In his latest book, 鈥淭he Prestes Column鈥� Professor Jacob Blanc offers a new interpretation of a legendary rebellion that marked Brazil鈥檚 history. Blanc鈥檚 analysis is a showcase of 鈥渋nterior history which looks closely at the band of rebel officers and soldiers who marched fifteen thousand miles through the interior regions of Brazil between 1924 and 1927
Professor Jacob Blanc joined 麻豆AV鈥檚 Institute for the Study of International Development in August 2023.
We spoke to Professor Blanc about his book and his upcoming projects.
Q: Before pursuing your PhD, you spent a year working in Southern Chile, where you experienced a 鈥渂rief, career-altering trip to Brazil.鈥� Can you tell us a bit more about your time in Chile and your trip to Brazil? In what ways did this experience set you on your path to study Latin American history for your PhD?
A: After college I worked for the Chilean Ministry of Education, teaching English on a windswept island off the coast of Patagonia. There are two versions of this story. The more intellectual version is that my time living in a very rural part of Latin America set me on the both to start exploring the history and culture of the countryside鈥攖hat is what my first book focused on, and it鈥檚 a central theme in my new book, too. The less-intellectual version of the story is that after freezing my butt off in southern Chile, when my teaching job ended and I went to Brazil for a few months, the Brazilian sunshine convinced me to change my plans for a PhD project! My experience in both countries was really formative: I had actually done French history as an undergrad, so I had a lot of catch-up to do for pursuing graduate work on Latin America.
Q: What is the Prestes Column, and why did you choose to study and write about this rebellion in detail?
The Prestes Column was a rebellion in 1920s Brazil, in which a group of about one thousand junior Army officers and soldiers staged an uprising in S茫o Paulo and eventually went inland, spending two years marching across the interior of the country in a (futile) effort to overthrow the federal government. In Brazil, the column is a foundation myth of sorts for the modern Brazilian state, and even though the rebels failed, it set in motion some of the most important political changes of the 20th century. For having criss-crossed the supposedly untouched and undeveloped interior regions of the country, it鈥檚 a sort of Brazilian Johnny Appleseed legend, though with a touch of Che Guevara鈥檚 Motorcycle Diaries, given that the column鈥檚 leader, Luis Carlos Prestes, eventually became a communist.
While doing fieldwork for my first book (a history of rural mobilizations against the Itaipu hydroelectric dam in the 1970s), I was interviewing a farmer who pointed across the Paran谩 River and excitedly told me about how the Prestes Column crossed at that exact spot nearly a century earlier. At that time, I was vaguely familiar with the legend of the column, but hearing these stories from the farmer, so many decades after the fact, I realized just how powerful the stories still were. And I get digging more into scholarship on the column, and it struck me that although there has been massive amounts of work on the column, it was almost all hyper mythologized. There seemed to be almost no critical analysis of the myth. So rather than focusing just on the rebellion, I charted a project that would allow me to tell the stories of how the history of the column reverberated across 20th century Brazil.
Q: What is 鈥榠nterior history鈥�, and in what ways did this legendary rebellion embody 鈥渢he constructed duality of Brazil鈥檚 interior鈥�?
In the book I argue that interior history is a way to understand not only the spatial history of a nation, but explicitly the constructed meanings that have become imbued in notions of interior and coast. There is a really fascinating, and complicated, relationship between coast and interior: the former is normally presented as civilized, modern, and highly developed, standing in contrast to the former鈥檚 status as a backwards hinterland. But in countries across Latin America and elsewhere, the two spatial categories are deeply symbiotic and they are also diachronic: the so-called modern coast is meant to eventually expand into the interior and thus complete the civilizing destiny of the nation. I think that the Prestes Column is an ideal case study for charting an interior history of modern Brazil, because it shows how interior regions and their populations have long been seen by coastal elites as simultaneously backward (in relation to the more modern coast) and dormant, a space of untapped potential waiting to be brought into the nation. Thus the constructed duality of Brazil鈥檚 interior: a space of barbarism but also the true locus of national authenticity.
Q: What kind of sources, archive and/or contemporary, did you consult for this book?
I had a broad range of sources. This included the diaries and memoirs of former rebels in the column, and also the internal bulletins and records of the column itself. I also visited archives across the country, including small regional ones along the path of the column. And I personally retraced key portions of the column鈥檚 25,000 kilometer-march, analyzing the monuments and memorial sites that have been erected where the column passed. Plus, there is a significant corpus of published works on the column (scholarly books, journalistic accounts, local hobby historians etc), all of which I triangulated to understand the evolving depictions of the column and the interior for nearly a century.
Q: How has the memory of the Prestes Column endured in Brazil?
In a lot of different ways. For some, the column remains a potent symbol of nationalism, in which a group of young Brazilians intrepidly crossed the dangerous interior and brought the beacon of freedom and civilization to the forgotten hinterlands. This includes more mainstream Brazilians in major coastal cities, but also people in the interior who invoke the column as a way to elevate their communities into larger national narratives. And earlier I mentioned that Prestes himself became a leading communist, which meant that his legacy has been more complicated, and a lot of people either celebrate the column as the cradle of his radicalization (a somewhat true, if exaggerated, claim), while others鈥攐f more conservative leanings鈥攖ry to focus only on the column without the attachment of its leader鈥檚 eventual turn to communism. And because the column inflicted a not-small amount of violence against locals during the two-year march, there are also lots of places in the interior which continue to see the column not as a liberating force, but as a violent invader. In the book I trace out the many legacies of the column and what they reflect about different visions for nationhood and political identities.
Q: How have your students, colleagues and peers engaged with the book and subject matter? What has surprised you most about the book鈥檚 reception?
The book has just come out, so we鈥檒l have to wait and see!
Q: Your forthcoming third book is a biography of former political prisoner Alu铆zio Palmar, in which you put your interviews with Palmar in dialogue with the public speaking, writing and advocacy he conducted since the late 1990s. Why did you choose to focus on the implications of using oral histories to study the legacies of authoritarian rule for your next monograph?
To be honest, I didn鈥檛 start out seeking to do such a deep dive into oral history and memory as a methodology. I鈥檝e worked with these topics before, so it wasn鈥檛 entirely foreign to me, but initially I aimed to write a more straightforward biography of Alu铆zio Palmar. He is someone who I got to know over my years of research in Brazil and his story always struck me as fascinating: a young militant in the 1960s who joined the armed underground to fight against Brazil鈥檚 dictatorship, and gets imprisoned and tortured for several years before living in exile and eventually becoming a human rights activist.
When the Covid pandemic hit, I was afraid that Alu铆zio might get sick and die, like so many people in Brazil and across the world, and I asked him if he wanted to do a biography project. He agreed, and for two years we conducted almost-weekly interviews over Zoom. The more I got into the oral histories, and as I did other research (interviews with dozens of other militants and family members, and archival work in military documents), I realized that the story was fascinating not only for what Alu铆zio鈥檚 life story included, but perhaps even more so for how he himself has told his own story over the years. So in the end it became a story about stories, and in the book I approach the question of memory from a lot of different angles to hopefully offer an interesting platform for understanding how the violent histories of authoritarian rule continue to shape society鈥檚 ability to even tell those histories themselves.
Jacob聽Blanc is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Department of History and Classical Studies and the Institute for International Development Studies. He is the author of Before the Flood: the Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke University Press, 2019) and the co-editor of Big Water: Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay (University of Arizona Press, 2018). He has been the recipient of major grants including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Prior to arriving at 麻豆AV in 2023, he taught at the University of Edinburgh.