Constellations of Inequality

Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil

Sean T. Mitchell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226499437
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Winner of the 2018 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Brazil Section Book Prize In 1982, the Brazilian Air Force arrived on the Alcântara peninsula to build a state-of-the-art satellite launch facility. They displaced some 1, 500 Afro-Brazilians from coastal land to inadequate inland villages, leaving many more threatened with displacement. Completed in 1990, this vast undertaking in one of Brazil's poorest regions has provoked decades of conflict and controversy.
 
Constellations of Inequality tells this story of technological aspiration and the stark dynamics of inequality it laid bare. Sean T. Mitchell analyzes conflicts over land, ethnoracial identity, mobilization among descendants of escaped slaves, military-civilian competition in the launch program, and international intrigue. Throughout, he illuminates Brazil's changing politics of inequality and examines how such inequality is made, reproduced, and challenged. How people conceptualize and act on the unequal conditions in which they find themselves, he shows, is as much a cultural and historical matter as a material one. Deftly broadening our understanding of race, technology, development, and political consciousness on local, national, and global levels, Constellations of Inequality paints a portrait of contemporary Brazil that will interest a broad spectrum of readers. 

ONE

Mimetic Convergence and Complementary Hierarchy

Without doubt, the historical [Brazilian] model of social cohesion, based in the assimilation of differences in service of acculturation and civilization, has lost credibility as a political utopia.

PAULA MONTERO, “MULTICULTURALISMO, IDENTIDADES DISCURSIVAS E ESPAÇO PÚBLICO”

Unequal Encounters

I am sitting in a sweltering church in March 2005, regretting that instead of the shorts I, like most men, usually wear in Alcântara, I am stuck with the now-sweat-drenched formal pants that I put on in deference to the gravity of today’s occasion. Before me in the seventeenth-century structure, a gilded and recently restored eighteenth-century altar rises up, its joyously pudgy rococo angels reaching heavenward and toward a golden crown. On the walls, engraved stones commemorate long-dead owners of enslaved people: merchants of salt, rice, sugar, and, especially, cotton. The 150 or so people with me in the pews are evenly divided between men and women; they are all Brazilian; almost all are black or brown, and, although they have dressed as finely as they can, most are visibly rural and poor. Some bureaucrats and urban NGO representatives are also present, mostly identifiable by their light skin, middle-class clothing, and the visible marks of urban comfort that I suppose I share.

Our eyes are set on a slide show projected onto a screen in front of the altar. It is controlled by a man who is also Brazilian, of East Asian origin, and dressed in the clothes of an urban professional. Like me and many others in the place, he fans himself with some of the pamphlets prepared by the Brazilian government ministries represented at this meeting—the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Agrarian Development, and the Special Secretariat of Policy for the Promotion of Racial Equality, among others. It is almost midday, and we have been in this stifling air for over three hours.

In the back of the hall are a few more light-skinned men, these in military dress. Unlike the other government representatives, these men from the air force have not prepared any pamphlets, and they will not speak publicly during these two days of hearings. When I try to talk to a lieutenant colonel later that day, he brushes me off—but not before intimating that I, and the civilian officials present, are part of an international plot against Brazil’s space program.

The man presenting the slides is an engineer and official from the civilian-controlled Brazilian Space Agency. This civilian space agency works uneasily alongside an air force space program that is, nominally, under its direction.

To the weary crowd, and with surprising emotion, he explains the significance of a chart titled “Export guidelines: Comparison between export segments by aggregate value.”

The chart is divided into two columns: “Industrial sector” and “Average price per kilogram,” all figured in US dollars. Running from the cheapest to most expensive per kilogram item, the chart informs the crowd that the mineral sector and its product, iron ore, command a mere $0.01 per kilogram on international markets. The agricultural sector, the next lowest-valued item, comes in at $0.30. One might guess that this would be relevant to the people in the crowd. But the people present do not sell much from their farms other than the thick, crunchy farinha d’água (manioc meal) that is a staple carbohydrate in this region where Brazil’s northeast meets the Amazon, the only significant cash crop here on the peninsula of Alcântara, and which, after living for more than a year in Alcântara, I have come to find as essential a complement to a plate of rice and fish as most locals do.1 They also sell, on regional markets, charcoal (a by-product of swidden horticulture) and other forest products. Women sell the laboriously and collectively produced babaçu oil, made from the nuts of the babaçu palms that are abundant here on the eastern perimeter of the Amazon, as well as gathered fruit such as juçara,2 muricí, and burití. Men sell fish and shellfish from the nearby bay of São Marcos and its brackish inlets, as well as wild forest game, the hunting of which is, in most cases, illegal.

But such sales are subordinate to Alcântara’s subsistence economy, and its residents sell nothing on international markets, nor anything bearing any relationship to the figures on the screen. Machado, my friend and local social movement leader who sits on my left, harrumphs (perhaps partially at the US anthropologist fiddling with the controls of an expensive digital voice recorder on his right): “A quilombola like me, I’ve never even seen a dollar.” His statement attests to the absurdity of this presentation about big-money exports in a municipality in which, according to a study carried out a few years earlier, 95.87 percent of rural families earned less than US$100 per month (Forum/DLIS Alcântara 2003). Even though economic conditions had improved somewhat since the survey, with Bolsa Família, the Workers’ Party’s conditional cash-transfer program, providing small monthly cash payments to families, most people in the church were still cash poor.

The engineer continues to make his case, dollar values ascending: steel and celluloid, US$0.30–$0.80 per kilogram; automotive materials, $10; the electronics sector, $100 per kilogram of audio or video equipment; the defense sector, a mere $200 per kilogram of rocket; aeronautics, $1,000 for one kilogram of commercial airplane; the defense sector again, tied with cellular-telephone makers, $2,000 per kilogram of missile and mobile phone; aeronautics again, $2,000–$8,000 for one kilogram of military airplane; and, finally, the priciest industrial sector on the chart.

“This is why this project matters for Brazil and all of us,” the engineer pleads, clearly recognizing that few in the church are swayed.

The space sector: one kilo of satellite will set a buyer back $50,000.

Challenges to a Developmentalist Teleology

The point of the chart was not simply to inform the crowd that satellites are worth a lot more per kilogram than iron, sugar, orange juice, soybeans, or farinha d’água. The least-schooled horticulturalist in the crowd no doubt knew this. Rather, the presentation was part of a public hearing in which a highly divided Brazilian federal government was unveiling its plan for the transformation and expansion of Brazil’s principal spaceport—one of many such plans that have come and gone since the 1980s—and making its best case that villagers should give up much of their land to facilitate spaceport expansion.

Several features of this meeting would have been unthinkable during the 1980s and 1990s, the first two decades of the Brazilian spaceport’s existence in Alcântara. The government’s new tactics mark changes in the structure of this conflict that shed light on the changing politics of inequality in Alcântara and Brazil.

At its announcement in 1980, the spaceport, or CLA (Centro de Lançamento de Alcântara, Alcântara Launch Center), was heralded by Brazil’s then Ministry of the Air Force as the most ambitious scientific project to be undertaken by a “developing country” (Choairy 2000, 65; Meireles 1983). Broadly, when representatives of the waning military government (1964–1985) first touched ground in Alcântara to recruit young locals to expropriate backwoods villages, the politics—not only of the base’s construction but also sometimes of public opposition—most often appealed to goals of progress, development, and whole-cloth socioeconomic transformation and convergence (between Brazil and the First World and among Brazil’s regions and unequal citizens). The spaceport’s construction was sold locally and nationally as helping to raise Brazil into the ranks of the major world powers while simultaneously pulling local villagers out of deprivation and exclusion (deprivation here imagined sometimes in socioeconomic and other times in explicitly racial—and racist—terms). This whole-cloth transformation was imagined and institutionalized at multiple scales. Villagers were to be moved from scattered and winding settlements, where they practiced rotating horticulture on communal land, into rectilinear villages, where they would practice modern farming on individual plots, and where they would share in the progress brought by the base. Brazil was to have a space program with military applications, one that would help fulfill Brazil’s destiny as a world power.

