Manoel Cardozo

Dom Rodrigo De Castel-Blanco and the Brazilian El Dorado, 1673–1682 1

When, in the year 1670, Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonca became governor-general of Brazil, and assumed the responsibilities of the highest office in the colony, the search for El Dorado was already something of a recognized pursuit on the part of many government officials and of many enterprising colonists. The existence of rich deposits of gold, silver, and precious stones within the confines of Portuguese America was pretty generally taken for granted; and numerous people were periodically diverted from agriculture, which early formed the basis of much of colonial wealth, to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of hidden treasure into the wilderness. The appeal of the unknown was, of course, enormous, and the vision of El Dorado had become fixed in many minds, especially after the news of Spain’s good fortune in Peru and Terra Firma was spread. With geographical knowledge as piecemeal and as imperfect as it then was, it was no difficult matter for a credulous age to suppose that by penetrating the jungle areas westward from the sea the Portuguese might in some way tap the sources of Spain’s Andean mines.

JANICE E. PERLMAN. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Pp. xxiv, 341. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1976.

ant professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, went to Brazil to do field work for her doctoral dissertation. (She had already visited the country briefly, during the wild days of Joao Goulart, and shared his enthusiasm for &dquo;structural reforms.&dquo;) She studied three types of squatter settlements in Rio de Janeiro, &dquo;a favela on a hillside in the midst of an upper-class residential and commercial area,&dquo; &dquo;a favela in the industrial periphery of the city,&dquo; and &dquo;a suburbio-a group of neighborhoods in an outlying satellite,

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come political instability was to imitate Mexico. He is said to have been nonplussed when it was pointed out that the stability of Mexico had been achieved at the terrible cost of the tenth part of its population. The senator clearly had no idea of the savagery of the Mexican scene, much less realized that Mexico, to those who had not been misled by the official propaganda, was the &dquo;sociedad de la gran mentira,&dquo; the society of the great lie. Sauer and Stevens were not blinded by the material advances or the unruffled surfaces. They were aware of the economic growth of the country and knew that some economic development had accompanied it. But they were also aware of the ruthlessness of the regime and its ability to create structures for the control of popular participation in decision-making. It was no secret to them that the government had manipulated the political process in such a way that there were few channels &dquo;through which to express noncomformity with existing policies or to exert pressures toward adopting alternative policies.&dquo; The books under review are especially timely in these days of change because they deal with vital aspects of Mexican incomformity, Sauer with noncomformity on the Right, Stevens on the Left. The methodology is not the same and neither are the basic assumptions, but the books complement each other nonetheless and together reveal very well the dark side of Mexico’s political life. If they had been available to Senator Fulbright, he might have spared himself the embarrassment of his naivete.

FRANZ A. VON SAUER. The Alienated "Loyal" Opposition. Pp. vii, 197. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974.

Andre Thevet, priest and friar, almoner to Catherine de Medici, cosmographer to four kings of France, is remembered by students of Brazilian history as one of the chroniclers of the unsuccessful attempt on the part of Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon (1510–1571) to found a French settlement in Rio bay. One might say that Thevet’s career was in a very real sense the product of the Christian humanism of the sixteenth century, and his life practically spanned those momentous one hundred years. Apparently of humble stock, he was born in the ancient town of Angouleme in 1502, almost at the time when Brazil was discovered. Of his early life and education virtually nothing is known, and a search for records made a number of years ago in his native city failed to disclose anything that might throw light on his first years.