahãs liked him and said that he never tried to take their women, an unusual trait for a caboclo in the area, according to the Pirahãs.
Arlo Heinrichs had persuaded Alfredo to become a Christian, and he had lived his life since that time, more than twenty years, as a proponent of that faith. He was known throughout the area as a man who could be trusted, a kind man who visited the sick, sang hymns, and befriended everyone.
I had watched him on occasion pull up to a bank near a settlement in the early morning and get out of his canoe, with his ukelele in his hand. He would come up the bank and begin strumming a hymn, then singing and smiling to people as they went about their work in the center of the settlement—women carrying clothes to the river to wash, men getting their hunting gear together. Everyone smiled and stopped what they were doing to hear Alfredo sing, in a high-pitched voice, more enthusiastic than lovely, of how he was not afraid of tomorrow because he knew Jesus today. After singing for a while, he would visit with the sick and wander about the village, telling jokes and talking about how Jesus had changed his life. A one-man missionary organization.
It is a rare thing for a caboclo to be trusted among other caboclos, but Alfredo was both trusted and respected. He was the only man I ever knew in that area that no one voiced any suspicions of.
I approached him on his sickbed now and asked, “Are you ill?”
“Yes, I am very sick. Come closer. I can’t see you,” he whispered in a raspy voice.
As I drew nearer I could see that his arms were thin and his face grimaced with pain, and he was shivering.
“Ah, é Seu Daniel!” (Oh, it is Mr. Daniel!) he acknowledged.
A smell of diarrhea and vomit was in the air.
“Are you in pain? Would you like me to take you to the hospital in Porto Velho?”
I was one of Alfredo’s admirers. He had always been so supportive of me, the white Protestant missionary, and never treated me as though he distrusted me.
“No, I am dying. I told my daughter that there was no need to call you. I will be dead soon.”
As I looked at Alfredo’s dark eyes, and saw his wizened, dark body, weakened by disease, immobile in the bed he had made for himself, I could feel a lump growing in my throat. Keren had tears in her eyes. The children were still at the doorway, staring.
“But let me help you, Alfredo. Surely the doctors in Porto Velho have medicines that can help you.”
“No, Daniel,” he replied. “One knows when one is dying. But there is no reason to be sad. I am happy to end this pain in death. And I can tell you that I am not afraid of death. I know that I am going to be with Jesus. And I am grateful that I had a long life and a very good life. I am surrounded by my children and my grandchildren. They all love me. They are all here for me. I am so thankful for my life and my family.”
In his pain and his sickness and in spite of everyone’s grief, Alfredo brought comfort and communicated a maturity and a fearlessness in the face of death that I had never seen before and have never seen since. I held his right hand. His daughter was rubbing his forehead with a moist cloth and crying. She thanked us for coming. Alfredo thanked us for coming.
“C’mon, kids,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“What is it, Daddy? Is he dying?” Shannon asked.
Kristene and Caleb looked into the room, then at me.
“He is sure that he is dying, yes,” I answered, barely keeping back the tears. “People here seem to know when death is near. But I hope you were all paying attention to Alfredo. He is unafraid. He has faith in Jesus. He knows he is going to heaven. That is how I want to die.”
I felt as though I had been in the presence of a saint.
We turned down the family’s offer of coffee and cookies, saying that we needed to get to the Auxiliadora and see some people before the recreio came to pick us up. As I started our motor and pointed the boat downriver, I began to think again, as I often did, about the character of these caboclos. I had learned from hardship that wherever you see a house along the Amazon or its tributaries, you had a haven. That family, one you had never met in your life, would come to your aid in time of need. They would let you stay with them. They would feed you. If need be they would paddle you out to the nearest help. They would give you their last possessions.
That is a code of the Amazon. You help the person in need today, because you may be the person in need tomorrow. I have never witnessed a clearer example of the golden rule.
One thing, however, I have never completely understood about caboclos is their racism against Indians. They say to me frequently, “Daniel, we are Indians who learned how to work. We are not lazy. No one gives us anything. We do not like the Indians because they beg and they always get more help than we do.”
Interestingly, the caboclos themselves call Indians caboclos. Caboclos rarely refer to themselves seriously as caboclos. They refer to themselves as ribeirinhos (people who live at the river’s edge) or, more commonly and simply, Brazilians.
This caboclo attitude toward Indians needs to be taken into account if you are looking for uncontacted or little-contacted Indians in the area. Often the caboclos are the only ones who actually know if there are Indians in the region. But you would never ask a caboclo, “Are there Indians around here who still speak their language?” If you wanted to find this out, the best way to ask, at least in certain regions of the Amazon, would be: “Tem caboclos por aqui que sabem cortar a giria?” (Are there caboclos here who know how to “cut” the slang?) The reason for this otherwise strange circumlocution is easy enough to discover if you talk to a caboclo long enough: they do not think of the Indians’ speech as a real language, nor do they believe that the various Indian languages are in fact all that different from one another.
