This chapter examines a very public controversy in which people of Native ancestry from a rural village in Mexico engaged the human and natural sciences and Mexican nationalism. On February 2, 1949, in the village of Ixcateopan (also rendered as Ichcateopan), in the state of Guerrero, a villager named Salvador Rodríguez Juárez found some papers hidden behind a shrine to the Virgin of Asunción in his home. Among the papers were an eighteenth-century book with some marginalia and an eight-page booklet in a leather cover. Both were signed by the colonial-era Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinía. They appeared to indicate that the last Mexica emperor, Cuauhtémoc, was a Native of Ixcateopan and had been buried in the village church.Footnote ¹ Rodríguez Juárez consulted the village priest about what to do with the papers, and the priest disclosed the astounding discovery at a Sunday mass.Footnote ² An official from a nearby town who attended the mass told a landowner from his village who worked as a stringer for the major Mexican daily El Universal.Footnote ³ The news spread quickly.

The politically imperiled governor of Guerrero, General Baltasar Leyva Mancilla, immediately set up a commission of local experts to investigate. But the committee members had limited expertise, and the governor soon sought help from the Instituto Nacional de Historia e Antropología (INAH, National Institute of History and Anthropology), headquartered in Mexico City. The INAH commissioned Eulalia Guzmán, who had spent several years in Europe locating and transcribing Mexican codices and had written a manuscript on Hernán Cortés’s Relaciones.Footnote ⁴ Guzmán knew colonial-era documentation well.Footnote ⁵

Once in Ixcateopan, Guzmán would have realized at once that something was amiss with the documents. Motolinía could not have penned marginalia in a book published more than two hundred years after his death. Guzmán nonetheless went ahead with her investigations, returning to the village several times between February and September, and accumulating additional evidence in support of the authenticity of the burial. Still unsure about the truth of the matter, she believed that archaeological explorations in the church could provide definitive confirmation or refutation,Footnote ⁶ and she asked the INAH to appoint an archaeologist. When the commissioned archaeologist was waylaid, the governor decided the excavation should begin anyway. After a few days of digging under the church altar and past three sets of floors, on September 26 villagers uncovered a pile of stones reminiscent of a pre-Columbian ritual mound. Below, there was a stone slab. Finding a gap in the stone, the diggers hit softer mud. A pick went through it, releasing a foul cuprous odor. Lifting some stone, the crew found a dagger and a copper plaque. The plaque was engraved with the numbers 1,525 and 1,529 separated by a cross and, below, “Rey, é, S, Coatemo.” Lifting the plaque, the assembled villagers saw a cranium with some beads in it. They unearthed more bones. Cuauhtémoc’s remains had been found!

The church bells rang. Guzmán brought the copper items out of the church, displayed them to the assembled public, and delivered an impromptu speech praising Cuauhtémoc. The discovery set off national celebrations. Schoolchildren from around the country placed handfuls of soil from their villages at the feet of the statue of Cuauhtémoc in Mexico City. Over seven thousand people traveled to Ixcateopan on Columbus Day 1949. Members of Congress speechified. Ixcateopenses rallied.Footnote ⁷

The Professional and Political Stakes

But did the remains belong to Cuauhtémoc? In the ensuing months and years, experts examined the documents, the church, the burial site, and the village’s oral traditions, using the tools of physical anthropology and history as well as architecture, chemistry, and archaeology. One group of scientists, led by Guzmán, concluded that it was at least possible, perhaps probable, that Cuauhtémoc was buried in Ixcateopan. Two other government-sponsored commissions came to the opposite conclusion.

This chapter, like the chapters by Rosanna Dent and Eve Buckley in this book, shows how the views, methods, and moral stances evinced by the experts in both camps emerged through interactions taking place across local, regional, national, and transnational scales – in villages, state agencies, and the transnational scientific community. The experts who investigated the Ixcateopan discovery dialogued with each other but also with Ixcateopense commoners and village officials, public opinion, US experts, national leaders, and regional elites like Governor Leyva Mancilla. The noted muralist Diego Rivera weighed in on the Ixcateopan controversy, as did President Miguel Alemán (1946–1952). Because the controversy took place during the years immediately following World War II, it became entangled in discussions regarding Mexico’s place in a Cold War world order that placed a premium on science. Intellectuals on both sides of the dispute deployed a science they deemed cosmopolitan, but they viewed the relation of science to Indigeneity and nationalism in different – and very gendered and racialized – ways.

For all the participants in the debate, the nature of Indigenous contributions to the Mexican nation was at stake, as was the role of science in authorizing narratives regarding Indigenous and Mexican history. Villagers did not reject science or expertise; they deployed it strategically and in combination with local views. The members of the two official commissions repeatedly voiced their adherence to scientific protocols as well, while characterizing Guzmán and her allies as irrational and branding them ideologically motivated indófilos (Indophiles). Members of the official commissions dismissed Ixcateopenses as likewise guided by fervor rather than evidence. Situating themselves as proponents of a cosmopolitan and detached science, these experts eschewed inevitably affect-laden relationships with the Ixcateopenses and propounded a Mestizo identity that embraced, they said, Indigeneity and Spanishness equally.Footnote ⁸ Guzmán and her collaborators responded by saying that the official investigations were incomplete and superficial. The authenticity of the burial and the documents, they affirmed, were too easily dismissed by experts who diminished the importance of Indigenous ancestry to the mixed, Mestizo Mexican nation. Guzmán’s opponents denied these accusations, proclaiming their respect for Cuauhtémoc and the Mexica Empire. Members of the first INAH commission laid a wreath at the statue of Cuauhtémoc in Mexico City before beginning their work.Footnote ⁹

Gender played an important role in the controversy. Because the main investigator was a woman working within an otherwise almost exclusively male scientific community, and because the virility of Cuauhtémoc was so often invoked in the debate, the episode laid bare the ways in which participants related gender differences to both scientific authority and Indigeneity – and of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism. As we shall see, Guzmán was caricatured as embodying a feminine, quasi-religious hysteria and at the same time portrayed as both unnaturally masculine and unnatural in her claim to scientific authority. Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, secretary of the second official investigation – dubbed the Gran Comisión because it included Mexico’s most well-respected scholars – wrote that the pro-Guzmán investigative commission was “more robust, intransigent, aggressive, and dangerous than its counterpart.” And villagers’ hostility toward the committee was, he said, due to their cultish adherence to Guzmán: “The discoverer’s harangues animated them, creating a tendency opposed to any kind of serene attitude, and they called any hint of skepticism a sacrilege.”Footnote ¹⁰ By contrast, the secretary of the Gran Comisión, Arturo Arnáiz y Freg, praised Mexico’s “anthropological and historical disciplines” for their “maturity” and lauded commission members for not “letting themselves be lulled [dejarse alucinar] by deficient testimonies, documents plagued with anachronisms, or the mystical inclinations of enthusiastic but misguided groups.”Footnote ¹¹ For the official scientific establishment, then, neither Indigenous villagers nor Guzmán – a woman – could speak authoritatively for the nation. Nor could they fruitfully deploy science and rationality.

Subsequent scholarship by Salvador Rueda, Lyman Johnson, Paul Gillingham, and others has echoed these characterizations. Gillingham calls the reports of the indófilos “partisan,” and “resting on unsupported assertion.” “Discussion,” he says, “was largely replaced with shrill assertion.” He further characterizes villagers’ attitudes as “defensive hostility” laced with “aggression and resentment,” and he repeats without critique the contemporary opinion that “to have taken Ixcateopan seriously was ‘another of Doña Eulalia’s insanities’.”Footnote ¹²

In sum, as this chapter shows, those who rejected the authenticity of the burial – in the 1950s and since – have subtly deployed notions of femininity to discredit the burial, Guzmán, and the Ixcateopan villagers. Guzmán and her allies countered by deploying science and casting doubt on the impartiality of scientists who did not denounce the Spanish conquest. Indeed, Guzmán was not as unscientific as her opponents claimed, and her opponents, despite their claims of neutrality, often offered poorly substantiated arguments. Unsurprisingly, Guzmán’s opponents also held biases that shaped their investigations, including a bias against women in science.

My goal in showing Guzmán’s allegiance to science and her opponents’ biases is not to claim that Guzmán was correct. Recent scholarship has shown convincingly that she was not.Footnote ¹³ But by highlighting Guzmán’s unacknowledged rigor and her opponents’ scientific missteps, this chapter unveils how a mix of ideology and proof colored all the experts’ opinions, along with their views of Indigenous Mexico and its history. Scholars’ relationships to Ixcateopenses mattered too, as did the gendered relationships they forged among themselves.

Guzmán herself had an ambivalent position. Her ambitions no doubt drove her too, and at times she evinced deep suspicion of Salvador Rodríguez Juárez and other villagers. Yet she also probed their oral traditions and rituals with care. At times, her political proclivities along with her suspicion of her academic opponents blinded her to contrary evidence. Yet she showed greater understanding of ideological biases than her opponents.

The Ixcateopenses had ambitions and plans as well. Like the Terra Indígena Pimentel Barbosa villagers examined by Rosanna Dent in this book, they engaged science and scientists to pursue their aspirations and reduce harm. For Ixcateopenses, that meant deploying a pro-Indigenous nationalism and forging alliances with scientific allies who deployed a similar national narrative. For everyone involved nationalism was a guiding and limiting framework, a terrain of struggle.

The Historiographical and Theoretical Stakes

This chapter historicizes experts’ moral stances, while stressing the competing contemporary moralities within the scientific community, born of distinct alliances.Footnote ¹⁴ The mores of investigators were conditioned in part by the material rewards and forms of recognition available to intellectual elites. Yet scientists’ views of, and experiences in, Ixcateopan mattered as well. The allegiance to scientific proof that Guzmán and her allies demonstrated was tempered by their knowledge of how it could be manipulated. Perhaps more than their opponents, the so-called indófilos were attuned as well to what was not proven or not known, a fact missed by subsequent scholarship that has deployed hindsight (and the findings of a new scientific investigation in 1976).Footnote ¹⁵

This essay also builds on Latin Americanist studies of the testimonio and Indigenous historical narratives. Those studies have probed how we make judgments regarding historical truths and historical narratives and how those may change over time. For instance, explorations of the collaboration between Rigoberta Menchú and Elizabeth Burgos Debray have suggested that readers of a testimony will inevitably view, and judge, Menchú’s testimonio differently now than when it was first published during a brutal civil war. If distortions in Menchú’s narrative were meant to save lives, how should that affect how we view those distortions? Does the relationship of narrative truth figure differently for Menchú because she is Maya? What level of cynicism, credulity, or contextual knowledge do we expect of distinct audiences?Footnote ¹⁶ Our own moral judgments may rest on accessing multiple, current and past, points of view.

Discussions of Menchú’s testimonio have also raised questions about how narratives are authored. Menchú’s account, like the accounts regarding Cuauhtémoc, involved conflictual and power-laden collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. And both invoked political projects that were at once local, national, and transnational. In the Cuauhtémoc episode, villagers of Native ancestry came to work, somewhat reluctantly, with the group of outsiders led by Guzmán. In that regard, the controversy – like the testimonio genre – qualifies notions of Indigenous refusal.Footnote ¹⁷ Villagers embraced Guzmán while refusing, as we shall see, to give gringo archaeologists access to their secrets.

In addition, the episode prompted what we might view as an affect-laden scientific refusal by Guzmán and her intellectual allies. Guzmán visited Ixcateopan repeatedly, and her opponents did not. This mattered. Power and affect shifted as words and objects circulated and as people traveled from the field to the city and back – or stayed put. Florencia Mallon has likewise noted that while the subjects of testimonios may have significant power at the moment they tell their stories, they inevitably lose control as their stories move outward.Footnote ¹⁸ If Cuauhtémoc’s bones, like the kuru examined by Warwick Anderson, are good to think with, in the Ixcateopan controversy, specific actors’ control over narratives varied as stories moved outward from the village and into regional, national, and international political debate. Yet neither the local histories nor the objects were lost. Today, what used to be the village church houses a shrine to Cuauhtémoc and a display of the remains. Ixcateopan’s yearly mardi gras festivities celebrate Cuauhtémoc.Footnote ¹⁹

The existence of these local histories suggests that the nation-state’s use of symbols like Cuauhtémoc might be thought of, at least in certain circumstances, not just as appropriation but as something else, perhaps a form of imperfect recognition but also signs of active persistence, resurgence, or political savvy on the part of Native people.Footnote ²⁰ Following Helen Verran, might we acknowledge that peoples can act together without necessarily thinking or being in the same ways?Footnote ²¹

In what follows, I first provide additional details regarding the development of the scientific investigation and the surrounding public controversy. I underscore the relations between villagers and the experts, while remaining attuned to disparate opinions within each of these groups. I then discuss the scientific and political context in which these debates developed. A fictional dialogue I discovered in the archive of a member of the Gran Comisión provides a window onto questions of gender as it relates to science and Mexican nationalism.

Eulalia Guzmán and the Ixcateopenses

Guzmán was skeptical when she first arrived in Ixcateopan, but this changed over the coming days and months. Shortly after her arrival, Guzmán visited the village momoxtli, a ritual mound that seemed to be the ruins of a castle. There, she found pottery that she identified as Aztec. She also heard of a ritual during Carnival in which villagers danced and pantomimed carrying a body that they took down from a tree. She learned of oral traditions that supported the account in the documents. Although Guzmán did not immediately reveal this detail to her superiors in the INAH, Rodríguez Juárez had in confidence shared with her additional documents, including an “Instruction” written by Rodríguez Juárez’s grandfather, Florencio Juárez. According to this new document, the book with the marginalia and the papers bound in leather had been copied from an older set of documents when the latter were in poor condition.Footnote ²²

If Guzmán was suspicious, so too were villagers. Initially, only three village residents agreed to share with Guzmán versions of an oral tradition regarding Cuauhtémoc’s burial. Most villagers blamed village leaders for revealing their long-held secret and for the unwanted attention the village was receiving. Village officials, however, recognized that the publicity might help the village gain access to resources. On the day Guzmán was leaving the town, they asked her to address a town meeting to see if she could convince more villagers to come forward with their stories. It worked. Eleven elders subsequently shared their own versions of oral traditions they had heard from their parents and grandparents.Footnote ²³

In 1949, as today, the details of Cuauhtémoc’s life and death were sketchy, and the evidence Guzmán collected in Ixcateopan filled in gaps in prevailing accounts. At the time of the Spanish conquest, Ixcateopan was a largely Chontal-speaking village in an area conquered by the Triple Alliance of Mexico Tenochtitlan–Texcoco–Tlacopan. According to the Ixcateopan documents, local rituals, and oral histories, Cuauhtémoc’s grandmother was a member of the Ixcateopan nobility who married a Texcocoan man sent to rule over the region around Ixcateopan. Cuauhtémoc’s mother, a figure about which existing accounts said almost nothing, was imprisoned by the Mexica, along with her father, as a result of disputes over taxation, and they were taken together to Tenochtitlan, the seat of Mexica power. There, Cuauhtémoc’s mother met his father, who was the son of the Mexica tlatoani, or ruler. Their son, Cuauhtémoc, returned to his mother’s homeland, departing for Mexico’s central valley when called to defend the Mexica capital from the arriving Spaniards.Footnote ²⁴

According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s well-known chronicle, in the aftermath of the Spanish defeat of the Mexica, Cortés imprisoned Cuauhtémoc and took him on a trip to subdue rebellious Spaniards at Hibueras. On that trip, Cortés learned that the young man was planning to kill Spanish members of the expedition, and Cortés had the Mexica leader assassinated, leaving Cuauhtémoc’s corpse hanging from a tree. Díaz del Castillo, who followed Cortés as he continued his trip, could not say anything about what happened to Cuauhtémoc’s body afterwards. Here, the local Ixcateopan accounts filled in. Indigenous members of Cortés’s expedition escaped and returned to the site of Cuauhtémoc’s assassination, wrapped his body in cloth, transported him hundreds of miles to his hometown, and buried him at the site of his family’s castle. Motolinía, who later visited the village, had him reburied at the site where the church was subsequently built. Because Motolinía was afraid the villagers might be persecuted by the Inquisition, he told them to keep quiet about the burial.Footnote ²⁵

