![]() ![]() Re-creating the lives of the people of Santana de Parnaíba in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been an intensely challenging task that has occupied me for the last fifteen years. Although this book is set in a very different town, Santana de Parnaíba, located not in the Amazon but in the state of São Paulo, the families of Santana de Parnaíba sent most of their descendants into the frontier, perhaps some even to the remote village I visited in 1967. Entering that world was stepping back into history, into the world of the individuals whose lives I reconstruct in this book. ![]() ![]() I realize now that the Indians, rubber tappers, hunters, and fishermen whom we met on that unforgettable trip were living as their forebears had lived generations before. As my family and I walked down the muddy street among the houses built on stilts, and as we visited rubber tappers, we found ourselves in a world dramatically different from the one we knew. I could not have imagined then that one day I would write about the settlement of the vast Brazilian frontier. ![]() When I first visited Brazil in 1967, we crossed the Amazon by motorboat from the Colombian town of Leticia and spent the day in the tiny village of Benjamin Constant. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |