This essay offers an overview of literature and culture in Manaus between 1870 and 1930. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Manaus grew from a remote outpost in the Brazilian Amazon to one of the capitals of the rubber boom – a bustling port where British bankers mingled with Turkish traders and opera companies from Italy sang at the opulent Teatro Amazonas. By World War I, however, the rubber trade had shifted to southeast Asia and the city entered what is typically portrayed as a long decline. Most accounts of the boom depict Manaus as a place where “culture” was just another import and object of conspicuous consumption. In contrast, this essay shows how the social and economic relations, international influences, and cultural infrastructure established during the heyday of rubber were essential to the postboom emergence of a regionalist movement and efforts to articulate an explicitly Amazonian identity.

The first Amazon rubber boom (1870–1912) represents a defining event in the history of the Amazon and a pivotal moment in the development of modern industry. This chapter traces, from a transnational perspective, some of the most significant Brazilian and Spanish American literary responses to the cultural, political, territorial, and environmental transformations brought on by rubber extraction in turn-of-the-century Amazonia. It also examines how the literature of the period reinterpreted major rubber-related international incidents, such as the Acre territorial dispute (1899–1903), the Putumayo scandal (1907–1914), and the rubber regime known as “La Funera” (1910–1921). The chapter situates the works of Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), Alberto Rangel (1871–1945), José Eustasio Rivera (1888–1928), and César Uribe Piedrahita (1897–1951) within regional narrative traditions and in connection with later literary and cultural production related to the Amazon rubber boom.