Returning to Mexico City, Guzmán looked in archives for information regarding the Ixcateopan region. Denizens of Ixcateopan and the surrounding region began to write her with tips, local lore, and even rumors of an unknown codex held in a nearby village. She learned that long before Rodríguez Juárez proffered his documents there had been stories in the region connecting Ixcateopan and Cuauhtémoc. The Ixcateopan oral tradition, it seemed, abounded in neighboring villages.Footnote ²⁶ Guzmán also visited Ixcateopan at least twice more between February and August. On one of these trips, Rodríguez Juárez, under pressure from village authorities, produced additional documents named in the Instruction, including, most intriguingly, two pieces of paper sewn shut with writing in invisible ink.Footnote ²⁷ In August, Guzmán opened the document with invisible ink before assembled villagers and applied gentle heat, revealing some hard-to-read words. Initial examinations of the paper and ink indicated that they were produced during the early colonial era, but Guzmán determined that further chemical analysis was needed.Footnote ²⁸

At this point, Guzmán was still unsure about the veracity of the story, but felt that physical evidence would help confirm or refute it. She began thinking about digging in the church after the rains had passed, in November or December. But villagers were keen on digging, and the governor of Guerrero was in a rush to unearth Cuauhtémoc before the hundredth anniversary of the state of Guerrero in October. Guzmán asked the INAH to send an archaeologist, but when the archaeologist was delayed, villagers and the governor decided to begin the excavation. Despite some efforts on the part of Guzmán, archaeological procedures regarding visual and written documentation of the excavation process were not followed. There were no drawings, and few photographs or notes.Footnote ²⁹

Gillingham adduces that villagers were excited about the stature they might gain. But village leaders had another reason for wanting to begin the excavation: a fear of looting. In letters to Guzmán, members of the village council told her that they had received letters from anthropologists wanting to excavate. Villagers were aware that if things did not move forward quickly, local riches might end up in the hands of US collectors. Guzmán was clearly attuned to villagers’ suspicions. She reassured the village that INAH experts would respect the rights of the village. “We take extreme precautions,” she wrote Rodríguez Juárez, “so as not to stir people up too soon, or awaken their ambition of finding valuable or historical material for personal gain.” Guzmán also cited concerns about the villagers’ sensibilities when INAH director Ignacio Marquina offered to commission archaeologist Pedro Armillas, who was a Spanish emigré. Guzmán told Marquina not to send Armillas because the Ixcateopenses would not trust a foreigner. If the town was to reveal its secrets, it wanted to ensure that collaborators would be on their side. Guzmán offered those assurances.Footnote ³⁰

To be sure, village residents were not always in agreement. The village appears to have retained divisions between descendants of earlier Chontal inhabitants and those descended from the Indigenous conquering forces of the Triple Alliance. Many of the village leaders, including Rodríguez Juárez, descended from those conquerors, and village commoners mistrusted their motivations. Rodríguez Juárez’s grandfather Florentino was literate, a mason who enriched himself by wresting lands from other villagers.Footnote ³¹ Another division – which perhaps built from the former rift – arose during the dig itself when the excavation team found that the church altar did not have a foundation and would need to be dismantled to avoid it from falling. A group of villagers opposed the removal of the altar and protested loudly outside the sanctuary. They desisted only when the governor offered to rebuild the altar and fix the church.Footnote ³²

A team of village residents did the excavating. After six days, on September 26, they unearthed the tomb. Two days later, INAH archeologist Jorge Acosta finally arrived, and the following day, the noted archeologist Alfonso Caso and INAH director Ignacio Marquina reached Ixcateopan.Footnote ³³ Caso had excavated the fabulous Zapotec ruins at Monte Albán, assisted by Guzmán and others. One of his first questions was to ask where the jewels were. It seemed improbable that a noble like Cuauhtémoc would have such a poor gravesite.Footnote ³⁴ Marquina was even more dubious. Though he had commissioned Guzmán, he had not expected her investigations to yield results. In September, he told Guzmán he did not think they would find anything in the church, and he made public declarations to that effect the day before the discovery. Once in the town, he made inquiries about whether anyone had entered the church on the night before the burial was unearthed. He presumably suspected that someone had planted the bones there that evening. Later, he and Caso visited Rodríguez Juárez, and, as Rodríguez Juárez later told Guzmán, warned Rodríguez Juárez not to trust Guzmán.Footnote ³⁵

For her part, Guzmán was still not fully convinced that the burial site belonged to Cuauhtémoc. She trusted the oral testimonies she had collected but thought that Cuauhtémoc might be buried elsewhere in the village. Perhaps, she thought, the townspeople had intentionally pointed to the wrong site so as to keep outsiders from finding it. Or they might have moved the body in the intervening 420 years. Guzmán continued to look for a second, more majestic, burial. She made some preliminary excavations at the momoxtli and at another chapel in the town. Like Caso and Marquina, she kept silent about her doubts. The crowd celebrating around the church would not have appreciated their suspicions. Caso publicly validated the find, and he refused to badmouth Guzmán publicly, calling her a friend.Footnote ³⁶

Soon after, Marquina appointed the first INAH commission. Its investigation was brief. The villagers were distrustful and possessive. When military leaders tried to transport the bones to Mexico City for safekeeping, village leaders told them no.Footnote ³⁷ When the physical anthropologists Eusebio Dávalos and Javier Romero visited Ixcateopan on October 6, villagers prohibited them from taking the bones outside the church to examine them in the sunlight. The INAH investigators spent no more than eight hours in the town. Nonetheless, even this cursory examination convinced them the bones did not belong to the nobleman. For one thing, they quickly determined the bones belonged to at least five different individuals, one of them a child. There were two left femurs. The cranium apparently belonged to a woman.Footnote ³⁸ Less than three weeks after the initial discovery of the bones, on October 14, the INAH commission delivered its verdict to the Minister of Education. Only the archaeologist who investigated the building of the church abstained from signing, citing a lack of sufficient evidence. The Minister of Education, aware that the verdict would not meet with the approval of a good part of the Mexican populace, consulted with President Alemán before releasing the results five days later.Footnote ³⁹

Meanwhile, Guzmán had begun assembling her own set of experts to examine the evidence. When she had opened the document with the invisible ink – she was still working on behalf of INAH – she had requested the help of a chemist from the Banco de México. Then, just days before the bones were uncovered, the criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, who headed the Bank’s investigations department, wrote to offer his assistance.Footnote ⁴⁰ Quiroz Cuarón and his investigations team presumably knew how to spot fakes, including forged signatures. Together, Quiroz Cuarón and Guzmán found additional experts. Historian Luis Chávez Orozco agreed to weigh in on the history and the historical documentation. Chemists examined the oxidation on the copper plaque to determine its age, and they looked at its chemical composition to see where it might have been mined. A paleographer dated the handwriting on the various documents. Architect and art historian Alejandro von Wuthenau worked to understand when the church had been built and when the altar had been erected so as to pinpoint when a burial in that location might have occurred. This group would eventually produce a series of reports.Footnote ⁴¹

Faced with Guzmán and Quiroz Cuarón’s efforts and public repudiation of the INAH verdict, the Minister of Education determined to set up a new commission. Guzmán asked Minister Gual Vidal to delay this new review until her experts had rendered their verdicts, but after consulting President Alemán, the Minister forged ahead. The Gran Comisión met for the first time on January 6, 1950.Footnote ⁴² Members of the Gran Comisión were assigned to report on distinct issues, depending on their areas of expertise. There were many technical issues to resolve, but the minutes of their deliberations suggest that commission members were convinced from the start that the find was fraudulent, and that they saw their mission as easy: proving that fraud. They were also under extraordinary political pressures from national government officials who wanted them to confirm that the bones belonged to Cuauhtémoc, and some members were called before high government officials. This political maneuvering simply convinced them of the need to assert their scientific neutrality and independence.Footnote ⁴³

The Banco de México and Gran Comisión teams had many questions to address: Regarding the documents: Did the handwriting and spelling correspond to the sixteenth century? The forms of expression? The paper and ink? Regarding the plaque: Did the spelling of Cuauhtémoc as Coatemo correspond to the sixteenth century? Would people back then have rendered the date with a comma between the thousands and the hundreds columns? Would they have referred to Cuauhtémoc as “Rey”? Would they have written the conjunction “é” with an accent? Or would they have used the letter “e” as a conjunction at all? Was the copper from the region? How old was it? What did the oxidation reveal? What about the handwriting? Regarding the human remains: How old were they? (An effort was made to send them to the United States for carbon dating.Footnote ⁴⁴) Could they belong to a young man of Cuauhtémoc’s supposed age? Regarding the burial in the church: When would it have been possible to undertake such a burial? Specifically, when was the church built and when was the altar installed? And what of the Ixcateopan story? Was it possible that Cuauhtémoc was of Tlatelocan heritage? Who was his mother? Could he have been raised in Ixcateopan? Could he have been transported from the presumed site of his death, about one thousand miles away? Could Motolinía have been in Ixcateopan around the time of Cuauhtémoc’s death?Footnote ⁴⁵

Both the INAH commission and the Gran Comisión focused on the human remains, which both official commissions readily determined to have been arranged in the form of a human skeleton by someone with little anatomical expertise. For the experts, and for the broader public, the physical evidence was paramount. The original documentary discovery had made headlines, but it received substantially less attention than the excavation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Guzmán and her allies focused on physical evidence too, but for them the physical evidence included the plaque and the paper as well as the human remains. They also paid considerable attention to the historical narratives provided by the documents and oral histories. In so doing, they manifested an interest in the local histories that made up Mexico’s larger national history and in the timeworn papers held in Ixcateopan, as in so many Mexican villages.

Mestizo Nationalism in the Cold War

Both the rival groups of experts used science, and foreign scientific expertise, in their efforts to establish the truth regarding the burial, but both groups were partial – influenced by the broader political contexts in which they worked; by existing narratives regarding Mexico’s past; by ideas about the relation of science to affect; and by group members’ relationships to Indigeneity in general and Ixcateopan in particular. The group assembled by Guzmán and Quiroz Cuarón argued that their opponents’ investigations were superficial. With the exception of Caso, Gómez Robleda, and the chemist Rafael Illescas Frisbee, none of the commission members ever visited Ixcateopan. Their science would, in contrast to Guzmán’s, not be swayed by their relation to Ixcateopenses. In subtle and not so subtle ways, members of the Gran Comisión dismissed local histories.Footnote ⁴⁷

For instance, the Gran Comisión used the 1946 book of US historian Gilbert Joseph Carraghan to discredit the oral evidence Guzmán had collected. According to Carraghan, oral traditions were valid only if historians could document uninterrupted transmission and two unrelated, independent series of transmittals. He also required that the tradition refer to an important event, and be widely accepted across time. The Gran Comisión then added multiple additional criteria, which, its members recognized, most traditions could not meet. Members of the Banco group countered that in fact the Ixcateopan traditions met many if not all of these conditions.Footnote ⁴⁸

Here, as in other instances, members of Guzmán’s group did not reject science but instead tried to make it compatible with local viewpoints. And, they were likely less convinced than their opponents made them out to be. A close reading of their reports shows that a number of them viewed the authenticity of the burial as plausible or probable rather than fully proven. Given their plausibility, and the Guzmán group’s desire to affirm Mexico’s Indigenous heritage and local histories, its members went along with a version of events that satisfied populist politicians and the broader Mexican public. As Gómez Robleda argued, “Insurance companies have very lucrative businesses based exclusively on probable truths.”Footnote ⁴⁹

As the debate regarding Cuauhtémoc was taking place, discussion of Spanish colonial and US imperial power was at a high point, with each growing out of and reinforcing the other. The Cuauhtémoc controversy should therefore be understood, as past scholarship has noted, in the context of proximate events that touched on Mexico’s relationship to its Indigenous past, its Spanish heritage, and its place in a Cold War world that placed a premium on science. Guzmán, Gómez Robleda, Chávez Orozco, and Diego Rivera were all part of the left-wing opposition to the ruling party that rallied around Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s Partido Popular, founded in 1948.Footnote ⁵⁰ For this group, Cuauhtémoc symbolized the fight against colonial oppression, a fight that had been continued by the Mexican patriots of the wars of independence, in the 1846–1848 war against the United States, and in the war against the French invasion. Ironically, this view jibed with that of a ruling party that deployed a populism that elevated the nation’s glorious Indigenous past.

One important event that framed the controversy took place in 1946, when Cortés’s corpse was exhumed – for the eighth time. The conquistador’s body had been hidden from the public since the independence era on the theory that Mexicans so despised Cortés that they might destroy his remains. In 1945, two foreign historians, the Cuban Manuel Moreno Fraginals and the Spanish exile Fernando Baeza Martos, produced a document that signaled the spot where conservative politician Lucas Alamán had reburied Cortés in 1836. Moreno Fraginals and Baeza Martos showed the document to the Mexican historian Francisco de la Maza, and de la Maza looked for a set of impartial arbiters to judge its veracity. After deciding the document was likely real, de la Maza and his collaborators decided to avoid bureaucratic hurdles by eschewing official sponsorship and searching for the body themselves. The found it almost immediately in the spot indicated.Footnote ⁵¹

The burial was then examined by experts. Historian Silvio Zavala, acting on behalf of the INAH, confirmed the documentary evidence by comparing de la Maza’s document with a copy that Alamán had deposited with Spanish authorities. Physical anthropologist Eusebio Dávalos examined the human remains and judged them to be authentic. Cortés was 1.58 meters, Dávalos noted, and diminished in size by his advanced age. His bones were diseased, and he had rickets, but his deformities had not been caused by an infection.Footnote ⁵² Based on photographs of the remains, Quiroz Cuáron rebutted Dávalos’s claim that infection was not the cause of the bone anomalies. To the consternation of Hispanophiles, Quiroz Cuarón claimed that Cortés was syphilitic.Footnote ⁵³ Diego Rivera, who had already decided he would paint an elderly, stooped Cortés in his Palacio Nacional mural, latched on to Quiroz Cuarón’s conclusions.Footnote ⁵⁴

Guzmán shared with Quiroz Cuarón and Rivera a desire to demystify the conquistador. Before undertaking the Cuauhtémoc investigation, she had been working on a book based on the conquistador’s letters to the king of Spain. The book argued that Cortés’s letters were politically motivated exaggerations with little relation to what actually happened. The INAH had refused to publish her book, and prominent anthropologists appear to have sabotaged her efforts to get it published elsewhere.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the ensuing public debate over Cortés, many Mexicans, Guzmán included, openly objected to the reverence shown the conquistador, and the Cortés discovery reignited discussion about the respective contributions of Spaniards and Native Americans to Mexico, with conservative Hispanists arrayed against progressive indigenistas.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this context, members of the anti-Guzmán group portrayed themselves as level-headed, middle-of-the-road thinkers, who recognized the quintessentially Mestizo nature of their nation. Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, who served as secretary of the Gran Comisión, wrote in 1960:

Again and again, Jiménez Moreno and other commission members stated that regardless of their determinations regarding the remains, they recognized Cuauhtémoc as a brave national precursor, but their science was separate from their affect. Zavala wrote that it was “necessary to separate clearly the admiration and respect we Mexicans feel for the figure of Cuauhtémoc from the purely scientific problem that entails establishing the authenticity of the discovery of the Ixcateopan remains.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Jiménez Moreno’s characterization of the indófilos was not necessarily accurate. According to the story circulating in Ixcateopan, the Spaniard Motolinía had presumably ordered the village to keep silent about Cuauhtémoc’s burial in order to protect them. The Ixcateopenses thus underscored reconciliation between Spaniards and indígenas, not Hispanophobia. A fictionalized dialogue that I attribute to Zavala made a similar point, while suggesting that Guzmán’s allies refused to recognize the positive Spanish role. In the dialogue, one friend says to another:

To be modern and fully Mestizo required Mexicans to reject popular historical memory and instead adhere to a science associated with the industrialized West.

In the late 1940s, the approaching centennial of the US–Mexico war made Mexicans particularly sensitive to their country’s position relative to the United States. In fact, shortly after Cortés’s remains had been found, nationalism flared when, in March 1947, Harry Truman visited Mexico on the first official visit by a US president to the country. On his visit, Truman stressed the need to continue good neighborly relations, and on March 4, he paid tribute to the “niños héroes” (child heroes) who had perished while defending Mexico City during the US invasion in 1847. By the end of that month, the remains of the niños had been dug up in Chapultepec Park. A quick investigation confirmed their authenticity. INAH scientists subsequently examined them and declared that the age of the deceased corresponded to that of the martyred child-cadets. As icing on the cake, the Mexican Congress declared the remains to be authentic. The message was clear. Even the US president valued Mexican bravery and nationalism.Footnote ⁶⁰

In this context, experts on both sides of the Cuauhtémoc conflict sought to buttress their science by showing that it stood up to US scrutiny. For instance, Guzmán’s team had good chemical evidence that the copper in the plaque was not of recent vintage. To confirm this finding, it sought out US experts who could date the metal. Caso, a member of the Gran Comisión, also wrote to US experts regarding the plaque, but his goal was to undermine the Banco group’s dating. During one of the Gran Comisión’s sessions, physician José Gómez Robleda (its only member aligned with Guzmán’s team) and Caso engaged in a long and testy debate regarding whether water could have dripped into the burial site. If the plaque had been in contact with water, as Caso argued, it would have rusted more quickly and was therefore newer than the Banco group claimed. Gómez Robleda denied that the gravesite could have been infiltrated by water.

