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Brazil’s greatest mineral resource is iron. There are practically inexhaustible veins in the country, located mainly in the State of Minas. It is estimated that there are 65 billion tons of iron ore in Brazil, 35 per cent of the world’s total reserve. The lack of high-quality coking coal has until recently prevented the development of steel mills commensurate in number with the quantity of ore. However, the coal of Santa Catarina, although of an inferior quality, has been energetically exploited, and the result has been the great steel mills of Volta Redonda, whose construction began in 1942 with U.S. aid. Brazil’s iron and steel industry is now the largest industry in Latin America, and exploitation of the ore has barely begun.
The same is true of other mineral reserves. There are deposits of just about every known mineral, including precious and semiprecious stones, scattered throughout the country, some in vast quantities. Only with denser population in these areas and more specialized techniques will Brazil be able to profit from these hidden riches. In Espírito Santo and other areas the government is at present exploring layers of monazite sands rich in radioactive ores.
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A matter of considerable controversy in Brazil is the extent of petroleum reserves. Some geologists have suggested that the vast sedimentary basins of the Amazon and Paraná, encompassing nearly 2 million square miles, contain extensive reserves. But so far only traces of oil have been found. Due to a fear of foreign exploitation, oil exploration and heavy oil production were restricted in 1953 to a single government monopoly, Petrobrás. Despite valiant wildcatting at a cost of some $50 million a year, Brazil produces only some 30 per cent of its own crude requirements, most of it from the wells in Bahia. And even if there are extensive reserves in the upper Amazon valley, geologists believe that they lie under rock and would present difficult and expensive problems. Transport would not be a problem, because of the nearness of the navigable Amazon. Throughout most of the country, however, transport is one of the basic problems which Brazil must solve before it can begin real exploitation of its truly magnificent resources. Today, Brazil has nearly 24,000 miles of railroads, but most of them are short-haul, east-west lines which penetrate inland only a short distance from the coast. Many of them are of different gauges, and there are few north-south connections in any event. The highway network still under construction will of course help to solve this problem.
Chapter 6. Unself-conscious Arts
The Brazilian of the interior owns almost nothing and has little cash income. He is not a “consumer”; he still makes most of the things he wears and uses. He lives close to the life of the Indian and the primitive African. These are some of the reasons why, once away from the coastal cities, the arts and handcrafts flourish in Brazil as they haven’t in the United States since colonial days. Since the man of the interior also has no entertainment (or hadn’t until the radio, now man’s alter ego in Brazil as everywhere else), he still makes his own: songs; ballads; dances; ancient, sometimes very elaborate, folk-plays and rituals; according to the seasons and the saints’ days. He weaves wool and cotton home-spun, plaits straw and wicker, makes pottery, carves. The richness and variety of these native arts owes much to the fact that they, too, like the people, are racially mixed. Portugese and Moorish, African and Indian, — and now in southern Brazil sometimes German, Italian, and Japanese, as well.
A curious fact about Brazilian folk-pottery is that, although familiar to the Portuguese for centuries, the potter’s wheel is not used. This is supposed to be because the present-day potters in Brazil learned their art from the Indians rather than from Portuguese tradition. Even without the wheel, the Indians for a thousand years or so have made — and are making — bowls and urns, sometimes of enormous size: huge pots for fermenting liquor, or funerary urns big enough to hold the body of an adult, sitting in foetal position. These pots are built up by the “rope” method, long thin ropes of clay superimposed, round and round, until the required height and shape are reached, then the ridges smoothed down. The backlands potters (women, as with the Indians) make pots of great elegance in this primitive way, decorate them with black, white, and earth colors, and polish them with the rinds of fruit.
Besides dishes & jugs for practical purposes made by women, men sometimes make clay figures, an art derived from Africa. Sometimes colored and glazed, sometimes clay-color, these little statues or whole groups of them depict all the types and activities of their society: the “cowboys,” soldiers, priests, hunters, a wedding, a funeral, a jaguar-hunt, a team of oxen, etc. Women potters occasionally make figures, and at Ipu, in Ceará, they are known for their miniature pots and pans, dishes and furniture and animals — toys for children, sometimes surprisingly like the toys the Greek and Roman potters made for children and that survive in the museums. From Bahia State come sitting-hens, turkeys, snakes, whole trees full of birds — brightly colored and gay. Pots for the baby copy exactly in clay the usual enamel model, those glazed inside costing a few pennies more than the unglazed ones.
Another art has developed in the zones the sociologists call the “leather-culture” (pastoral): a great variety of articles made from calf-skin. The most esteemed, however, are those of deer-skin — and deer are plentiful in the scrub-forests of the northeast. The cowboy’s leather costume is made to protect him from the thorns and sharp-edged leaves of the caatinga, the scrub-forest, and its varieties of low-growing cacti and thorny trees. It is like medieval armor, made in leather: leggings, serving the same purpose as an American cowboy’s “chaps,” but tight-fitting and extending over the top of the foot, like spats; an apron, a “chest-protector,” and over all the leather “doublet,” with long sleeves meeting the leather gloves or mitts. On his head the cowboy wears a leather hat, with a strap under the chin. All these garments are fancifully decorated: embroidered, inlaid in different colored leather, stamped. Their saddles are equally objects of art, and their long, quilted capes, and decorated whips with fine lashes (made from bulls’ pizzles).
Besides the art of pottery, the women of the north and northeast have inherited the art of working in straw from their Indian grandmothers: mats, bags, baskets, hats. In one part of Ceará they make straw hats similar to the “Panamas” of Panama and Chile in their softness and fineness. Baskets, fish-traps, coarse and fine sieves, mats woven to be used as ceilings below the naked rafters. In Pará State, influenced by Portuguese workers in wicker, there is a home industry of furniture-making in reeds, rushes, wickers, etc. Travellers on the Amazon are startled to be begged to buy large wicker rocking-chairs, perched across the sterns of tiny canoes.
The most famous straw-work, however, are the hammocks woven of cord or thread made from several varieties of palm. They are soft and supple, straw-colored, as fine as silk. They are not used for sleeping in, but hung for siestas on the shady porches. For sleeping, hammocks of woven cotton are used, but coarser ones in bright plaids (the Portuguese, like the Scotch, are devoted to plaids), unsystematic plaids or all-white — the more valuable kind. The foot-wide borders of these hammocks (called “varandas”) are an art in themselves — special patterns, in “knotted lace” with long fringes. In the big ranch houses of the sertãos the “hammock chests” are an indication of the owner’s wealth, big chests of cedar or other fragrant woods where dozens of the valuable snow-white hammocks are packed away with sprigs of marjoram between them.