Population-Colonization-Reproduction Policies: “whiteness”, “childhood”, and feminine constructs in the governance of the future Amazon

Abstract

In this article, I revisit aspects of the large-scale colonization plan implemented in the Amazon during the Brazilian Civil-Military Dictatorship. My aim is to demonstrate how the national integration roads — and the state-colonial processes they set in motion — were presented as solutions to a development problem. This development issue was framed as a demographic problem which was, in turn, treated (also) as a racial problem to be managed through a specific reproduction and settlement policy. The proposed analysis stems from my doctoral research on the mechanisms that underpin colonial-racial durability in the Amazon. In that work, I sought to show how the national integration roads activate long-term racial grammars constitutive of Brazil’s state-formation process. Within this broader reflection, I focus on the grammars present in the stories of families, women, and children gathered during my fieldwork, as well as in propaganda reports on national integration policies produced by Revista Manchete. This allows me to address the role attributed to whiteness, the feminine, and childhood in projections about the prosperous future that these roads promised for the Amazon. I argue that the state colonization policies implemented should be conceptualized as both a vehicle and a reflection of the rhetoric underpinning national debates about desired futures, addressing how notions of modernity were instrumentalized to promote racial whitening through direct and indirect measures aimed at controlling reproduction and birth rates.