But even as they argued about the conditions at the burial site, all participants recognized that ultimately a solid conclusion regarding the plaque’s age could never be drawn from the evidence of oxidation. There were simply too many variables.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet both groups persisted in this debate and continued to invoke foreign experts. In so doing, they showed they could dialogue with US and European colleagues and that their cosmopolitan science could dignify the Mexican nation. In another case, physical anthropologists Dávalos and Romero touted their use of internationally recognized scientific methods to examine the human remains. Whether these foreign formulas actually shed light on the controversy was, for them, secondary: “To determine the height,” they wrote, “we have used Manouvrier’s table or Pearson’s ten formulas although the results have to be considered relative given that we are talking about indigenous remains.”Footnote ⁶²

The connections between Spanish and US imperialism – and their relation to both nationalism and science – were made clear in Zavala’s fictionalized dialogue, in which two friends, one an immigrant to Mexico from Spain, the other a Mexican, talked during a visit to Cuernavaca. In the dialogue’s opening paragraph, we learn that the friends were bored of visits to Cortés’s Cuernavaca palace, a landmark that ironically housed a Diego Rivera mural commissioned by US ambassador Dwight Morrow. Yet they were at home among the many tourists, “perhaps because of habit, or since they know that it is because of the love of their dollars that comfortable hotels have been built. And we must not forget that the ‘girls’ [in English in original] are soft on the eyes …” The friends asserted their masculine superiority over the wealthy ‘girls,’ and their affinity for US-style consumption just as they manifested their indifference to the symbols of US power, Spanish colonialism, and of the left-wing Mexican nationalism that overwrote that colonialism, all instantiated in the palace.Footnote ⁶³

The fictional friends debated the merits of myth and science. “Mario,” the author told readers, was “cosmopolitan.” The Spaniard roamed the world not for fun but to “understand mankind” (comprender los hombres). The Mexican “Aníbal,” was also a world traveler, but over the years had once again turned his gaze to Mexico, which he now saw more clearly and in greater detail. By explaining the controversy to Mario, Aníbal displayed Mexican science to the world. As Mario noted, “A Mexican has written that we must defend Mexico’s scientific prestige since the verdict [of the commission] will be known in circles frequented by foreign experts.” Referencing perhaps a Cold War distinction between the superior democratic West and the totalitarian Soviet bloc, the dialogue ended with Aníbal asserting that the broad-ranging media coverage of the controversy was made possible by Mexico’s freedom of the press. He urged his friend to write something about Cuauhtémoc to “repay the hospitality we have shown you.” The word of the foreigner would validate that of the Mexican.

Like the expert reports emitted by all the investigating commissions, which went to great lengths to establish their scientific nature, Zavala’s dialogue contrasted the friends’ contemplative “tranquil spirits” to the “burning debates” in the press. At the core of Zavala’s argument, and that of others who questioned the authenticity of the burial, was the notion that masculine rationality and science should triumph over feminine emotion. Jiménez Moreno made similar arguments, denouncing the “thunderous … shrieking press” and the excesses of a public that labeled them “traitors” who should be shot. (Rivera had famously claimed that those who denied the authenticity of the discovery should be shot in the back.) The members of the Gran Comisión, Jiménez Moreno noted, worked without any remuneration and on top it had to endure insults for “upholding the jurisdiction of scientific investigations without twisting the truth to suit patriotic motives.” Jiménez Moreno further castigated indófilos “who – inspired at times by a racist attitude that negated the positive contributions of Mestizaje and Hispanic-Indigenous transculturation and that therefore destroyed the roots that created and nourish our nationality – have in the end abandoned legitimate and well-grounded patriotic sentiment.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Guzmán and her allies were thus unscientific pro-Indigenous “racists” who refused to recognize Mexico’s mixed heritage or adhere to cosmopolitan scientific standards.

The fervor of Guzman’s camp was often equated with a religious fervor that, given the anticlericalism of the postrevolutionary state, was un-Mexican. Jiménez Moreno claimed that the “popular work” of author and former governor of Campeche Héctor Pérez Martínez, who favored the Guzmán camp, presented the Mexican past to the public with “dramatismo,” providing what was “perhaps a Bible for those who with great passion agitated [militaron] in favor of the authenticity of the Ichcateopan discovery.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In Zavala’s dialogue, Mario compared the Cuauhtémoc “myth” to that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, affirming that the Cuauhtémoc “cult” had “priests like Miss Guzmán and Diego Rivera, surrounded by their acolytes.”

Since the allegiance of Guzmán and her allies to a revolution that advocated rationality against religion was unquestionable, their detractors had to labor to prove that the alleged indófilos were irrational. As Aníbal noted in Zavala’s dialogue, the quasi-religious zeal with which Guzmán and her allies defended Cuauhtémoc was ironic given that they were also supporters of Mexico’s official “socialist” education, which advocated “rationalism” and even banned religion from the schools.Footnote ⁶⁶ Aníbal explained away this support of science by reminding Mario that Mexicans liked to “razonar el mito guadalupano” (reason out the Guadalupan myth). “Our myth makers,” Aníbal explained, “do not openly display themselves as such. Instead, they look for the support of scientific veneer. And, so, they imitate the testimonial tradition of the Church, for which miracles must be ‘proven’ before they are officially accepted.”

Guzmán and her allies tried to do what for their opponents was unimaginable: uphold local history, nationalism, and feminine belief along with cosmopolitan masculine science. As a single woman and intellectual, and a feminist moreover, Guzmán personified this unnatural mixing. In contradistinction, her opponents claimed to propound a harmonious Mestizaje. Yet they deployed a language of gender that relied on hierarchy and distinction rather than mixing or equalizing. Their vision of Mestizaje was, in its adherence to science, Westernized or whitened, and masculine. Caso, Jiménez Moreno, and Zavala peppered their assessments of Guzmán with praise. Zavala, for instance, characterized Guzmán as having an “indisputable persistence and unquestionable integrity.”Footnote ⁶⁷ But this praise was overshadowed by less favorable assessments. Guzmán’s aggressive harangues (buttressed with scientific posturing) did not seem fitting for a woman.

At the same time, the Mestizaje promoted by these mainstream scientists depended on the masculine Indigenous presence of the “Aztec warrior” who embodied and engendered a virile Mestizo Mexico. For that reason, members of the Gran Comisión repeatedly pointed to a second unacceptable gender discrepancy: the cranium found in Ixcateopan, they said, belonged to a woman. As Aníbal admitted: “I am bothered that the defenders of the remains may crown the most virile hero of our history with the cranium of a woman. In regards to this aspect, I am indeed interested in rigorous anthropological judgment.” Elsewhere, too, this fact was mentioned as the definitive proof of the inauthenticity of the discovery. Physical anthropologists Dávalos and Romero wrote, “The cranium, which is the key piece [pieza capital] is a woman’s. It is inconceivable that anyone would want to represent a hero that has figured as a symbol of the virility of the Indigenous Aztec with a cranium of the female sex.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Here was one more reason to reject the conclusions of their opponents. The nationalism of Guzmán and her supporters was based on an Indigenous heritage that was judged, scientifically, to be in fact feminine. The remains from the village of Ixcateopan could not be the fount of Mexico’s Mestizo national identity. If Mexico had an Indigenous heritage, it would need to be linked to something grander and more manly – more imperial and Aztec, less conquered and Chontal.

In their report for the first INAH commission, Dávalos and Romero cautioned that in examining the cranium and other bones “to the point possible we have abstained from crossing the limits that science imposes in this particular case.”Footnote ⁶⁹ “We recognize,” they later added, “that any physical feature varies and that masculine characteristics are not always clearly displayed in specimens of this sex, and we can say the same of feminine characteristics.” Yet this did not stop them from suggesting that it was “inconceivable” that the virile Cuauhtémoc should have a woman’s cranium and that the masculine and feminine crania from the Aztec period were “totally different.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The anti-Guzmán camp portrayed themselves as careful scientists. But their assessments were not always sober and neutral.

Affect, Evidence, and Truth

As I have suggested, recent historical accounts have repeated the contrast between an exalted Guzmán and her rational opponents. To cite one example, Lyman Johnson writes that when pressed by regional authorities to begin the dig against her will, Guzmán’s “political ambitions … made successful resistance to these pressures unlikely.” Once the dig began, “Guzmán was unable to exercise full control at the site, with military and civilian officials and even members of the Rodríguez Juárez family directing workers at times.” Johnson further refers to her “lack of professional discipline.” After the first commission report, “a frontal assault on her achievement,” Guzmán – who, Johnson reminds us, originally trained as a schoolteacher rather than as a historian or archeologist – “signaled clearly both her independence from INAH superiors and her political sophistication.” Those INAH superiors did not, it should be noted, have more anthropological training, since they were part of a generation that came of age before anthropology was established as a professional activity.Footnote ⁷¹ One problem with this argument is that, as contemporary observers had to admit, Guzmán and her followers sought to be as scientific in their proofs as their foes. In at least some ways, they were equally if not more rigorous.

That did not ensure they came up with the right result. The findings of the pro- and anti-commissions are voluminous and complex. Without deep expertise in paleography, physical anthropology, history, chemistry, and other disciplines, it is difficult to understand the arguments of each camp, much less evaluate them. But even with those caveats, it is obvious that spurious arguments could be found in both groups, along with more robust proofs. And often truth was impossible to determine. Just a few of the easier to understand examples: The Gran Comisión claimed that the handwriting on the copper plaque was from the nineteenth century and that it was similar to that of the documents. The Guzmán group countered that chiseling into copper was different from writing on a sheet of paper. The Comisión argued that writing the date with a comma was not common in the colonial era. The Guzmán group offered copious examples of periods and other signs used between words and minimized the difference between a chiseled comma and a period. The Guzmán group affirmed that the paper on which the documents were written was from the colonial era. Their opponents countered that it was easy to tear colonial-era paper from old books or folios. The Guzmán group argued that the remains had to have been buried before the altar was constructed; that the flooring over the burial was intact, evidence that the grave had not been tampered with; that the oxide on the plaque and its positioning were not consistent with a later burial.

The most convincing argument offered by the official investigators was the forensic evidence. The skeleton made up by Liborio Martínez of the Banco de México group was put together incorrectly, they said, an assertion to which even Gómez Robleda, a member of the opposing group, had to assent. The human remains belonged to different people, and it looked as if someone inexperienced – someone who could not tell a left from a right femur – had tried to reconstruct a complete skeleton. There was clearly an old burial ground in the church which could have provided ample materiel for a forger. The most convincing evidence offered by Guzmán’s group – what had likely convinced Guzmán herself – was the oral evidence and folklore. It pointed clearly to a burial and was able to signal the place where the remains had been found. Cuauhtémoc himself might be buried somewhere else in the village, as Guzmán suggested. Or the remains might belong to another colonial-era personage. But the oral evidence and the widespread rituals were hard to dismiss. The anti-Guzmán camp was able to do so only through superficial procedures and appeals to foreign expertise. To do so, they cited a book by a foreigner in order to claim that the oral evidence was unreliable because it had not been confirmed by a written source.Footnote ⁷²

Careful sleuthing has revealed that the village schoolteacher found a sealed room in the back of the home that had belonged to Florentino Juárez and that Salvador later sold to the municipality. It was full of charred bones and old books. It was in essence a factory for making heroes. Gillingham and Mexican scholars offer a convincing account that says that Florentino planted the bones while the church steeple was being rebuilt. His goal was to earn favor in Mexico City in order to buttress Ixcateopan’s position in a land dispute with a neighboring village. He then spread rumors throughout the area, planting the roots of the oral tradition. Most of the bearers of the oral traditions had been peons working for Juárez and his close associates.Footnote ⁷³ The oral tradition, or at least aspects of it, was a real tradition, but it was a nineteenth-century tradition.

However, the truth of the matter is not the only issue of import. Rather, my argument is that the portrayal of Guzmán as shrill, opportunist, politically motivated, and unscientific was in itself politically motivated as well as affect-laden. And it was politically motivated by a particular vision of Mexico, one that favored a whitened, cosmopolitan, masculine identity and was unconcerned with the needs or histories of villages like Ixcateopan.

Guzmán was a highly trained specialist, whose work was criticized in ways that others’ was not. Her investigations and those of her collaborators were not engaged with as seriously as they might have been. As Guzmán herself pointed out, the bones of the niños heroes were declared real with only minor questions raised. Uneasiness with Guzmán’s gender, her feminism, and her self-assurance colored her opponents’ assessments of her, as did suspicions of both Indigenous peoples and the left-wing pro-Indigenous nationalism promoted by Guzmán. A nation that was both virile and Mestizo – and that would be accepted in a world order that valued scientific proof and technological advances – could not be represented by the Indigenous woman buried in the Ixcateopan church or by a left-wing nationalist, and feminist, like Eulalia Guzmán. Nor could that nation take villagers’ opinions as proof. The members of the Gran Comisión did not have the time to do further research regarding Ixcateopan. They were not interested in doing so.

If we reject how Guzmán’s opponents characterized her, how do we reflect critically on her actions and historicize the morality of the scientists involved? Can we think of Guzmán’s work as active scientific refusal? Or an unconscious refusal? On one level, Guzmán does seem to have had an awareness that the bones did not belong to Cuauhtémoc. Perhaps then, her investigations sought to give a scientific veneer to the villagers’ beliefs. On the other hand, the Banco group seems to have been sincere in its efforts to prove that the discovery was authentic. It is perhaps most likely that Guzmán and her followers were unsure about the veracity of the find. Pleading with members of the Gran Comisión, Gómez Robleda argued not so much that the burial was authentic but that, if there was any uncertainty, the commission should refrain from passing judgment. Was this humility? An attempt to save face? Perhaps a bit of both? Given what Guzmán and her allies saw as the political motivations of their opponents, they felt justified in insisting that the burial was real.

Standards of scientific proof could, and did, vary, and the volume of evidence made it more difficult to reach a clear result. In many ways, what we know today to be the real story is more fantastic than the assertions of Guzmán and her crew. Even more important, Guzmán and her supporters rejected the characterizations thrust on them and refused to counterpose truth and politics. The members of the Gran Comisión refused to see themselves as defying the imperatives of a nationalism that embraced its Indigenous peoples and local histories.Footnote ⁷⁴

We should also ask to what extent Guzmán’s insistence was a response to a scientific feud, an attempt to buttress her own ambitions. Certainly, that was how her opponents portrayed her, and more recent scholarship persists in denouncing her desire for recognition. One might think of the dueling visions of Mestizaje at play as part of an elite dispute that silenced popular voices. I have instead suggested that Guzmán’s experiences in Ixcateopan may have affected her. And, at least in some ways, she was responding to her village allies. The question about the nature of Mexican Mestizaje that shaped the dispute between scientists was one Ixcateopenses, at least some of them, cared about. Their position within the Mexican polity and their ability to extract resources depended on the presumed value of Indigeneity to the nation. And hegemonic views regarding Indigeneity no doubt helped shape their views about who they were and about their past. Some of them at least sought to claim a glorious imperial Indigenous past.

In Ixcateopan, the Cuauhtémoc myth persists today. In 1976, Guerrerenses asked that the case be reopened and a new set of investigations was conducted, leading to a good many publications. The burial and the oral traditions were judged by these experts, again, to be fraudulent. In the process the history of the village and the region were further documented. Still, Ixcateopan’s reputation as Cuauhtémoc’s hometown remains. Indeed, the village now celebrates his birthday with dancing and singing. The alternative view, so satisfying to truth-seeking historians, also persists. Along with the new investigation, a new series of archeological excavations began in 1976. They are ongoing.

Introduction

In the early 1950s, Brazilian physician and nutritionist Josué de Castro published a book, entitled The Geography of Hunger in its English translation, which emerged from decades-long observation of chronic starvation in his native city of Recife, Brazil. The book, which received reviews both laudatory and scathing in the global press and academic journals, was a direct response to a 1948 publication by American conservationist William Vogt called The Road to Survival, which warned of a looming global population crisis. Vogt’s writing, influenced by mid twentieth-century American eugenicist thinking, was unapologetic about the need to curb reproduction in what would soon come to be termed the “third world.”Footnote ¹ He adopted the concept of “carrying capacity” (originally used in reference to steam ships) as a purportedly objective measure of how many humans and other species a specified region can sustain, and he used this seemingly straightforward mathematical equation to justify recommending a range of population control measures.

Vogt viewed people in less industrialized countries as abstractions, based on ecological and demographic data but limited direct experience. De Castro’s response to Vogt’s assertions stemmed from personal encounters, since childhood, with the sort of people whose reproduction Vogt feared. The Brazilian intellectual countered Vogt’s call for population control with an emotional appeal to readers, insisting that they confront the geopolitical injustices that make the global poor chronically hungry. Until his death in 1973, de Castro demanded in a variety of forums that the problem of hunger be addressed by reforming political and economic structures that failed to prioritize food cultivation and access. This essay examines the work of Vogt and de Castro with an emphasis on their contrasting forms of encounter with the subjects of their analyses and on the different affective rhetorical strategies that each employed to persuade their readers.

In the past two decades, several historians have written histories of twentieth-century family planning. Matthew Connelly critiques population control in several contexts as examples of the pitfalls of social engineering, highlighting the racism and classism inherent in numerous family planning campaigns. Thomas Robertson examines population concerns as one element of twentieth-century debates that pitted economic growth against environmental conservation, particularly in the United States. Alison Bashford considers immigration and birth control promotion as opposing strategies for managing global population growth. Emily Merchant illustrates how family planning advocacy emerged in conjunction with a new approach to eugenics, both movements understood by their supporters as progressive routes to economic uplift for the poor. She portrays demographers as more tempered advocates for population reduction than biologist Paul Ehrlich and other popularizers of “zero population growth.”Footnote ² Other scholars have provided insightful analyses of demography as a social-scientific discipline with ideological commitments shaped by its initial funders and institutional locations.Footnote ³ This essay foregrounds the effort by one briefly prominent intellectual from the Global South to oppose the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was central to economic development, particularly in the world’s poorest regions.

Both the American conservationist and the Brazilian scientist attuned to structural inequalities were politically progressive within their specific social contexts. Yet Vogt was willing to objectify and dismiss the individual aspirations of people in places far removed from his own experience in order to protect what he cherished as a North American “standard of living.” De Castro imagined the global poor as familiar, due to his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, and vigorously opposed the relatively affluent North American’s agenda as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. De Castro feared that prioritizing population control as the solution to entrenched poverty would undermine other movements for economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America.

Debating Population during the Early Cold War

In her 2014 history of population studies Bashford notes that while “global food, hunger and population were key elements in the [Cold War] discourse of anti-Communism … [they were also key elements of] postwar anticolonialism.”Footnote ⁴ That latter framing, which emphasized the alignment between endemic hunger and areas of former colonial rule, was articulated in the postwar writing of intellectuals from the newly designated “Third World.” Their analyses of resource scarcity rejected the rising preoccupation with “overpopulation” emerging from industrialized nations, particularly the United States. Rather than reflecting an overabundance of people, these scholars argued, famines and social unrest were the result of economic injustices that directed inadequate resources (particularly food) to the world’s poor. Development efforts, therefore, should focus not on reducing the numbers of poor people but on elevating their food consumption and economic productivity through economic restructuring, both within and among nations. In a 1954 book entitled Hungry People and Empty Lands Indian social scientist Sripati Chandrasekhar promoted the emigration of his country’s poor to less populated regions of the Earth as a way to better align human population with food supply.Footnote ⁵ As another prominent intellectual from one of the regions targeted for population reduction in the 1950s, de Castro argued vigorously against the solidifying US-based orthodoxy that blamed poverty on overpopulation.

Many nationalists from the Global South were wary of population control measures because of the eugenic intellectual roots of American and British fertility control advocates such as Margaret Sanger. In a foreword to Sanger’s 1922 book promoting birth control, The Pivot of Civilization, author H. G. Wells – Sanger’s friend and lover – summarized her message as follows:

Critics of such views from the Global South portrayed foreign-sponsored birth control promotion as a form of imperialism that blamed poverty on the overfecundity of the poor rather than on global economic relationships that fed citizens of powerful nations at the expense of those in the periphery. Examples like Puerto Rico, in which per capita income tripled over the 1940s at the same time that the population was growing (due to decreased infant mortality), threw US-influenced demographic orthodoxy into question.Footnote ⁷

In order to combat accusations of imperialist motivation, new organizations focused on global population reduction – like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, established in 1952 – adopted the term “family planning” to connote a focus on the best interests of parents and children rather than the more insidious “control” of birth rates. Nevertheless, when Cornell University sociologist J. Mayone Stycos analyzed Latin American press coverage of population issues in the 1960s and interviewed scholars across the region, he concluded that most Latin Americans viewed “overpopulation” as an imperialist myth used to justify reducing birth rates in the Third World. Those who did believe in a looming demographic crisis thought it should be solved by promoting industrial economic growth, which – according to demographers’ own models – would lead naturally to reduced family size.Footnote ⁸

In the past decade, numerous scholars have traced the multi-institutional focus on population control that was pursued by philanthropic foundations and government agencies in the decades following World War II. Connelly highlights the technocratic modernization ideologies that underlay such efforts.Footnote ⁹ Robertson traces the merging of concerns about ecological limits to growth with both eugenics and Cold War geopolitical concerns.Footnote ¹⁰ Many Cold Warriors viewed American-style suburban domesticity as the exemplar of capitalist modernity. They upheld small, nuclear-family households as essential to industrial development driven by increased per capita consumption of manufactured goods. Large families were antithetical to such progress, draining resources at both the household and national levels. As one historian argues, by the early 1950s, “[a]n intellectual orthodoxy concerning the importance of the relationship between national economic development and [managed] population growth solidified among social scientists, economic planners, and political leaders in the West and in those nations that looked predominantly to the liberal democracies of the West” for assistance and emulation.Footnote ¹¹ This new orthodoxy was based on demographic transition theory, developed by Frank Notestein at Princeton University. In 1952, several philanthropic foundations, including Rockefeller, Ford, and Milbank Memorial, jointly formed the Population Council, allowing them to distance their names from controversial population control efforts; Notestein became head of the council in 1959. Reducing fertility in poor nations became a focus of many international development agencies during the 1950s and 1960s, motivated by demographically based theories of economic development and by Cold War concern that the impoverished masses of Europe’s former colonies would be vulnerable to Marxist political movements.

The consolidation of overpopulation as a way of conceptualizing global resource scarcity is an example of intellectual imperialism grounded in social and natural sciences (notably demography and ecology), with significant consequences for globally marginalized people when concerns about population growth were translated into policy – most tragically when such policies were carried out by authoritarian regimes, or by political classes that sought to reduce the influence of minority ethnic groups. Even in less draconian cases (those that did not involve coerced sterilization or abortion), it is a significant intrusion into people’s most intimate life decisions to assert that their reproductive choices will have negative consequences for national welfare and the wider human community.Footnote ¹²

American Conservationist William Vogt and the Road to Survival

Vogt’s 1948 book Road to Survival argued that curbing population growth was an urgent priority for developing nations. The American conservationist based his analysis of human population limits on what he termed carrying capacity, expressed as a simple equation: C = B:E, where C is carrying capacity, B is biotic potential to sustain animals, and E is environmental resistance to this potential.Footnote ¹³ Later ecologists, notably Eugene Odum, would question the usefulness of this means of estimating a region’s capacity to sustain life, due to the number of variables in dynamic interaction that impact the maximum population a particular land area can sustain.Footnote ¹⁴ Soil fertility was a central focus of Vogt’s analysis, reflecting concerns about soil depletion that arose during the 1930s as a result of the US Dust Bowl, along with evidence of severe erosion in Australia and South Africa.Footnote ¹⁵ In Vogt’s view, the problem of overpopulation was not only an ecological concern. He believed that an intensifying struggle for lebensraum (literally room to live, a term deployed by the Nazis to justify Germany’s territorial expansion) underlay the terrible violence witnessed in Europe and Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. Without a curb on human population increase, Vogt predicted, such violence would intensify.

Vogt’s analysis acknowledged that overconsumption and waste in the industrialized world contributed to resource scarcity elsewhere. He also noted the rapacious impact of capitalism on natural resources. Uniting these views, he asserted that “Ecological health for the world, requires, above all … 1. That renewable resources be used to produce as much wealth as possible on a sustained-yield basis … and 2. We must adjust our demand to the supply, either by accepting less per capita (lowering our living standards) or by maintaining less [sic] people.” However, Vogt quickly dismissed the possibility of reducing consumption in the industrialized world by any significant measure: “Since our civilization cannot survive a drastic lowering of standards, we cannot escape the need for [global] population cuts,” he concluded.Footnote ¹⁶ And although Vogt saw capitalism as partly to blame for global poverty, he took the eugenicist’s view that the poor are somewhat responsible for their own misfortune. Vogt tentatively recommended financial “bonuses” for men (in particular) who voluntarily underwent surgical sterilization. “Since such a bonus would appeal primarily to the world’s shiftless,” he postulated:

Vogt was not reticent about the struggle for survival between people in wealthier and poorer countries that carrying capacity limitations would eventually necessitate, and he did not disguise his bias against populations he viewed as overly fecund. Why should the United States, Canada, Australia, and Brazil “open their doors to Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus (and their sacred cows),” he asked rhetorically, in a section on immigration as one possible solution to food scarcity, “to reduce the pressure caused by untrammeled copulation. Our living standard must be dragged down, to raise that of the backward billion of Asia.”Footnote ¹⁸ With reference to a UN FAO proposal for economic development in Greece, Vogt noted: “At no point in the entire report is there any suggestion that a positive effort be made to reduce the breeding of the Greeks … Such neglect [of this possible solution] would disqualify a wildlife manager in our most backward states!”Footnote ¹⁹ Vogt warned his American readers that “Since Greece seems to have planted its hand firmly in the American dinner pail, the question [of population growth in that war-ravaged country] is of more than academic interest to the American taxpayer.”Footnote ²⁰ Regarding President Truman’s “Point Four” program of foreign aid following World War II (which Vogt opposed and de Castro praised), Vogt advocated freedom to access reliable contraception as a precondition for receiving American assistance. “Quite as important as the Four Freedoms … is a Fifth Freedom – from excessive numbers of children,” he quipped.Footnote ²¹

Throughout Road to Survival, Vogt criticized twentieth-century public health programs for having exacerbated the mounting problem of overpopulation. “Was there any kindness in keeping people from dying of malaria so that they could die more slowly of starvation?” he asked in the introduction.Footnote ²² Vogt’s critique pointed to Latin America’s medical sanitarians as among the well-meaning progressives responsible for unsustainable population growth. His discussion of that world region noted that “drinking water has been improved in many cities to such an extent that intestinal diseases, the most effective factor limiting populations, have dropped sharply.”Footnote ²³ This observation was certain to raise the ire of public health professionals, including de Castro, for whom their nations’ early twentieth-century sanitarians were heroes. Vogt was evidently aware that his cavalier attitude toward infant mortality could be jarring. He followed the observation that “One of the greatest national assets of Chile, perhaps the greatest asset, is its high death rate” by adding, “This is a shocking statement. Nevertheless, if one does not believe there is a virtue in having more people live ever more miserably, destroying their country with increasing rapidity, the conclusion is inescapable.”Footnote ²⁴ Unabashed, later in the volume Vogt chastised British colonial administrators in India for contributing “to making famines ineffectual, by building irrigation works, providing means of food storage, and importing food during periods of starvation” rather than allowing disease and famine to limit Indian population growth as they had for generations.Footnote ²⁵ Vogt’s book repeatedly depicts the global poor as wallowing in misery. In his view it would be better not to have been born than to live as they did.

Vogt’s dismal depiction of hunger and poverty in many regions of the world was influential in shaping overpopulation discourse and related philanthropic efforts over the following decade.Footnote ²⁶ His warnings about the dangers of overpopulation became the basis for Paul Ehrlich’s widely read book The Population Bomb, published in 1968, two months before Vogt’s death. An entomologist by training, Ehrlich became a member of Stanford University’s faculty in 1959, where he interacted with sociologist Kingsley Davis, ecologist Garrett Hardin, and others who believed firmly in looming demographic catastrophe. Critics of Ehrlich’s 1968 book have noted that he attributed to population biology and ecology problems (like the global proliferation of urban slums) that were more directly attributable to industrialization, increasingly concentrated land ownership, and resulting rural–urban migration.Footnote ²⁷ During the 1960s, Ehrlich cited India as an example of the population crisis that threatened all humanity, but by the following decade he had begun to focus attention on American consumerism as a significant engine of environmental crisis.Footnote ²⁸ Ironically, this brought him closer to the viewpoint of Josué de Castro. Historian Thomas Robertson argues that this shift made Ehrlich’s position less politically viable than his prior attacks on the overfecundity of the third-world poor.Footnote ²⁹

In a biography of Vogt that juxtaposes the ecologist’s gloomy predictions about humanity’s future with those of the more optimistic agronomist Norman Borlaug (often termed the father of the Green Revolution), author Charles Mann emphasizes aspects of Vogt’s life that may have contributed to his pessimistic outlook.Footnote ³⁰ Vogt’s father abandoned their small family shortly after his son’s unplanned birth. During a lonely childhood on Long Island the young Vogt became an avid amateur ornithologist, and as an adult the rapid urbanization around his childhood haunts alarmed him. In 1934, Vogt became editor of the Audubon Society journal Bird-Lore; through that position he met Aldo Leopold and other prominent naturalists. In 1939, on the recommendation of Robert Cushman Murphy of the American Museum of Natural History, Vogt traveled to guano islands off the Peruvian coast to advise Peru’s government about seabird population decline. While there he witnessed a famine among the birds caused by diminished plankton supply during an El Niño period. Vogt interpreted this in Malthusian terms, as a natural cycle that kept the bird population from exploding.

Upon his return to the United States, Vogt was hired by Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs, and from 1943 to 1949 he served as head of the Pan-American Union’s (later the Organization of American States’s) Conservation Section, in which capacity he toured a number of Latin American countries. In 1948, Vogt created the Conservation Foundation in partnership with Aldo Leopold and Fairfield Osborn, whose father had written a preface to Madison Grant’s eugenicist 1916 tome The Passing of the Great Race; 1948 was also the year in which Vogt and Osborn each published books warning of disastrous environmental decline as a result of human population growth.Footnote ³¹ Vogt continued this argument in subsequent publications, such as a 1949 Harper’s magazine article that portrayed Mexico as teetering on the edge of ecological collapse due to accelerating human population growth. Historian Nick Cullather notes that Mexico’s population density at the time was lower than that of the United States and speculates that Vogt confused urbanization, caused primarily by internal migration, with overall population increase.Footnote ³² That internal migration was the result of both agricultural modernization, spurred in part by the US-promoted Green Revolution, and industrialization.

Also in 1948, with help from Julian Huxley and UNESCO, Vogt and several colleagues formed the International Union for the Protection of Nature. During its first conference the following year the IUPN criticized President Truman’s Point Four program for aid to developing countries, which advocated increased productivity and consumption worldwide. Due to such outspoken opposition to the economic development agenda promoted by many government officials, Vogt was asked to resign from the Pan-American Union. In 1950, he accepted Fulbright and Guggenheim grants to travel with his second wife, Marjorie, to Scandinavia, to investigate successful population control measures. In 1951, he was hired by Margaret Sanger to head the Planned Parenthood Federation of America where he remained for a decade. Vogt’s criticism of economic policies that prioritized growth without heeding environmental costs made him a pariah in some circles during that critical Cold War decade and strained his professional relationships. In 1967, Vogt’s third wife died, and he killed himself a year later. None of his marriages produced children.

Vogt’s descriptions of the obstacles to global security and prosperity posed by unmanaged population expansion in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere were ruthless. From his perspective, as an American who prioritized conservation to maintain existing standards of living, this stance undoubtedly seemed eminently defensible, merely embracing hard-nosed solutions to postwar global challenges. Viewed from a very different geographic and political orientation, Vogt’s recommendations were appalling. De Castro countered Vogt’s dramatic vignettes of impending catastrophe with an optimistic vision of improved global nutrition fueling boundless human ingenuity. Both authors hoped to persuade readers through emotional appeals about the values at stake in this debate.

Brazilian Physician Josué de Castro and the Geography of Hunger

Josué de Castro grew up in the coastal capital city of Recife, Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil (Figure 9.1). There a centuries-old sugar-exporting sector historically dependent on enslaved labor was in decline, and de Castro witnessed the deep poverty of many in the region. His childhood home was adjacent to mangroves where families constructed makeshift shacks to forge a meager living from crabmeat as their primary sustenance. Some of these desperate souls were escaping droughts in the semiarid interior sertão, as de Castro’s own father had done; others faced the endemic hunger that plagued many inhabitants of Brazil’s coastal sugarcane zone. “Right next to [our] house,” de Castro recalled in a memoir, “started the tightly packed area of the hovels – straw and mud huts, piled one on top of the other in a network of alleys in desperate anarchy. The houses penetrated the water, the tide invaded them. The branches of the river overtook the street and the mire overwhelmed everything.”Footnote ³³ As a child, de Castro listened to stories of servitude told by two formerly enslaved men who worked for his father. Over time he came to understand that the crabs on which residents of the mangroves subsisted provided a more reliable source of nutrition than what many people in northeast Brazil enjoyed – and that the “drama” of constant hunger that colored the daily existence, and even the metaphorical language, of his childhood playmates played out with slight variation in communities around the world.Footnote ³⁴ The physician had witnessed first-hand the human misery of slow starvation. He disagreed vehemently with Vogt as to its fundamental causes and solutions.

Figure 9.1 Portrait of Josué de Castro, undated.

Source: Acervo Fundação Joaquim Nabuco. Recife-PE, Brazil.

De Castro’s professional training took him to medical school in Rio de Janeiro during the late 1920s and back to Recife, where he graduated from the city’s new faculty of medicine in 1932. Soon after, he received funding from the Pernambuco (state) Department of Public Health to study the relationship between income and cost of living among working people in Recife. This research was conducted by surveying patients at public health clinics about their family size, income, and expenses for necessities (housing, clothing, and food). The resulting, widely cited publication, “Living Conditions of the Working Class in Recife: An Economic Study of Their Diet,” was the first of its kind in Brazil and a model for subsequent investigations by de Castro and others.Footnote ³⁵ The report concluded that Recife’s workers lived in a constant state of debt, with average salaries lower than what was required to sustain a family of five or more. Food absorbed three-quarters of workers’ budgets and was nonetheless nutritionally inadequate; the typical diet amounted to 1,650 calories each day with no milk, fruits, or vegetables. De Castro cited malnutrition as the cause of high infant mortality (almost 260/1,000 in Recife – and higher in rural areas) and low life expectancy, which amounted to a tremendous loss of “human capital.”Footnote ³⁶ What had often been characterized as “mal de raça” (racial weakness) was in fact “mal de fome,” he argued – physical debility caused by poor nutrition.Footnote ³⁷ The data from de Castro’s study became the empirical basis for passage of a minimum wage law for urban workers, supported by President Getúlio Vargas.

De Castro held a series of academic and political positions over several decades, all centered on problems of nutrition and political economy. From 1937 to 1957, he occupied the Human Geography chair at the new University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, where he was appointed director of the Institute of Nutrition. Along with his academic posts, in 1942 he became director of a Brazilian agency intended to address food supply problems during the world war. During this period, de Castro shifted his research focus from the physiological study of malnutrition (its direct causes and impact on the human body) to a political-economic analysis of hunger as a widespread social scourge. He deliberately rejected the term “malnutrition” in favor of the more evocative “hunger” (fome), rather than adopting a more objective and distanced approach to questions of food scarcity.Footnote ³⁸ His goal was to emphasize the human suffering and injustice at the core of this phenomenon. This focus is evident in a fictional sketch de Castro published in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Diário de Notícias during a drought in 1951, in which a farmer is forced to witness his young child’s death by dehydration after years of backbreaking labor in the semiarid interior of northeast Brazil. In this and similar (but nonfictional) accounts de Castro worked to elicit sympathy from his countrymen for the chronic tragedy that plagued the most marginal citizens of his home region.Footnote ³⁹

In 1948, de Castro organized a Latin American conference on nutrition in Montevideo, sponsored by the UN FAO and World Health Organization. Two meetings followed, in Rio de Janeiro (1950) and Caracas (1953), all addressing similar themes to those highlighted in his publications.Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1950, conservative landowners blocked de Castro’s appointment to become Brazil’s Minister of Agriculture, due to his support for controversial land redistribution measures. He then became president of the UN FAO’s Executive Council, a post that he held for four years. While at the FAO in Rome, de Castro founded a campaign against world hunger with which he remained involved through 1965. President Vargas appointed de Castro to a National Commission for Agrarian Reform (Comissão Nacional de Política Agraria), which aimed to extend rights to rural workers that had been obtained by urban workers during the 1930s. Vargas also made him vice-president of a national social welfare commission (Comissão Nacional de Bem Estar Social) in 1953.

De Castro was not the only Brazilian nutritionist to criticize the political and economic foundations of malnutrition during the mid twentieth century. Several others conducted similar studies and published books and articles that highlighted undernourishment as a crisis as important as poor sanitation, a public health issue that had received considerable attention and federal funding during the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴¹ Like de Castro, these authors emphasized that what had often been interpreted as signs of racial inferiority among Brazil’s poor were instead indicators of malnutrition, stemming from a range of social inequities.Footnote ⁴² Scientists like Pernambuco’s secretary of public health Nelson Chaves, a physiology professor at Recife’s medical school, mobilized quantifiable data and their own professional status to generate sympathy for the chronically malnourished, in hope of promoting more just access to essential resources.

De Castro’s Response to Vogt

De Castro reached international readers with his 1951 book A Geopolítica da Fome, which outlined the problem of global hunger as a product of economic relationships within and among nations. Published in English as The Geography of Hunger to avoid use of a term tainted by association with Nazi ideology, the book was translated into over twenty languages during the 1950s.Footnote ⁴³ Neither Vogt’s Road to Survival nor Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet was as broadly translated.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Geography of Hunger expanded on de Castro’s 1946 study of hunger in Brazil, which itself stemmed from his mid-1930s analysis of the diets of Recife’s working poor. The book vigorously opposed the view, ascendant within American development organizations in particular, that global hunger was rooted in excessive population growth. Its specific target was Road to Survival, which de Castro satirically termed The Road to Perdition.

In A Geopolítica da Fome, de Castro accused Vogt and other “neo-Malthusians” of laying blame for social unrest and looming environmental crises on the poor for their undisciplined reproductive choices, when they should instead be seen as victims of global economic and political forces that conspired to deprive their families of sufficient food. De Castro insisted that hunger is not a biological or ecological phenomenon; it is the product of human economies. He cited the dedication of vast tracts to monocrop exports as the primary culprit, both because of the soil erosion that ensues and because those crops displace food cultivation. “Hunger has been chiefly created by the inhuman exploitation of colonial riches, by the latifundia and one-crop culture which lay waste the colony, so that the exploiting country can take too cheaply the raw materials its prosperous industrial economy requires,” de Castro wrote.Footnote ⁴⁵ Those guilty of creating this crisis were not the famished “as Vogt asserts,” but rather “those who go in for neo-Malthusian theories while they defend and benefit from the imperialist type of economy.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The neo-Malthusian recommendations of Vogt and his colleagues “reflect the mean and egotistical sentiments of people living well, terrified by the disquieting presence of those who are living badly,” the Brazilian asserted bluntly.Footnote ⁴⁷

In de Castro’s reading of modern history, the dominant global model of “economic colonialism,” driven by raw materials export from the tropics, generated hunger among laborers in those peripheral regions. He proposed an alternative model that he termed a “geography of abundance,” mutually beneficial to the world’s wealthy and poor. Instead of trying to limit the growth of populations in the Global South, de Castro argued, those countries should expand the land and sea areas used for food cultivation and intensify agricultural production with the aid of fertilizers, pesticides, and better soil conservation. By raising the real wages and consumption of the poor, economic exchange would be stimulated worldwide – and population reduction would no longer be necessary or desirable. De Castro disputed Vogt’s central claim that all of Earth’s fertile soils were already under cultivation. “A great many areas of very good soil are to be found in South America” and elsewhere, he asserted, and not yet farmed.Footnote ⁴⁸ Within Latin America, only Puerto Rico could be said to be overpopulated, and “chronic starvation” there was the result of neocolonial policies by the United States, which displaced food production in favor of sugar, tobacco, and coffee exports.Footnote ⁴⁹ “The fundamental truth can no longer be concealed,” De Castro intoned in his conclusion. “The world has at its disposal enough resources to provide an adequate diet for everybody, everywhere. If many of the guests on this earth have not yet been called to the table, it is because all known civilizations, including our own, have been organized on a basis of economic inequality.”Footnote ⁵⁰

De Castro had great faith in human creativity, capacity for technological innovation, and instinct for survival. There is no “impassable limit to human population” fixed by nature, he insisted – in contrast to Vogt’s postulation of firm limits to Earth’s carrying capacity. Rather, people “transform natural limitations into social opportunities” through science and ingenuity.Footnote ⁵¹ De Castro deemed chemical fertilizers and other technologies for intensive farming to be critical for increasing food production, along with fish farming and hydroponic agriculture. Like many other Cold War technocrats he was enthusiastic about the US Tennessee Valley Authority model, through which “rational control of land, water, and all the various resources of the region” raised incomes and improved living conditions for millions of people within the agency’s jurisdiction.Footnote ⁵² “When deserts of ice and impenetrable tropical jungles are being turned to gardens and orchards, when the lands we farm and the plants we grow are being made to multiply their yield, and while we are barely learning how to tap the great food reservoirs of the waters, the wild flora, and of artificial synthesis, the Malthusians go on setting up their sinister scarecrows,” he chided. “It is nothing to us, since we have no reason to fear them.”Footnote ⁵³

Paralleling the organization of Vogt’s book, de Castro’s substantive chapters analyze deficiencies in the typical diet of poor people from many global regions, based on prevailing understanding among nutritionists in the late 1940s of the importance of minerals, vitamins, and amino acids. The Brazilian viewed hunger as correctable through effective use of modern technologies, but also as a matter of equitable resource distribution (as economist Amartya Sen would argue several decades later).Footnote ⁵⁴ Both of these elements – the technological and social limits on food supply – must be addressed simultaneously to provide adequate food for expanding human communities. De Castro cited a recent UN FAO proposal as one potentially helpful intervention in the global food economy: “What we propose is an international instrument of consultation and co-operative action in the commodity field, so that nations may join in concerted efforts to attack the common enemies of mankind – poverty, disease and hunger – instead of each attacking the other’s prosperity in a futile effort to defend its own.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Ensuring food sufficiency was fundamental to global security, de Castro insisted, deploying one of Vogt’s motivating concerns in service of an opposing position.

Central to de Castro’s argument was the belief that hunger itself contributes to population growth, so reducing hunger would correspondingly slow population increase: “The psychological effect of chronic hunger is to make sex important enough to compensate emotionally for the shrunken nutritional appetite,” he speculated.Footnote ⁵⁶ In support of this theory de Castro cited research on the suppression of fertility in rats that consume a high-protein diet, as wealthier people do.Footnote ⁵⁷ He provided data on the inverse relationship between national birth rates and protein consumption and suggested a mechanism to account for this, based on research by physiologists at the University of Chicago:Footnote ⁵⁸ protein deficiency reduces liver function, which reduces “the liver’s ability to inactivate estrogens,” thereby increasing women’s fertility.Footnote ⁵⁹ Higher fertility among less well-fed populations might be an evolutionary protection, de Castro hypothesized, as prospects for the survival of offspring diminished due to food scarcity.Footnote ⁶⁰

Another cornerstone of de Castro’s opposition to overpopulation discourse was his conviction that a better-fed population would be more industrious and could therefore produce more food. “In diet [lie] the origins of Chinese submissiveness, of the fatalism of the lower castes in India, of the alarming improvidence of certain populations in Latin America,” he insisted, uncritically referencing widely held stereotypes.Footnote ⁶¹ “The 500,000,000 Chinese could have a life absolutely free of hunger if they were physically capable of work, if their nutritional and hygienic conditions allowed them to make use of the geographic potentialities of their country.”Footnote ⁶² Sons were often deemed essential to farmers without livestock, such as Chinese working tiny plots to feed their families (who could not waste meager food on animals). This produced a vicious cycle of population growth, de Castro argued. Thus, “[t]o wipe out hunger … it is necessary to raise the productive levels of marginal peoples and groups, and through economic progress to integrate them into the world economic community.”Footnote ⁶³ In de Castro’s developmental imagining, resource constraints would be overcome by the same people whom Vogt targeted for fertility control. Adequately fed human communities would become an asset to greater productivity, rather than a drain on ecological resources or a threat to political stability. Extrapolating from his extensive experience with marginalized communities in Recife, de Castro attributed similar potential for resourcefulness and ingenuity to impoverished people worldwide. Vogt, with little personal experience of the world’s poor, projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

It is notable that de Castro’s writing emphasized class location and social marginalization but rarely made explicit mention of race, despite the fact that in his native region African ancestry correlated closely with poverty – and that as a child he knew men who had spent their youth as slaves. De Castro’s silence with regard to race is likely traceable to the emphasis in Brazil, particularly from the 1930s through the 1950s, on racial harmony (“racial democracy”) as a national characteristic.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is not clear that he embraced northeastern sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s depiction (in seminal works like Casa Grande e Senzala, about colonial slaveholding) of Brazilian society as racially harmonious.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nevertheless, he may have been disinclined to take direct aim at the widespread assumption that explicitly racial prejudice was not an issue in Brazil. Reference to social class, often in terms of contrasts between elite and marginal groups, sufficed – in de Castro’s view – to describe the divisions and injustices that he wished to draw attention to. De Castro himself was sometimes described as a Mulatto man, suggesting that he had both European and African ancestry (and that this mixed lineage was evident in his appearance), but he did not discuss this as a significant aspect of his own identity. In his worldview and experience, class loomed larger than race as a way of conceptualizing the inequities in power and resource access that he wished to draw attention to. De Castro’s concerns were with global capitalism and the legacies of imperialism, which he understood in political and economic terms rather than racial ones. He also disregarded gender as an analytical category, which seems astonishing to a contemporary reader, given his subject matter, but was true of virtually all the men who debated population growth as a global issue in the mid twentieth century. Their central focus was the quantitative relationship between human birth rates and food supply, and they debated this with little reference to women – notwithstanding women’s essential roles in childbirth and nutrition.Footnote ⁶⁶

Reception of De Castro’s Work

The Geography of Hunger elicited a range of responses from reviewers worldwide. In August of 1952, demographer Kingsley Davis published a blistering condemnation in the American Sociological Review, calling de Castro emotional, utopian, and unscrupulous; a dishonest cheat who “makes no fetish of consistency” in his use of facts. Davis accused the Brazilian of masquerading “under the cloak and prestige of science” while discarding “all the canons of scientific logic and evidence,” and he called upon social scientists to issue a robust condemnation of the book. Several critics in the United Kingdom objected to de Castro’s indictment of British imperialism despite efforts by British scientists to promote intensified agricultural production of precisely the kind that de Castro was calling for. Others accused him of naive credulity regarding the socialist experiments underway in China, the Soviet Union, and (later) Cuba – and of dishonestly omitting mention of the 1930s famines in Stalinist Russia from his published work. A reviewer in the New Statesman and Nation noted that de Castro’s idealistic prescriptions for greater global cooperation with regard to food distribution seemed inconsistent with his thesis in the section criticizing European imperialism, namely, that “the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Other readers were much more complimentary. The American Political Science Association gave de Castro their FDR Foundation award in 1952. Novelist and Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck, who contributed a preface to the American edition of Geography of Hunger, called it “the most hopeful and generous book I have read in my entire life.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Several explicitly anti-Malthusian authors wrote to de Castro commending his important work. “Population pressure is always directly and immediately related to the number of people who are able to make only very meager economic demands … on the existing soil and other natural resources of any given area or of the whole planet, irregardless [sic] of how great or abundant these resources might be,” noted Fred W. Smith of Camden, Ohio. The mystery, in his view, was why Malthusianism continued to hold any sway in the twentieth century. However, he concluded:

Other supporters of de Castro’s critique highlighted the resource pressures caused by overconsumption (especially of beef) by citizens in the industrialized world and the tremendous waste of food in the United States, suggesting that any global food crisis was not caused by inadequate supply. Daniel Slutzky of the Department of Social Sciences, University of El Salvador, noted that the International Planned Parenthood Federation conducted similar contraceptive promotions throughout Central America regardless of national and local population densities, which differed substantially. This supported his thesis that the central goal of IPPF and related organizations was neither economic development nor improving the welfare of the poor but rather reducing population numbers in places the United States feared as potential incubators of communism. Slutzky compared this to the Nixon administration’s contraceptive promotions among poor urban Blacks in the United States.Footnote ⁷⁰

Establishing Global Networks for Development Action

Following his return from the FAO, de Castro served two terms as a Pernambucan representative in the national legislature and member of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PTB). He was appointed Brazil’s ambassador to the UN in 1962. The right-wing military regime that came to power in 1964 stripped de Castro of his political rights, due to his support for leftist causes, including granting voting rights to illiterate people, labor protections for rural workers, and agrarian reform (land redistribution). He took refuge in Paris, remaining there until his death in 1973.Footnote ⁷¹

De Castro continued his campaigns against hunger and poverty well beyond his years with the FAO. He established ASCOFAM (Associação Mundial de Luta Contra a Fome) in Brazil to better organize production and distribution of nutritional foods in his native northeast region, home to many of the country’s most impoverished people. From 1960 to 1965 he led the UN FAO’s World Campaign Against Hunger. He established an international NGO known as CID (Centro Internacional para o Desenvolvimento) in 1962 to address structural issues underlying global poverty and continued this work from his exile in Paris after 1964.Footnote ⁷²

Upon his departure from the FAO in 1955, de Castro chastised his colleagues there for “lacking courage” to confront global hunger as a political issue, asserting that they preferred to view it as a problem of technical know-how, a less contentious position.Footnote ⁷³ His critique of the UN and its agencies intensified over the following decade. By 1965, de Castro was referring to the UN as a reactionary organization established by elites with regressive views, one that impeded the development of solutions to the world’s problems and served instead to obfuscate with statistics.Footnote ⁷⁴ Nevertheless, his years as president of the FAO’s Executive Council had immersed him in an international network that he expanded strategically over subsequent decades. While representing the FAO, de Castro visited President Truman to discuss the establishment of an international food reserve and met with Popes Pius XII and Paul VI. The latter (while still a cardinal) reportedly told the Brazilian that Geography of Hunger was “the most Christian text I’ve read in my life.”Footnote ⁷⁵

De Castro’s letters from the 1950s until his death reference trips to China in 1957 (he was impressed by how well-fed the rural population appeared to be) and Russia, and a celebration of the Cuban Revolution with Fidel Castro in 1961. He met or corresponded with an array of influential figures, including Americans Eleanor Roosevelt and Robert Kennedy, Italian Roberto Rossellini (who had plans to make a film based on Geography of Hunger), Indian prime minister Pandit Nehru, former Argentine president Juan Perón, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and UN secretary-general U Thant, from Burma. De Castro’s correspondence indicates that he was popular among “anti-Malthusians,” including Catholic clergy, from numerous countries across the Americas and Europe. These scholars and activists raised the alarm about the Nixon administration’s support for coercive sterilization, with backing from Paul Ehrlich (who reportedly proposed that the United States lace its food aid with sterilizing chemicalsFootnote ⁷⁶) – measures that de Castro referred to in some of his writings as contraceptive genocide. But de Castro also maintained cordial correspondence with representatives of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, including Lady Rama Rau of India.

In 1962, de Castro was instrumental in establishing an International Center for Development (CID) headquartered in Paris. The goal of this nongovernmental organization was to provide an alternative to existing development efforts that were “contaminated by neocolonialism” and, in de Castro’s view, amounted to little less than alms.Footnote ⁷⁷ CID hoped to promote development efforts that would be of genuine assistance to Third World populations and to provide a forum for frank discussion of global problems, followed by concerted action. The founders, including representatives from Greece, Hungary, France, Belgium, Peru, Chile, the United States, India, and Senegal, proposed the creation of an International Development University with a focus on education and human resources as key to global development. In addition to his work with this group, during his exile in Paris de Castro became deeply involved in nuclear nonproliferation and global peace movements spearheaded by Robert Oppenheimer and Bertrand Russell. His meetings and correspondence with political leaders and activists around the world maintained his sense of connection to marginalized people and his commitment to opposing injustice, despite geographic distance from the communities that had forged these sensibilities earlier in his life.

By the mid-1960s, the central argument of de Castro’s writing was that since underdevelopment and hunger are closely correlated, while population density and hunger are not, population is not the causal factor leading to hunger. Science could be used to solve problems of food supply and distribution, but only where there was political will to do so (as in Britain during World War II). “Neo-Malthusians” attempted to explain political–economic dynamics and their consequences as natural, when they are fundamentally social phenomena. Highly technocratic approaches to development, such as those espoused in the early 1970s by the Club of Rome (which sponsored a widely read publication entitled The Limits to Growth)Footnote ⁷⁸ did not adequately acknowledge the political variables that affect resource access. De Castro had become increasingly fascinated by the United States as an exemplar of underdevelopment; a draft chapter of one unpublished manuscript written near the end of his life was entitled “Misery in the Midst of Abundance” and focused on impoverished minority communities within that wealthy nation.

Conclusion

From 1948 until his death in 1973, de Castro sought to elevate alternative ways of conceptualizing global development, decentering the interests, priorities, and cultural assumptions of the most powerful governments and their populations. His critique emphasized that many variables can be analyzed in considering the relationship between human populations, natural resources, global security, and ecological health – and that the decision to problematize one of those variables rather than another (e.g., the fertility rates of women in less industrialized nations rather than the consumption habits of Americans) is a political choice, influenced in the mid twentieth century by geopolitical concerns, nascent modernization theories, and the geographic and social positions of the most highly resourced participants in this debate.

There are provocative parallels between the early Cold War debate about overpopulation and more recent discourse about climate change. In both cases, significant regional and social-class differences in contribution to the problem are elided to suggest that human communities face a shared challenge for which they are similarly culpable and must sacrifice in the interest of a secure future. Anna Tsing has written about climate change discourse in the following terms, focusing on debates that preceded the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro:

This assertion by Tsing’s “spokespeople” is somewhat analogous to de Castro’s arguments decades before. There are contrasts, notably that de Castro thought overpopulation was not nearly as significant a concern as Vogt believed it to be, whereas Tsing’s protagonists did not aim to diminish the significance of the climate crisis. But in both cases, voices from postcolonial regions highlight the culpability of industrialized nations in precipitating catastrophe. And in both instances, the objectivity of scientific paradigms emanating from centers of global power is questioned by advocates for marginal regions who highlight the political agendas embedded in those first-world discourses. Like Tsing’s southern voices, de Castro questioned what countries such as the United States stood to gain through an overpopulationist framing of resource scarcity, and he drew attention to dynamics that were elided by emphasizing Third World fecundity as the root cause of rising hunger. In a world of vastly unequal wealth and power, any implication of shared responsibility for accelerating resource scarcity should reasonably be viewed with skepticism; de Castro’s life’s work stands as a reminder of this.Footnote ⁸⁰

In a recent critique of the economic ideologies underlying twentieth-century population policies, historian Michelle Murphy describes Notestein’s advice to Pakistan’s government in the late 1950s as “symptomatic of an economized reformulation of Foucault’s description of the violent purifications of state racism as some must die so that others might live into some must not be born so that future others might live more abundantly (consumptively).”Footnote ⁸¹ She emphasizes that American economists in the 1960s valued “averted births” more highly than lives lived in poverty, which were often evaluated negatively in relation to GDP. In a section reflecting on overpopulation concerns in relation to climate change Murphy asks, “What kind of population control practices and racisms are reactivated by pointing the finger at human density in a moment when wealthy human-capital assemblages with often low levels of fertility are responsible for the vast bulk of [carbon] emissions?”Footnote ⁸² Murphy’s analysis highlights the demographic abstractions wielded to justify a range of population control measures in the interest of economic growth, limiting births in some communities so that other people (whiter, wealthier, and more connected to centers of global power) can live more lavishly. What de Castro strove to broadcast during the years when theories promulgated by Notestein and others were gaining influence was that “population” is not abstract. To critique public health efforts in a city like Recife, as Vogt did, was to advocate for the painful and avoidable deaths of thousands of infants, deaths witnessed by family members powerless to intervene. This searing reality was obvious to de Castro because he had lived among people who benefited enormously from cleaner water, vaccinations, and other public health interventions in his native city. The Geography of Hunger implored readers to reckon with this reality. De Castro hoped to invert Vogt’s apocalyptic portrayal of a world overburdened by hungry bodies, emphasizing instead what those people could contribute if reasonably provided for – and pointing out the significant per-capital resource drain of the world’s wealthiest people.

Introduction

Geneticist Fabrício Rodrigues dos Santos rushed through his words as he told me about his experience of fieldwork in A’uwẽ territory. From his office at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, he wove an entrancing story of his time in Aldeia Etênhiritipá. His eyes shone as he recounted a hunting trip, stargazing, and a movie night; I was fascinated. Rather than focusing on days filled with collecting genealogical data and genetic samples, Santos’s narrative centered on what he called “the most interesting part … the anthropological experience.”Footnote ¹ Santos’s tale did not fit with my preconceptions of genetic sampling for the Genographic Project.

I had been introduced to Santos by one of his colleagues, Maria Cátira Bortolini, a fellow scholar of human genetics who was hosting me for a period of research in her department at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. As Bortolini followed my growing interest in the history of genetics research in A’uwẽ (Xavante) communities as well as its ethical oversight, she suggested I interview Santos.

The South American branch of the Genographic Project, a global program sponsored by National Geographic and IBM, had run into a complex and slow process of regulatory approval in Brazil. As a transnational, corporately sponsored program that focused on genetic sampling of Indigenous groups across the continent, the project was subjected to multiple additional levels of ethical oversight. As the coordinator for the program, Santos navigated the four-year process to obtain official permissions to conduct the embattled research project. However, while he was happy to tell me about the difficulties of navigating regulatory bureaucracies, it was talking about his time in the field that made his eyes shine. As I listened to him explain his fieldwork, it seemed to me that there was another process of research regulation underway as well – though perhaps not explicitly articulated. The A’uwẽ aldeia – village or autonomous political community – that hosted him and his team, Etênhiritipá, was also working to instill a framework for their interactions, a relational and affective basis for knowledge making.

At the time of my interview with Santos, I was conducting my own participant-observation through oral history and archival research in labs and academic departments around Brazil. It would be a year before my fieldwork would extend to overlap explicitly with Santos’s with my first visit to Terra Indígena (T.I., Indigenous Land) Pimentel Barbosa, the A’uwẽ territory where the Genographic team conducted their research. The aldeias of this territory have been hosting researchers since shortly after they established diplomatic relations with the Brazilian government in 1946. The first anthropologist arrived in the aldeia of Wedezé in 1958. Since then, the community – and subsequently communities as the population grew and aldeias divided – of Terras Indígenas Pimentel Barbosa and Wedezé have hosted dozens of researchers. Geneticists and biomedical researchers James V. Neel, Francisco Salzano, and colleagues followed the first anthropologist in 1962. Subsequently, scientists from almost every discipline of the human sciences have visited, from social and cultural anthropology, linguistics, and education, to public health, biomedicine, and human genetics, creating an extensive published literature of warazú (non-A’uwẽ) understandings of A’uwẽ life, language, health, biological differentiation, and history.

These communities are a classic example of “overstudied Others,” as described by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang.Footnote ² However, T.I. Pimentel Barbosa has become a hub of scholarly attention not only because of the wealth of past studies and data sets, but also due to the interest of aldeia residents in cultivating relationships with researchers. While A’uwẽ in the 1950s and 1960s had little context to understand the actions of the scientists who arrived to study them, with time and experience they developed their own expertise in research. In the context of ongoing Brazilian colonialism in Indigenous territories, residents and especially certain leaders came to engage scholars for their own reasons. They developed strategies to guide and direct researchers.

This chapter explores the two different systems of research oversight that applied to Santos and the Genographic Project. It does so by situating these systems within the broader relational nature of field sites and fieldwork that has shaped the experience of warazú researchers and A’uwẽ participants. As the other chapters in this book have shown, affective relationality shapes knowledge in the human sciences across the scales of the transnational and national. Both the assertion and recognition of expertise are bound up with appeals to affect: about the racial construction of national character, or the politics of consumption within the international order. Here I combine attention to the bureaucratic interface of the transnational and national with the very personal level at which Indigenous actors modulate affect to attend to pressures of Brazilian state administration. Attention to the “complex moral sensibilities and structures of feeling” of research participants does much to illuminate the limitations of abstracted ethics and formalized medical research regulation, as Warwick Anderson has shown in his explorations of the relationships between Fore communities afflicted by the neural disease kuru and the scientists who sought to study and sample them.Footnote ³

In this case, sets of normative considerations stretch and vary across fields of scholarship including genetics, public health, and anthropology. Members of the Genographic Project encountered both the formalized bureaucracy of ethics regulation of the Brazilian state, and the systems of relational ethics that A’uwẽ leaders and community members in T.I. Pimentel Barbosa have developed to try to instill or compel responsible research from warazú like myself who seek knowledge in A’uwẽ territory. By relational ethics, I refer to principles that some A’uwẽ articulate, both explicitly in conversation and through their demands and actions. These principles hold that researchers should center relationships and the responsibilities that accompany these relationships when engaging or seeking to engage with members of the aldeias.

In exploring these two systems, I focus primarily on genetics-based research that began in 1962 and continues to the present. I consider other forms of scholarship and research methodology in my discussion of what I see as A’uwẽ regulation because these interactions have profoundly influenced aldeia residents’ experiences of knowledge production. This is particularly true of the work of anthropologists who lived in A’uwẽ territory for extended periods, as well as public health scholarship that has evolved into repeated, ongoing programs of study.

My focus here is on genetics research because it brings into relief two facets of what I call bureaucratic vulnerability. First, this history demonstrates the role of the state and the regulatory system in adjudicating research, as well as researchers’ attempts to continue their inquiries even when that oversight could constrain current research. I argue that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. For all the flaws inherent in its conceptualization, the Genographic Project allows us to see ways A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers. This is the second axis of bureaucratic vulnerability: The implicit requirement to be documented in certain ways pushes community members to engage and cultivate relationality with researchers.Footnote ⁴

Here I explore the possessive logics of both the systems of the state and the actions of researchers as Indigenous heritage, genes, lands, or knowledge come to be the focus of study and documentation. In studying and writing about these systems, which also shape my own research engagements both with the Brazilian state and with A’uwẽ community members, I do not aim to place blame or exonerate – I too am implicated and embroiled in Brazilian state regulation and relations-building in Pimentel Barbosa.Footnote ⁵ Rather, I hope history and the work of the historian have a role to play to make sense of the contexts, unintended consequences, and possible alternate futures that emerge from seriously considering how A’uwẽ actors build affective and political connections with the scholars who visit them.

I begin by exploring the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability and how regulatory structures and their avoidance are conditioned by the possessive logics of Brazilian colonialism. From the protectionist regulation of the Brazilian state, I turn to examine a set of relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Finally, I turn to how and why A’uwẽ aldeia members embraced the Genographic Project, even as other similarly well-informed groups declined to participate. Contextualized in prior experience with scholars, and the mandates of bureaucratic thinking that constrain Indigenous rights to land, health, and education in Brazil, the relational work that aldeias of T.I. Pimentel Barbosa performed looks different.

Bureaucratic Vulnerability

In discussions and formal interviews between 2012 and 2014, I quickly came to see that the regulatory hurdles that the Genographic Project faced loomed large in the imagination of other geneticists with interest in studying Indigenous genes. The layers of bureaucracy and the approach of the regulatory body, the Comissão Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa (CONEP, the National Commission of Ethics in Research) proved such a perceived barrier that various labs stopped proposing new sampling. Instead, they used work-arounds to continue their research, whether on samples from collaborators in other countries where official approvals are easier to attain or by using stored samples collected under prior ethical and regulatory regimes.

