The Rubber Frontier and the People Left on It

The three Amazonian ayahuasca religions all begin in the same place, and it is not a spiritual one. Between about 1880 and 1912 the Amazon rubber boom pulled tens of thousands of workers, most of them from the drought-stricken north east of Brazil and many of them Black, into Acre and the western forest on debt contracts they could rarely discharge. When plantation rubber from South East Asia collapsed the price after 1912, the system emptied out and left those people where they were: far from home, without land, without the church structures of the coast, and in daily contact with Amerindian and mestizo neighbours who had their own healing practices.

Irineu Serra arrived at the end of the boom and lived through the aftermath. What he built at Alto Santo was a congregation for exactly that population, organised with the ranks and uniforms of a fraternal order, providing mutual aid and healing as well as doctrine. The Barquinha of Daniel Pereira de Mattos and the União do Vegetal of José Gabriel da Costa answered the same situation in different ways. Reading these religions as exotic imports from the forest misses what they mainly are, which is the religious response of a specific displaced labour force to its own circumstances.