The West as Geographic Fiction and the Conquering of Central Brazil

In the first half of the 20th century, a group of intellectuals—influenced by the thesis that the biogeography of the hinterland was a historical agent limiting the progress and economic development of Brazil—began to develop a set of arguments that reinforced the obsession with the conquest of the country’s interior. At the same time, the authoritarian and nationalist regime of President Getúlio Vargas, at the end of the 1930s, established an agrarian colonization policy for the Brazilian interior named the “March to the West.” This paper explores the symbolic elements of the colonizing march into the interior. I argue that the colonization policy sought to establish a new geographical and ideological category for the interior through the invention of the West and the denial of the sertão—a fundamental category for the social thought of the period, but one that contradicted that of the hinterland. To this end, this paper grounds this discussion in representative elements of the West—a geographically undefined territory—and the narratives of the promised land with its archetypes and characters of the colonizing frontier in Central Brazil.