“Black in the Flogging Tree”: Landscape Change and Racial Identities in Amazonia, 1850–2005

This paper focuses on the history of a flogging tree, using it as a window to observe the evolving landscapes of race and labor relations in rural Amazonia. Under slavery, in the mid-nineteenth century, the tree was at the center of an Amazonian sugar plantation and functioned as a display of the master’s coercive power. Its central position at the plantation, not far from the Big House, structured labor spaces around a geography of containment, regimenting and disciplining enslaved laborers. In the early 20^th century the tree mutated its social and cultural meaning, becoming a site associated to wage labor at the sugarmill for the former freedmen, now free tenants and squatters on the lands of the former plantation. By 2005, a new transformation took place. Amidst legal disputes between the freedmen and agribusiness companies over ownership of the old plantation lands, the tree became a symbol of the shared ancestry between the black peasants still living nearby. In turn this shared ancestry represented the basis for their legal claim to be officially recognized as a black rural community by the Brazilian government. The tree epitomized the radical landscape transformation that had taken place over a century and a half, when the lands around the tree went from a geography of containment to one of autonomy and self-determination, a profound shift in traditional hierarchies of race, labor, and access to state institutions in rural Brazil.