After three decades in Alcântara punctuated by technological mishap and land conflict, proponents and opponents of the government’s plan to transform and expand the base spoke about the spaceport and its surround in markedly changed terms. Once an engine and index of Brazil’s push for technoeconomic convergence with the First World, by 2005 the base was more often cast as a generator of profit and, sometimes, sovereignty. And, while villagers were once incorporated into the project as archaic but modernizing remnants of a disappearing Brazil, they now were more often cast as modern subalterns, with an identity increasingly understood in ethnoracial terms.

Let us consider again the opening vignette and its slide show presentation: although the bureaucrats present represented federal government agencies, the chart had been prepared neither by the military nor by any other government agency but by AIAB (Associação das Indústrias Aeroespaciais do Brasil, Association of Brazilian Aerospace Industries), an organization that represents private Brazilian aerospace companies. Moreover, what the bureaucrat was proposing to villagers was the planned construction by a civilian space agency of launching platforms to be used for profit by foreign governments and Brazilian and foreign corporations—notably through Alcântara-Cyclone Space, a joint Brazilian-Ukrainian company then under formation to launch satellites from Alcântara.3

In contrast, when the base was built, the principal institutional actor was the Brazilian military, and the launching project was conceived as part of a push for nationalist development and a bid for entrance into the First World. Published in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, just as construction of the base was beginning, an essay by the well-known Brazilian astronomer Ronaldo Rogério de Freitas Mourão, “Why Brazil Must Intensify its Space Research,” captures this nationalist ambition succinctly: “In the next 20 years, some space projects now under study will profoundly affect the economic, political, and social perspectives of the world’s nations. These projects will increase enormously the current technological lacunae that exist between developing countries and those on the path to transform into the super-civilizations of the future” (Mourão 1985).

Inequality is central to the push for the space program here. The world will divide into “developing countries” and “super-civilizations.” For its proponents, the construction of this base was part of the drive to enlist Brazil among these super-civilizations, fulfilling a long-standing promise of Brazilian nationalism. But by 2005, this utopia of technomilitary convergence with the world’s great powers was hard to find in pronouncements about the space program. Much more typical of the space program in 2005 was the profit-minded ambition represented by the slide show presentation in the church.

It is not that such developmentalist4 nationalism is completely absent from Brazil’s current space program. As I show, especially in chapters 3 and 7, the attempt to transform the space program into a civilian and commercial project with strong commercial and only mild developmentalist ambitions—that is, a space program that can properly be called neoliberal—has generated a fierce backlash, particularly in the military. But even the strongest contemporary supporters of the space program—in particular, the civilian space program—frame their claims differently than did their predecessors. The most articulate and prolific defender of the Brazilian space program—civilian and also military—José Monserrat Filho, for example, in a 2001 interview with the online science magazine ComCiência, implored: “We have already lost so much time and we need to act now with much greater determination and aggressiveness in order to sell the advantages of Alcântara as a truly competitive option on the world market. This can bring more resources and more experience for our whole space program, which will gain more of its own impetus” (ComCiência 2001).

In a 2014 interview I had with Monserrat Filho, he made a similar point, emphasizing the importance to the space program of international collaboration (with China, Israel, the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, all countries that have at times shown interest) and of the base’s commercial potential.

Although Monserrat Filho, like the bureaucrat at that day’s meeting in Alcântara, is a tireless advocate of Brazil’s extraterrestrial aspirations, his vision of earthly technopolitical advance for Brazil has important differences from those of his predecessors. Despite some dissenting voices, well-placed proponents of the twenty-first-century space program speak as often of market share—or, in the case of AIAB’s chart, the price per kilo of satellites—as they do of an autonomous launch program. And they seldom speak of a space program that might spur a nationalist convergence with the world’s great powers.

