The Color Line and the Assembly Line by Esch Elizabeth D

Author:Esch, Elizabeth D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520285378
Publisher: University of California Press

MAKING AMERICAN RUBBER, MAKING RUBBER AMERICAN, AND REMAKING MIXED-RACE BRAZIL

In 1919 Ford had established an industrial presence in Brazil through its assembly plant in São Paulo, and had begun to use this as a continental base for providing the steadily growing Latin American market with cars and tractors. The company thus viewed the Amazon as foreign but familiar. Ford had chosen Pará because its ecology was home to heveas brasilis with which the British had had enormous success in developing for plantation growth and expansion. (That Britain had illegally acquired heveas seeds at the height of Amazonian dominance of the world rubber market in an historic “seed snatch” from Brazil by a British imperial thief dressed as a botanist has been well documented.)35 These were clearly factors in Ford’s decision to launch its plantations in the Brazilian Amazon. But at least as important as each of these reasons was the company’s belief in the racial improvability of its future workforce: Fordlandia was, even before its inception, a racial project. The possibility of recruiting and developing laborers of what Ford believed to be specific racialized types helped tip the scales in favor of Brazil, as compared to other regions with equally favorable climates and geographies. Carl LaRue, a botanist who scouted plantations for Ford, recommended Brazil because, although “labor is somewhat more expensive than in the East . . . labor is also more intelligent than the average labor in the East.” LaRue spelled out a solution to the problem of cost, arguing that the use of machines on a modern plantation that Ford intended should offset any advantage that the plantations in “the East” might have.36 LaRue also believed that the laborers whom Ford would recruit in Brazil were themselves capable of being modernized because of what he saw as their racial characteristics. LaRue’s report claimed both racial and historical expertise:

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