This dynamic drew my attention to questions of vulnerability: How are Indigenous people positioned as uniquely vulnerable research subjects within Brazilian legislative frameworks? How do regulatory bureaucracies and the people that interact with them simultaneously construct and respond to perceived vulnerability, while also creating new kinds of risk for Indigenous groups? And how are broader bureaucracies of recognition related to and dependent on expert knowledge production? In this section, I explore the concepts of vulnerability and bureaucracy as they relate to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Maile Arvin have each referred to as a logic of possession over Indigenous peoples.Footnote ⁶ This logic is practised by both the Brazilian state in its oversight of researchers and the extension of federal recognition of Indigenous lands, and by non-Indigenous scholars in human genetics research that aims to tell a universal history of humankind. Those who, in Ailton Krenak’s words, are not full members of the clube da humanidade (the club of humanity) can be the subjects of research to illuminate a history of humanity that scientists hold to be universal.Footnote ⁷

The logic of possession is enacted through discourses of both biology and national history. It provides a counterpart to more common discussions of the settler colonial logic of elimination, as articulated by Patrick Wolfe.Footnote ⁸ Arvin highlights how scientific classification of Native Hawaiian people as “almost white” has served to naturalize the presence of white settlers in Polynesia. She argues, possession expresses “more precisely the permanent partial state of the Indigenous subject being inhabited (being known and produced) by a settler society.”Footnote ⁹ Jenny Reardon and Kim TallBear have extended a similar analysis to the politics and practices of genetic research on Indigenous peoples including the Genographic Project. They highlight how (usually) white scientists make claims on the genes of Native peoples in service of Western creation stories that do not serve and may even undermine Indigenous epistemologies.Footnote ¹⁰ In the Brazilian context, Tracy Devine Guzmán has discussed how the paternalistic logics of expansionism were articulated through an “anti-imperial imperialism.” Framed in terms of their opposition to foreign interests in Amazonia or (other) Indigenous territories, Brazilian state actors constructed Native people as “our Indians in our America,” justifying and extending their own ongoing internal colonialism.Footnote ¹¹

The regulation and production of expert knowledge is central to enacting logics of possession. As Joanne Barker has so convincingly written, mandates for documentation to “prove” Indigeneity create conflicted and conflictual relationships between Native peoples and scholarship produced by outsiders.Footnote ¹² When the object of study is an Indigenous group, Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, the product is cultural difference, which serves nation-states by producing “manageable forms of difference.”Footnote ¹³ Indigenous peoples must demonstrate their claims in specific ways to be recognizable and to access even the limited rights afforded to them.Footnote ¹⁴

In twentieth- and twenty-first-century Brazil, difference has most often been managed through bureaucracy. At the highest level, state-led arbitration of knowledge provides the foundation for the twin processes of defining and racializing indígenas and justifying the expropriation of Indigenous land.Footnote ¹⁵ The introduction of a system of oversight for explorers, scientists, and artists wishing to visit Indigenous lands in the 1930s served as a mechanism by which the Brazilian state could claim Indigenous peoples and cultures as national patrimony, while also asserting the role of protector. At the same time, the state reasserts its sovereignty through the regulation of researchers. I describe this process in more detail in the next section. However, for the purposes of understanding the second axis of bureaucratic vulnerability, I highlight here that some geneticists respond to the seemingly ever-increasing bureaucracy of regulation by using less-regulated strategies to continue to research Indigenous groups, but without consultation or ongoing consent. Citing bureaucratic barriers, they have continued to use historical biosamples, or tissues or DNA from Indigenous groups beyond Brazil’s borders to research without engaging in fieldwork or the direct accountability of relationship-building.

In framing these dynamics as “bureaucratic vulnerability,” I am interested in the creation of risk and harm through state administration.Footnote ¹⁶ The concept of vulnerability in bioethical discourse has been problematized for its insinuations of weakness, a focus on participants at the expense of attention to structures of research inquiry, and its limitation in addressing the specificity of particular groups’ experiences.Footnote ¹⁷ Here I seek to move beyond classifying Indigenous people as “vulnerable,” rejecting damage narratives,Footnote ¹⁸ to focus instead on how the concept of vulnerability and the bureaucracies built around it create risks for A’uwẽ communities. The term bureaucratic vulnerability intends to draw readers’ attention to the structures of research inquiry and state knowledge production that marginalize A’uwẽ knowers and knowledge. This focus on bureaucratic structures also helps me grapple with what I see as A’uwẽ desire to engage with researchers as well as community members’ refusal to talk about or dwell on negative perceptions of researchers or damage enacted by researchers.Footnote ¹⁹

Settler Knowledge and Bureaucracies of Possession and Recognition

The history of Brazilian state regulation of research in Indigenous territory is tightly bound up with possessive logics, as well as a nationalist concern about the presence of foreign researchers. More recent classifications of Native peoples as vulnerable cannot be divorced from this and a broader history of Brazilian tutela or tutelage. Tutela and its proponents – identifying Indigenous people as child-like and in need of protection, education, and moral uplift – justified post-Independence colonization and provided terms in which they claimed moral authority.Footnote ²⁰ As Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima has argued, the development of the administration of Indigenous peoples and lands in the early twentieth century was part of a “massive siege of peace,” which also helped to form the Brazilian state.Footnote ²¹

Official legislation and the institutionalization of research oversight was not implemented until 1933 under the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas with the formation of the Conselho de Fiscalização das Expedições Artísticas e Científicas (Conselho, Council for Control of Artistic and Scientific Expeditions).Footnote ²² The proposal’s architects promoted the project as one aimed at those foreign expeditions that did not follow “established norms and ethics,” by which they meant those that failed to support technical cooperation and knowledge sharing.Footnote ²³

The new Conselho was fundamentally concerned with protecting what its members and legislators saw as patrimony, which included mineral, botanical, and ethnological specimens. Once established, it worked with the Ministry of Foreign Relations and the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI, Indian Protective Service) to ensure, among other things, that an equal half of all specimens and materials collected were deposited with the Brazilian government before export permits would be granted.Footnote ²⁴ The government also required copies of all resulting reports and publications, contributing – at least in theory – to the legibility of Indigenous groups to the state. As Luís Grupioni explains, “… the Indians interested the Council as a testimony, as an inheritance, transformed into patrimony that needed to be preserved; it is in the action of collecting artifacts and depositing them in museums that this organ occupies a place in the indigenist field.”Footnote ²⁵ In the case of the Conselho, nationalism and a paternalistic and assimilationist mandate served as moral justification for regulating researcher access to Indigenous groups in Brazil.

During the military dictatorship (1964–1985), a variety of institutions were charged with collectively controlling scientific expeditions into Indigenous territories.Footnote ²⁶ Bureaucratic demands grew, but the framing was similar: preventing scientists, particularly foreign ones, from visiting militarily strategic areas or absconding with valuable patrimony was enmeshed with protecting Indigenous groups from the same visitors.

The exercise of Brazilian sovereignty over Indigenous peoples was also intimately dependent on the knowledge created by researchers, particularly in relation to the identification and demarcation of Indigenous lands. Although there were strong fluctuations over the course of the dictatorship, FUNAI administrators were sometimes supportive of research, conceptualizing it as a resource for the indigenista organization and government more broadly to understand – and by implication govern – Indigenous groups. For example, as president of FUNAI in 1975, the unusually progressive General Ismarth de Araújo Oliveira supported the view that anthropologists should be required to provide information in the form of field reports and final publications and that, “the organization of this documentation will be one of the greatest weapons that FUNAI has for the defense of Indigenous land.”Footnote ²⁷ FUNAI even prioritized research in certain areas where the government lacked knowledge about Indigenous inhabitants.

Federal recognition of Indigenous lands – demarcation – has been an essential factor in the protection of Indigenous lives and lands.Footnote ²⁸ However, it also partially remediated the problem created by the state’s programs of westward expansionism. The military dictatorship promoted demarcation because it facilitated the regularization of legal claims by ranchers and new agribusiness entrepreneurs to surrounding land they had occupied at the invitation of the government.Footnote ²⁹

The bureaucracy changed again in 1988 with the ratification of the current Constitution, and in 1996 with the National Health Council’s Resolution 196/96. This resolution added to the existing system a mandatory review by an institutional ethics committee and CONEP that would oversee certain kinds of research considered to be of higher risk.Footnote ³⁰ This legislation detailed a series of “special thematic areas” designated for higher scrutiny, most of which focused on biological concerns such as research involving human genetics, or dealing with populations seen as biologically vulnerable, such as pregnant women or children. However, the legislation also identified any research in Indigenous territory as a special thematic area. The law defines Indigenous peoples – the only category determined by sociological parameters – as inherently vulnerable.Footnote ³¹ The implementation of the added layers of review meant that a single protocol dealing with research in Indigenous territory had to pass through at least four processes of review before FUNAI forwarded it to the community in question for consultation. The result was an extensive, slow, and complex approval process.

State reliance on knowledge from the human sciences thrusts Indigenous groups into a bureaucratic double bind. This is an administrative version of the dilemma highlighted by Guzmán in her examination of Indigenous leaders’ and activists’ political action in Brazil. Guzmán describes this double bind as “knowing that any intervention they might undertake in that system – already against great odds and at great personal cost – unavoidably reinscribes, to some degree, the erasure, exclusion, and delegitimization that has characterized the indigenous–state relationship since its inception.”Footnote ³² Faced with demands to be legible in certain ways, many Indigenous groups cultivate relationships with anthropologists or other scholars who they hope will become allies in moments of bureaucratic need.

Adopted Warazú and Regulatory Affect

Aldeia Etênhiritipá’s reception of Fabrício Rodrigues dos Santos and the Genographic Project was predicated on years of experience of interacting with researchers. Here, before examining how the Genographic researchers recounted their enrollment in the next section, I trace another case of scholars who developed deep connections in Terra Indígena Pimentel Barbosa. Their acceptance and training by the community has taken place over more than thirty years. As anthropologists and public health researchers Carlos Coimbra and Ricardo Ventura Santos have visited, researched, and collaborated in T.I. Pimentel Barbosa, over time A’uwẽ community members shaped their approaches through the construction of an affective field.

I describe this as an “affective field,” to emphasize the dynamic play of experience (being affected) and action (affecting change).Footnote ³³ Rather than referring to the cultivation of specific emotions such as happiness, nostalgia, or pity, the affective field emphasizes the ever-evolving qualities of human relationships and relationships with place. This space of being affected and affecting others overlaps and works to constitute the field. It compels researchers to center relations; research becomes, fundamentally, a question of “self-in-relation.”Footnote ³⁴ Whether this involves cultivating field experiences such as star-gazing, or a sense of inclusion in ceremony and community events, or a deeper sense of obligation through the articulation of new kin relations and their invocation in the face of community challenges, a complex emotional landscape permeates the researchers’ “fields.” Following the story of Santos and Coimbra’s research allows us to see how aldeia residents developed their own regulatory system that is affectively based.Footnote ³⁵ Their request that Coimbra and Ventura Santos conduct a delimitation study for the demarcation of an adjacent A’uwẽ territory in the mid-2000s also underscores how taking a relational approach to researchers is a precarious but important technique in the face of bureaucratic imperatives of documentation.

In 1990, Coimbra and Santos were introduced in Aldeia Pimentel Barbosa by Nancy Flowers, an anthropologist who had spent fourteen months there during a critical period of the 1970s when residents of T.I. Pimentel Barbosa faced particularly acute challenges to their land rights. Community members indicated that the first step for the researchers upon arriving was to present themselves and their plans at the warã, the men’s council meeting, a twice daily gathering of men who have completed spiritual initiation that serves as a space to discuss political happenings of the community. Santos explained this saying, “If we arrived one day, the next day at five-thirty in the morning we were there in the warã, introducing ourselves, recounting our news, with them wanting to know what we wanted to do there, what our plans were.”Footnote ³⁶ Having already hosted researchers dozens of times, the warã had come to function as part of the A’uwẽ system of oversight. Scholars were expected to publicly present their ideas and plans for their work, and then be present for what sometimes were long, formal discussions in the A’uwẽ language. The warã became a space of accountability, where at the end of a period of investigation, scholars are called back to update the community on their activities and expectations moving forward.

As they undertook their first years of research in Pimentel Barbosa, recent PhDs Coimbra and Santos were busy settling into new positions at the Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública (ENSP, National School of Public Health) in Rio de Janeiro. There they built a research program in Indigenous health with particular attention to the social determinants of health, and T.I. Pimentel Barbosa came to play a central role in their work.Footnote ³⁷ Part of what made ongoing visits to the aldeia possible was the open-ended quality of their relationships.

Coimbra and Santos were welcomed and supervised by a variety of Elders, leaders, and others in the aldeia. Over time, “our perspective really changed,” Coimbra explained to me. “[At the beginning,] we went into the A’uwẽ community without knowing anything, just with the Neel and Salzano references [from a 1962 study] in hand to repeat that research … In contrast, today the exchange is really intense.”Footnote ³⁸ Coimbra and Santos’ approach was also evolving in concert with changing notions about the practice of public health in Brazil. The early 1990s was a time of widespread changes in the Brazilian public health system in the wake of re-democratization, with discourses about health rights and equity centered by many public health researchers and practitioners.Footnote ³⁹

In 2014, Tsuptó, a young leader who officially represents Aldeia Pimentel Barbosa to FUNAI, described a shift in how researchers and community members have engaged over time. Thinking back to the earliest ethnographic publications, which documented his community and other A’uwẽ aldeias, he said, “There was a time when there was disrespect. Without the knowledge of the Indigenous population, some works were published, which I see today as a lack of respect. But now, today we are talking. This is respect. It is through dialogue that the work is done, and that is important.”Footnote ⁴⁰

This dialogue increasingly shapes the research projects that the Pimentel Barbosa Elders accept. In the case of Santos and Coimbra, as diabetes and other metabolic issues became increasingly prevalent, key interlocutors within the aldeia started insisting that the public health researchers turn their attention to chronic health problems. “Really, to be honest,” Coimbra recounted,

By the 2010s, research on metabolic issues was a major aspect of the work of the ENSP research group. It was in the context of these sustained interactions that leaders in Pimentel Barbosa were able to advocate for a new direction in research that would address issues they prioritized.

Tsuptó emphasized that, yes, while he thought the research topics were important, the process of research also created enduring connections: “The work got deeper and won our confidence. And the relationship of friendship with Carlos and Ricardo … it’s not just through the work or research, but through our relationship of friendship as people.”Footnote ⁴²

Another key strategy that community members have applied to warazú researchers is the incorporation into the A’uwẽ affective field through adoption. Increasingly, over time, Elders in Pimentel Barbosa have adopted scholars who come to research. “Adoption” here is a process of claiming a researcher, by which an Elder (or sometimes more than one) asserts a relationship of kinship by publicly announcing their chosen relationship to the researcher. Whether or not a researcher is formally adopted depends on a variety of factors, from age to whether we stay in the aldeia or at the nearby government post, to the length of our visits. There is no formula.

What is clear is that by asserting kinship, A’uwẽ Elders call on researchers to behave according to social norms of family; they invoke these terms to emphasize their moral authority.Footnote ⁴³ As researchers, we understand and attempt to meet these expectations to varying levels. As others have discussed, these forms of chosen kinship function in multiple ways. They help to bridge boundaries across power differentials, and in Cristian Alvarado Leyton’s words, institutionalize “a moral imperative of loyalty and solidarity … [through] affective relatedness, promising in turn an enduring relationship.”Footnote ⁴⁴ While some scholars express skepticism about the authenticity of anthropologists’ or other researchers claims to adoption,Footnote ⁴⁵ I understand A’uwẽ use of kin terms as a pragmatic invocation of relationality and expression of affective connection that helps clarify understandings of what constitutes ethical or moral work according to A’uwẽ expectations.

Santos and Coimbra were not initially incorporated into specific families, but after many years of collaboration, there was consensus among community members that they belonged to one moiety, poreza’õno, rather than öwawe, the other.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their place in the social system of the aldeia was based not on the facts of their research, but on the facts of their persons. “Researcher is what you do. Poreza’õno is who you are,” Tsuptó explained to me as I asked how we are separated into moieties. Likewise speaking of Coimbra, Tsuptó explained, “He would come independent of the research … I would say, ‘we need help. Carlos … this thing is happening. Can you do this work?’ ‘No, Tsuptó. I’ll do it.’ And through that, Barbosa – as an Elder – he spoke: ‘Carlos is my brother … Everyone will respect him the way they respect me’ … So he decided. He spoke this to the warã.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Tsuptó’s uncle Barbosa Sidówi Wai’azase Xavante claimed Carlos as family and extended his protection to the researcher.