Caboclos believe that they are poor, and they will go to great lengths, even risking their lives, to improve their financial lot. Like most people in the Western economy, they want to get ahead. They feel their poverty desperately. The Pirahãs, on the other hand, though they have less materially than the caboclos, do not have a concept of “poor” and they are satisfied with their material lives. Caboclo interest in money was never more evident to me than during the gold rush days in Porto Velho, in the early 1980s. In those years, gold was discovered in the Madeira River and its tributaries. This was a boom time for the cities along the Madeira, especially Porto Velho. Many caboclos turned their industry to gold prospecting and became rich, at least for a little while. Prospecting was incredibly dangerous work and extremely hard. Caboclos with no training in diving at all volunteered to wear diving helmets and descend without lights, in the pitch black, fifty feet of muddy, fast-moving water, to the bottom of the Madeira, with anacondas, caimans, and stingrays, there to hold large vacuum hoses and move them slowly over the riverbed.
The barge above them supplied their air. Other caboclos on top worked at the filtering system that combined mercury and gravity to separate the gold from the dirt, rocks, and other debris being vacuumed up. Mercury pollution of the Madeira became a serious problem.
If the diver was sending up gold, they pulled on his air hose as a signal to remain where he was. This was extremely dangerous. If caboclos at a neighboring barge saw that the barge next to them was bringing up gold but theirs wasn’t, things could get homicidal. More than one barge crew was killed by their neighbors. Then the encroachers would simply cut the air hose of the diver and send their own diver down to finish him off, if he was not dead already.
My friend Juarez, the son of Godofredo Monteiro, became a diver. He told me that the first time he descended, blood came out of his ears because of the pressure. “But you have to stick with it if you want to get rich,” he advised me.
He did make some money. Eventually he brought up enough gold to pay off his father’s debts, buy a house in town, and set himself up with an ice-cream stand and a keyboard for his budding singing career in the nearby town of Humaitá. Eventually the gold petered out, but the contributions that it made to the economy of Amazonas were only possible because of the industry of the caboclos and other poor Brazilians. The wealthy owned the barges but the poor mined the gold.
In addition to their hard work, this gold rush revealed more than once to me that caboclos have a hilarious sense of humor. During the gold rush, I saw a caboclo walking down the streets of Porto Velho in new clothes, with strings of money tied behind his back.
“What is that money there for?” I asked him.
“Filho de Deus” (Son of God), he began his response (a common Amazonian vocative expression—intended to be ironic). “I have spent my entire life chasing money. Now that I have found gold, money can chase me for a while.”
Another example of caboclo humor comes from a night along the banks of the Madeira in the city of Humaitá. It was early evening, about 7:30, still passear time, when it is customary to stroll with your spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend, and visit friends. It was warm and humid, but not uncomfortable, like a pleasant sauna. Some people gathered in the little plaza. The plaza pavement was of cracked gray concrete, surrounded by low whitewashed walls topped with slick red clay tiles that people could sit on. There were couples dressed in spotless, freshly laundered clothes, often white pants or shorts and bright-colored tops hanging attractively on their hard brown bodies. They were sitting around the plaza eating ice cream, popcorn, and sandwiches. Bugs of all sorts, including mosquitoes, gnats, wasps, and rhinoceros beetles, were flying into lights wherever they could find them. Two-wheeled carts stood at strategic points around the plaza, like New York hot-dog stands, with electric lights and coals burning brightly in hibachis next to the carts, grilling kebabs. The carts carried the makings for sandwiches called x-baguncas (cheese messes—the Portuguese letter x is pronounced “shees,” which is identical to the Brazilians’ pronunciation of the English word cheese). At one end of the plaza an older woman sold sandwiches, while her grandson played with a plastic truck on the concrete pavement of the plaza, close by. At the other end of the plaza was the father. Both carts were doing brisk business. Their sandwiches were very good—ham, mashed potatoes, peas, mayonnaise, frankfurters, and cheese, all at once.
The little boy asked his grandmother something. She said no. He ran across to his father and cried, “Dad, Grandma says I can’t have a Coca Cola.”
The little boy was very angry with his grandmother.
His dad looked at him and after a moment of silence offered a solution: “Let’s go kill her, then,” he said, with apparent sincerity.
The little boy looked at his father, puzzled. Then he responded emotionally, “No, Dad. We can’t kill her. She’s my grandma.”
“You don’t want to kill her?”
“No! That’s Grandma!”
“OK, well, then I have to work.”
“OK.”
And the little boy ran back to his grandma. I could see the dad chuckling to himself.
The most influential aspect of caboclo life on the Pirahãs is their beliefs about the supernatural, conveyed in broken sentences and words borrowed from the Lingua Geral (the “general tongue” spoken throughout the Amazon during the early history of Brazil). The Pirahãs talk frequently about caboclo beliefs and ask me about them.
These beliefs are an amalgam of Catholic teachings, Tupi and other indigenous folktales and myths, and macumba—an African-Brazilian form of spiritism like voodoo. They believe in the curupira, a jungle elf (some say beautiful woman) who leads people into the center of the jungle because its feet point backward and the lost soul thinks it is leaving the jungle. They believe that the pink Amazonian river dolphin turns into a man at night and seduces young virgins.
I remember Godofredo telling me about this dolphin’s transmogrification. He related an elaborate story of how the dolphin, transformed into a pale-skinned man, but still with his enormous and elongated penis, had impregnated an unfortunate girl near the Auxiliadora. After telling me the story, he asked, “Do you believe this, Daniel?”
“Well, I am sure that many people do,” I answered.
“I do believe it,” he said, trying to pressure me with my respect for our friendship to believe him.
Godofredo had two daughters when I met him, Sônia and Regina. Sônia was about my daughter Shannon’s age and Regina was roughly Kristene’s age. When Sônia was twelve years old, during a period when my family and I lived in the state of São Paulo while I was studying for my doctorate at UNICAMP, she and a girlfriend of hers from the Auxiliadora died suddenly with terrible abdominal cramps. From the description we received later by mail (Godo dictated a letter and had a friend take it by boat to Humaitá to mail it), which included vomiting up fecal material and an inability to defecate, we thought it sounded like intestinal blockage, though it could have been botulism or any number of other things.
Godo’s diagnosis was typical of people of the region: “Ela mixturou as frutas” (She mixed her fruits). Caboclos, unlike the Pirahãs, are very superstitious about what they eat—mixing certain foods, they believe, can lead to a quick and painful death. For example, one must never drink milk while eating acidic fruits like mangoes.
Once we visited Godofredo when his son, Juarez, was recovering from a near-death case of falciparum malaria. Godo had watched Juarez writhe for days on the floor in fever, pain, and nauseated agony, yet had made no effort to get medical help for him.
“Why didn’t you take him to the doctor in town?” I asked, somewhat perturbed. “I can still take him to the doctor if you like. I will pay all the expenses.”
“Look, Mr. Daniel. Everyone dies when it is their time to die. That is why one doctor dies in the arms of another. Isn’t that true? Doctors don’t control death,” came the sagacious caboclo reply.
A couple of years later, when Juarez was nearing his seventeenth birthday, I wanted to provide him with an opportunity to better himself financially. I sat down with Godo during a trip through the Auxiliadora to the Pirahãs.
“Godo, we both know that Juarez is a very smart young man. I have seen that he likes to work on record players and radios. I think that with good training, tools, and some financial help, he could start a shop and make good money. I have a friend in Porto Velho, an American radio technician named Ricardo, and he has agreed to teach Juarez his trade, to let him board with him and his wife, and then to supply him with tools when Juarez is done training. I am willing to pay for all of this. What do you think, Godo? I would like to take Juarez with me when I leave the village.”
Godo put me off temporarily. “Let me think about this, Daniel. When you leave for Porto Velho, I will give you my answer.”
A few weeks later, during a visit by Godo to the Pirahãs to trade for Brazil nuts, I boarded his boat to visit with him and drink some coffee.
“Daniel, I have thought a lot about your offer,” Godo began. “I cannot accept it. You see, I need my son to work with me. I am too poor to hire help. But if he leaves and learns all these new things, I am sure that he will stay in the city and never come back here. He will stay and make money in Porto Velho or Humaitá and not help his father.”
“But Godo,” I pleaded, uncontrollably meddling in his family affairs because I was shocked at this selfishness, “you are ruining Juarez’s future just for your own interests.”
I was really upset. I noticed that Juarez and his stepmother, Cesária, were looking askance at us from the back of the boat, their heads down.
“Maybe I am ruining his future. Or maybe I am not. Only God knows, Daniel. But I know that I need Juarez here with me, now.”
In complete exasperation, I gulped down the rest of my cafezinho (a small cup of strong black coffee) and excused myself to go back up the bank of the Maici to my house. I knew that Godo’s attitude was typical of most caboclos. Children were for the economic help of the parents. People didn’t waste their primary assets, their children. They were yours to do with what you wanted, and you wanted them to help you financially.
Years later Godo asked if he could still accept my offer. Juarez was in his midtwenties by this time. “No, Godo. Ricardo no longer lives in Porto Velho, so I don’t know anyone there now who could train him.”