Contradictions of Convergence

At the widest scale, one of the key arguments of this book is that this utopia of redress for inequality, the idea that the poor would somehow follow along the same teleological trajectory as the rich, becoming more and more like the rich—the idea that a decline in inequality must entail a decline in difference—has lost the dominance that it held during much of the twentieth century. It no longer shapes the way people think about the redress of inequality in Alcântara with the hegemony that it did during the spaceport’s early years. This utopia of redress for inequality was dominant during the Cold War, as one response to the competing promises for the amelioration of global inequalities promoted by capitalist and communist powers of the First and Second World (Coronil 1997, 385; J. Ferguson 2006, 176–93). The utopia of convergence enjoyed a brief resurgence in international and Brazilian accounts of Brazil during the economic boom of Brazil’s first decade of the twenty-first century (e.g., Cohen 2011) and with the much-debated rise of a so-called new middle class comprising as many as 40 million Brazilians (Klein, Mitchell, and Junge 2018; Neri 2012; Pochmann 2014).5 But the utopia of convergence vanished from international and Brazilian accounts during the period of political conflict and economic decline that began in 2013 (Pinheiro-Machado and Dent 2016; Mitchell, Blanchette, and Silva, n.d.). I call this utopia of redress, in which poor nations and poor individuals are imagined to follow the rich in some teleological pantomime, mimetic convergence.6

Mimetic convergence was a developmental “grid for interpreting and explaining the world’s inequalities” that was globally dominant in the decades after World War II, as James Ferguson has shown (2006, 177). Focusing on the collapse of postwar developmentalist ideology in contemporary Africa, Ferguson has observed a transformation much starker than that in Brazil, despite some important similarities. Ferguson describes a developmentalist temporalization of inequality that has, since the Cold War, come undone. In a clear description of mimetic convergence, Ferguson writes, “The effect of this powerful narrative was to transform a spatialized global hierarchy into a temporalized (putative) historical sequence. Poor countries (and by implication, the poor people who lived in them) were not simply at the bottom, they were at the beginning . . . history—the passage of developmental time—would in the nature of things raise the poor countries up to the level of the rich ones” (178; see also J. Ferguson 1999).

Contemporary Brazil is not facing the same degree of socioeconomic hardship as much of contemporary Africa. But the changes in Alcântara’s conflicts that I document in this book mark changes in the way in which socioeconomic and sociotechnical inequalities tend to be understood and acted upon in Brazil, too. The developmentalist utopia from which the space program was born conceived of inequalities along a temporal line, in which the telos of development (in varieties of both the political Left and Right) held out the promise of a confluence of the developed and underdeveloped somewhere in the future. In the Brazil of neoliberal capitalism that emerged after the Cold War, and of multiculturalism and redistribution that emerged under PT (Workers’ Party) governments between 2003 and 2016, that utopia of teleological convergence is no longer dominant.

This is not to say that Brazil’s space program is no longer the site of many nationalist ambitions or that Brazilian policy makers no longer think about and plan for the nation’s ascension into the ranks of international powers. Such ambitions and projects run through many plans for the space program and the nation, as we will see in the pages that follow. Moreover, many of the years that I have been researching in Brazil have been marked by ambitious projects of south-south cooperation and of national development plans (Burges 2014; Boito and Berringer 2014; Cesarino 2012). But the difference between AIAB’s chart and Cold War–era attempts to enter Mourão’s “path to transform into the super-civilizations of the future” shows us how the unitary teleological grid on offer during the Cold War has receded, leaving the purpose and meaning of national development open to new forms of contestation.

In its focus on the value of space technologies in international markets, the presentation to the villagers was drastically misaimed at people who mostly earned their livelihoods through subsistence activities. But, less obviously, it hinted at shifts in the imaginaries of inequality, progress, and time institutionalized in Brazil’s space program. As shorthand, we might say that earlier visions of the space program institutionalized an imaginary of international inequalities framed in temporal terms: Brazil was behind but would strive to catch up to the world’s powers, which were ahead, in the future. In the space program’s early twenty-first-century iteration, on the other hand, the institutionally dominant imaginary of international inequality is one we might gloss as spatial: Brazil’s space program here may never help the nation “catch up,” but the equatorial base in Alcântara has a value, identity, and a niche that can be protected—and be highly beneficial to the nation—or at least to some in the nation. There are close symmetries between this transforma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Relaunching Alcântara
• 1  Mimetic Convergence and Complementary Hierarchy
• 2  Alcântara in Space and Time
• 3  Interpreting an Explosion
• 4  Expertise and Inequality
• 5  Racialization and Race-Based Law
• 6  The Making of Race and Class
• 7  Space at the Edge of the Amazon
• Conclusion: Space and Utopia
• Chronology
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index