Other researchers, especially those who have arrived at a younger age and lived more time in the aldeia, have been adopted and named, claimed by an A’uwẽ Elder as their child. Since the year 2000 at least seven researchers associated with the ENSP team – including myself – have been publicly adopted. In discussion, Elders Marilda, Solange, Angélica and Agostinho explained how this adoption works through the translation of Goiano, saying, “It is the person who arrives first, to encounter, greet, and love the person. So it is the one who arrived, greeted, and loved, and there they become family, they begin to transform into family … For example, Sereburã arrived, greeted, and liked you, and already established [colocou] to call you daughter. So there you already are transformed.”Footnote ⁴⁸ As Elders extend this formal familial belonging, they inculcate obligation and esteem. Adoption implies a great deal of work, as adoptive family members often take an outsized role in caring for us warazú researchers, from educating us about how to behave and how to understand things that are unfamiliar to preparing materials for our participation in community ceremonial life.

This adoption draws researchers into an affective field, where a researcher’s decisions and actions take place within a profoundly relational system. These actions to adopt, incorporate, teach, and oblige researchers are an A’uwẽ praxis that in my interpretation works to destabilize the researcher–subject binary. I see researcher and A’uwẽ creation of the affective field as working toward Kim TallBear’s eloquent urging that “we must soften that boundary erected long ago between those who know versus those from whom the raw materials of knowledge production are extracted.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Interest in incorporating researchers, however, is also a response to the failings and mandates of the state. Tsuptó recounted the work of one of Ventura Santos and Coimbra’s students, Rui Arrantes, on oral hygiene: “now children, school-aged children, they use toothbrushes … with their [ENSP’s] work it awoke [us]. We had to do something, we had to take action.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Tsuptó emphasized that the researchers arrived with such a high level of training and technical competence that they were able to implement good programs that government employees failed to realize for their lack of relationships, dedication, and training.Footnote ⁵¹

The ENSP researchers also responded to calls from the communities of T.I. Pimentel Barbosa to support their efforts to reclaim a large portion of their territory by conducting a delimitation study for submission to FUNAI and the judicial system. “As one of the leaders,” Tsuptó recounted, “I needed help. For this delimitation study, a field study, I needed an anthropologist, I needed an environmentalist, I think a biologist … I did not want FUNAI to choose someone. I did not trust them.”Footnote ⁵² After consulting with the other aldeias of T.I. Pimentel Barbosa, Tsuptó invited Coimbra, Ventura Santos, and another member of their team, anthropologist James Welch, to conduct the study: “We went to Brasília, but at the time FUNAI had no funding to pay them … Beyond research, they were doing it because they are honest … A [different] anthropologist would not do this for free.”Footnote ⁵³

“My first inclination was not to do it!” James Welch told me in a good-natured tone, “I thought it would be a huge amount of time …” he paused, “which it was.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Coimbra told me, “We could not say no, of course, so we did it.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Their collective expertise made them ideal for the project, Welch explained: “We decided together that it was important and it was the right thing and we probably had the best data to do it. We were probably the people that could produce a high-quality report.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In 2008, Santos, Coimbra, and Welch joined a group of FUNAI employees to complete the Wedezé delimitation study in collaboration with the eleven aldeias of T.I. Pimentel Barbosa.

The formal process for legal demarcation of Indigenous Territory in Brazil begins with a multidisciplinary delimitation study, which combines ecological, archeological, and anthropological expertise. First, individuals with state-recognized epistemic authority, usually framed in terms of training in the relevant academic fields, are appointed to a working group. They produce a delimitation study for FUNAI. Once approved, this study then passes to the courts, where it faces often-extensive legal challenges from affected landowners. If the courts accept the study, the land becomes officially demarcated, with timelines for non-Indigenous occupants to vacate the area.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indigenous groups do not have complete legal sovereignty over their lands, which remain under federal control.

For the Wedezé delimitation study, the anthropologists were able to draw on their extensive experience as well as historical source material: Field notes from researchers who had witnessed critical land struggles of the late 1970s helped corroborate A’uwẽ explanations of how they had lost Wedezé, and how important it continued to be for them. The earliest anthropological study was central in supporting community claims to the longevity of their connection to Wedezé. To complement the historical data, ENSP researchers drew on publications and data sets that they and their students had produced over the preceding two decades. Months of collaborative work produced further evidence including ethnobotanical surveys, oral histories from Elders, and technical surveying of cemeteries and ritual spaces. The study was comprehensive, and thoroughly backed up by years of respected research.Footnote ⁵⁸

The report led to the delimitation of 150,000 hectares of A’uwẽ land in 2011, at a time when few new Indigenous lands were being recognized. With FUNAI’s acceptance of the report, the process moved to the courts. As of 2024 the proposal still faces legal challenges and a long and precarious road to official demarcation. However, the strong case that the researchers were able to build in cooperation with the aldeias was a major step toward demarcation. Interlocutors in the aldeias of Pimentel Barbosa recognized Coimbra, Santos, and Welch not only as friends of the aldeia, but as scholars whose authority would be recognized by the state. They differentiated the academics from other warazú as those most well prepared to present data on territorial claims to Wedezé. At the same time, Coimbra’s sense that “we could not say no,” underlines the obligation the researchers felt.Footnote ⁵⁹ In part, this dedication was cultivated by the investment of A’uwẽ leaders and community members in the researchers, and by the aldeia’s ongoing work to find common ground.

The bureaucratic processes of recognizing land – albeit small portions of prior territories – served and serve to inscribe Brazilian sovereignty over Native lands and reinscribe the power of the state to grant recognition. It is an area where administrators call on what they hold to be apolitical expert knowledge: Scientific empiricism is called upon “to manage the existence and claims” of groups like A’uwẽ communities. This mandate to be documented means that Indigenous groups have incentives to not only allow, but even to actively seek out relationships with scholars.

A’uwẽ community members shape knowledge production by engaging with the hopes, desires, and fears of the scholars who come to study them. This is not to say that there are never moments of refusal – questions are avoided, researchers are turned away from certain topics, projects are allowed to perish in inaction.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, A’uwẽ actively work with scholars and so exercise agency, even (and perhaps especially) within a context of unequal access to power, resources, and knowledge. As Sherry Ortner points out, citing Laura Ahearn, the point “is not that domination and resistance are irrelevant, but that human emotions, and hence questions of agency, within relations of power and inequality are always complex and contradictory.”Footnote ⁶¹ In a system where academics are considered among the most reliable experts to consult on land demarcations or lobby for better education, health, or environmental management policies, A’uwẽ community members have chosen to draw researchers into an affective field in order to compel them to “stand with” rather than “give back” to the community.Footnote ⁶²

The Xavante Genographic

As mentioned in the opening to this chapter, Genographic researchers Santos and Vieira spoke of their fieldwork in T.I. Pimentel Barbosa with relish. The researchers brought enthusiasm to discussing all their fieldwork, but in interviews they repeatedly set their time in Pimentel Barbosa apart. This suggests, I think, that their A’uwẽ hosts have been particularly adept at modulating the affective field of engagement. The two scientists articulated a sense of connection and belonging. This section examines researchers’ personal reports of fieldwork in T.I. Pimentel Barbosa to explain the affective experience of research and explore the investment of time and effort that aldeia residents dedicated to the visiting researchers.

It is important to contextualize my interviews with the researchers within the fierce debates about genetic sampling of Indigenous groups generally and the Genographic Project specifically. Native activists and social scientists have objected to the premises of the project, citing the fraught Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) of the early 1990s, and a long history of scientific abuses of Indigenous subjects.Footnote ⁶³ Some who were invited to participate articulated their own objections, including the Q’eros communities in Peru discussed by Adam Warren in Chapter 3 of this book.Footnote ⁶⁴ Social scientists and historians have situated the Genographic Project within a longer trajectory of human biology, highlighting continuities with previous research agendas from the 1960s and 1990s.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Brazil, journalists also picked up on the contested nature of the project. They cast the initiative as a second Projeto Vampiro, citing the nickname of the HGDP. They drew comparisons to other controversial scientific endeavors, including the collection and storage of Yanomami blood, and the use of biosamples from Karitiana and Paiter (Suruí) to create immortalized cell lines for research.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was in large part due to these critiques that the regulatory process for the project was so belabored.

At different moments in their interactions with me, the Genographic researchers sought to rearticulate their defenses of the project through our conversations.Footnote ⁶⁷ Santos’s version of the A’uwẽ fieldwork also included exaggerations and reasons to read the interviews critically. However, Santos and Vieira’s sentiments of excitement and longing were genuine, and many portions of their accounts match up with reports from other researchers, including (in some ways) my own, about how they were received and treated by aldeias in T.I. Pimentel Barbosa. While some Indigenous groups were wary of participating, or chose not to, the A’uwẽ aldeias that the Genographic Project visited embraced the project.

The scientists’ initial connection with T.I. Pimentel Barbosa was through Jurandir Siridiwê Xavante, a leader from Aldeia Etênhiritipá. Jurandir had participated in an advisory board made up of leaders from five different Indigenous groups that consulted with the Genographic during the regulatory process.Footnote ⁶⁸ The scientific team was composed of four men: geneticist Fabrício Rodrigues dos Santos as the principle investigator; biophysicist and postdoctoral researcher Pedro Paulo Vieira; Francisco Araújo, a graduate student in social anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; and Peruvian Aymara graduate student José Sandoval.Footnote ⁶⁹ As their primary interlocutor, Jurandir played a central role in the researchers’ experience of their work in the Terra Indígena. He coordinated their stay, officially presenting them to the warã on their first night in Etênhiritipá so that aldeia Elders could consider the researchers’ proposal.Footnote ⁷⁰ Jurandir exercised his political influence in favor of the research project: He rallied aldeia residents to show up for the scientists’ explanations of the project; he helped coordinate the support that the project would need at each turn.

Other aldeia residents also provided support. Two assumed the roles of guides and guards, helping the researchers with daily tasks, and protecting them and their equipment from overly curious children.Footnote ⁷¹ These men took the researchers out to explore the cerrado, and taught them about A’uwẽ fire hunting practices. The researchers also worked with two leaders from each of the nine aldeias that participated in the study.

Santos’ narrative of his research experience in Etênhiritipá included a wide variety of interactions that had little to do with the project’s goals of collecting genealogical data and genetic samples:

Later in our interview, Santos continued to describe stargazing with a laser star pointer and an iPhone constellation application. “So it was a moment fully lived in every minute,” Santos sighed.

But Santos and Pedro Paulo Vieira felt most deeply drawn in by what they understood as their inclusion in the aldeia. “And not only that,” Santos told me, following up on his account of the movie night, “We participated in rituals with them. Not the rituals they put on for tourists, ones that they were really doing.” Santos explained: “There were two rituals going on at the same time. One was [like] a baptism … In that ceremony I was baptized too. I’m öwawe,” he said, referring to his incorporation into one of the A’uwẽ moieties.Footnote ⁷³ Santos’s story of his time in the aldeia betrayed the joy, excitement, and sense of engagement that set the A’uwẽ experience apart for the Genographic researcher. What Santos conveyed to me was not a series of emotional responses, but the researchers’ movement through an affective field.

“The Genographic was adopted by the Xavante of South America in Brazil,” Pedro Paulo Vieira told me, framing the A’uwẽ fieldwork as the pinnacle of the Genographic in Brazil:

Vieira emphasized Etênhiritipá’s adoption of both the researchers and the project. This inclusion was compelling to the biophysicist because it was both personal and intellectual; it incorporated an invitation to remarry his wife in the aldeia alongside a perceived interest and investment in the scientific work itself. The researchers were struck by what they perceived as the authenticity of their hosts. At the same time, they felt embraced, included in this authenticity.

Focusing on the application, uses, and cultivation of affect highlights the extensive care work involved for A’uwẽ communities to host outsiders. The narratives that the Genographic researchers offered suggest that A’uwẽ subjects went to substantial trouble to inculcate certain affective states in the researchers who visited them. Rituals needed explanation. Equipment had to be protected. Even spontaneous decisions, such as a hunting or fishing trip, involved extensive work.

This experience of belonging was essential to the researchers’ understandings of their fieldwork, and they mobilized this perceived acceptance and belonging to make claims about the legitimacy of their work through our conversations. But this sense of belonging and acceptance was also – and continues to be – marshalled by A’uwẽ with the expectation of mutuality. The investment to bring researchers into the affective field is about building enduring relationships to shape research through dialogue, and form experts who can be called upon to address community needs. However, when community members invest in Santos or me, they face the possibility that we will disappoint or betray. It is a precarious strategy within the double bind of state recognition.

Conclusion

The use and reuse of blood samples is a pressing moral question of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century genetics. In the words of Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, and Jenny Reardon, “Within biomedicine, indigenous biospecimens are increasingly the crucibles in which ethical practice is determined.”Footnote ⁷⁵ An extensive and thoughtful literature in STS (science and technology studies), history of science, and Native Studies has explored the stakes of genetic research for defining Indigeneity,Footnote ⁷⁶ grappling with questions of scientific responsibilities toward communities whose DNA is under study and the value (often conflicting) that geneticists and communities place on stored samples.Footnote ⁷⁷ There are many important critiques that have been raised regarding the Genographic Project, and it seems Santos, Vieira, and colleagues had little latitude to adjust their scientific practices in conversation with residents of T.I. Pimentel Barbosa. However, their navigation of both the regulatory systems of the Brazilian state and the oversight of their A’uwẽ hosts – even if limited by structural constraints – exists in contrast to the work of some other human geneticists.

In the wake of the Genographic’s hurdles with the ethics council, other geneticists expressed intense concerns and pessimism regarding the regulatory system and the ability to continue their work. In 2012, I asked senior geneticist Francisco Salzano, widely considered a founder of Brazilian human genetics, about timelines for getting new regulatory permission for sampling in Indigenous communities. He lamented, “Now there is what I call geneticophobia … When you speak of DNA, everyone is horrified, and thinks that the genome of a person will be patented. This is also reflected in the regulations of the National Commission for Ethics in Research, CONEP.” The regulatory experience of the Genographic Project was the first example he gave of how research regulations apply to genetics work with Indigenous populations: “For approval of these studies in Brazil, it took at least three years, with requests for information going back and forth.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Maria Cátira Bortolini described this saying, “it’s an incredibly complicated thing to get approval from the Ethics Council to study Indigenous communities. So, like I said, we do not do new collections. We have used samples called historical samples with an approval to use these historical samples.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Among the samples still in use by Salzano and Bortolini’s team as of 2017 were those first collected by Salzano and colleagues in T.I. Wedezé in 1962.

Salzano received ethics committee approval through his institution shortly after the National Council of Health instituted the new oversight system in 1996. The collections, which he had made over four decades were one of the foundations of his career until his death in 2018, and also provided material for analysis by dozens of doctoral students, some of whom went on to become close collaborators.Footnote ⁸⁰ In most cases, the researchers did not return to the Indigenous communities where the original sampling took place to conduct ongoing consent processes. Because the intellectual questions of the research group have remained focused exclusively on the genetic history of the populating of the Americas and questions of human evolution and differentiation, the university ethics committee approved ongoing use.Footnote ⁸¹ This is despite the fact that most of the technologies and techniques now used did not exist when the scientists collected the original samples. When geneticists claim, “what genome scientists are trying to obtain is a history of humankind in general, not of only one ethnic group,”Footnote ⁸² and position historic collections as patrimônio da humanidade or human patrimony, they make claims through a logic of possession.

In my discussions with Bortolini and other members and former members of her lab, I emphasize what I see as the minimum imperative for ongoing consent from communities whose members and ancestors are being studied. While she and others have used the regulatory difficulties of the Genographic Project as evidence for the bureaucratic impossibility of obtaining such consent, I have used Santos’s engagement by Etênhiritipá as an example of why such ongoing discussions are an ethical necessity. Neither of our positions is innocent, and the conversation is ongoing. Likewise, before the pandemic, I began to discuss the stored samples with community members in the aldeias of Etênhiritipá and Pimentel Barbosa in what I imagine will be a much longer-term conversation. Already community members have taken delight in certain aspects of the history of the genetics research, including work underway to return anthropometric photographs from the 1960s in digital format.Footnote ⁸³ They have also begun to draw parallels between the presence of their samples in laboratories and the histories of collection, use, and sale of samples from Paiter (Suruí) and Karitiana aldeias.Footnote ⁸⁴

For Santos or Bortolini or for me, even if we embrace meaningful long-term engagement in Pimentel Barbosa, we may not be able to disavow the possessive logics of the state. However, by working through the affective field of A’uwẽ regulations of research, we may open ourselves up to being changed. As TallBear writes, “A researcher who is willing to learn how to ‘stand with’ a community of subjects is willing to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced.”Footnote ⁸⁵ I am unsure what will be asked of me as I collaborate on a digital archive project in six aldeias, but while I may not be able to shift the possessive logics of recognition, at least with A’uwẽ community members we can work to shift the logics of the research itself.