Ultimately, Juarez’s story became a tragedy, common enough among the caboclos. As I was completing the first version of this chapter, I learned that he had been killed in a motorcycle accident on the Transamazon Highway. I have nearly been killed more than once riding my motorcycle down the Transamazon. I thought long sad thoughts about Juarez and the miserable end of the promising young life whose potential was never realized.
Summing up caboclo culture fails to do justice to their rich system of beliefs and way of life. Ultimately, the caboclos had come to play as much a role in my life as the Pirahãs, as I immersed myself more deeply into the world of the Amazon. Like the Pirahãs, they have been among my dearest friends and my most exasperating acquaintances.
But I couldn’t conclude even this cursory survey of them without mentioning their readiness to fight. Caboclos live by a code similar to that of John Bernard Books, John Wayne’s final movie character, in The Shootist: “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I expect the same from them.” Amazonians will help you if you ask. They will give you their last food if you need it. But they are severely sensitive to slights or any sign that you think you are superior to them.
Sometimes just my white skin and foreignness offends this sensitivity. This is because many Brazilians have come to believe that Americans are racist and feel superior to all other peoples. Sometimes those offended by my mere presence feel it incumbent upon them to try to intimidate me for their friends to see.
Many times I have been asked, “O que é você?” (What are you?) or “What are you doing in Brazil?” or “What are you trying to steal from our country?”
The balance between showing toughness and using common sense is a vital one to acquire when traveling in the Amazon. The Pirahãs have learned this lesson. And so have the caboclos. Neither will back down if the odds are even. But both will avoid a fight if the odds are obviously against them. It took me some time to learn the lesson for myself, after committing mistakes that could have been very costly.
Once when my family was living with the tribe, an enormous boat, of a size normally seen on the Madeira, the Amazon, or the Rio Negro, three decks high and one hundred feet long, came up the Maici to our village. It was high water, so the boat seemed to be parked right in front of our house at the river’s edge. The river was only a foot or so from the top of the bank then, though it is more than forty feet below the top in the dry season. The boat was so close and the river so high that the crew could peer into my house. The crew was large, perhaps as many as thirty-five men. I could see that they were staring at Keren and my daughters, now just past puberty. I reacted instinctively and boarded the boat, a thirty-year-old gringo, five feet nine and 155 pounds.
“What are you doing on Indian land?” I demanded of the owner, a huge man named Romano.
“We are looking for hardwoods,” he replied coolly.
I looked around. One man on the crew had a white fleshy orb in the socket where I expected to see his eye. Another had a scar from his forehead to his throat, clearly from a knife. Another had a scar across his belly. I noticed that all of them were built better than I was, with rippling, well-defined muscles exuding power. But as an indignant father and husband, I ordered them off the Pirahãs’ land.
“Who are you to tell us to leave?” Romano asked. “An American ordering Brazilians off Brazilian land?”
“The FUNAI delegado in Porto Velho, Apoena Meirelles, told me to make sure that no one came on this land without his permission,” I responded truthfully but naively, simply not grasping how offensive this could be to a native-born Brazilian. I also did not realize that the FUNAI was largely irrelevant to caboclos, even though I could not function without the foundation’s permission and support. This happened early on in my career, before I knew better.
I was ready to act. I didn’t know what I would do if this turned out badly, though. I had no plan. But to my relief, after a silence during which the crew continued to stare at my house and Romano just looked at me, he suddenly ordered his men to start the boat and prepare to leave. He offered me coffee and we drank it, syrupy sweet espresso. He said goodbye politely and they pulled out. Another lesson I have learned: mean-looking people can in fact be nice.
Caboclos, like the Pirahãs, are isolated even from other Brazilians, something that the Pirahãs notice when other Brazilians or foreigners come onto their land. This was made clear to me years ago by caboclo reactions to members of the Projeto Rondon. This project was a government-sponsored initiative to aid the health of the poor of Northern Brazil and increase the social awareness of privileged Southern Brazilians by bringing teams of college students from the South to the more remote and primitive areas of Brazil for short visits to provide dental and medical care. Once when I arrived at the Auxiliadora, where Godofredo and Césaria still lived, some men called to me as I was passing the shade tree that they sat under. They were sipping iced-cold Antarctica beer, dressed in shorts with flip-flops, and shirtless.
“Seu Daniel, como é que vai? Sabe rapaz, na semana passada tinha um grupo de estrangeiros do seu pais aqui. Falavam português enrolado que nem você!” (Mr. Daniel, how is it going? Last week there was a group of foreigners here from your country. They spoke Portuguese poorly just like you!)
“A group from my country?” I asked, surprised that any group of Americans would ever travel to the Auxiliadora. “Where were they from?”
“They were here with the Projeto Rondon. They were all from São Paulo.”
I walked away amused that to the caboclos there was little difference between a gringo from the United States and a Brazilian from São Paulo.