The Prestes Column Rebellion: An Interior History of Brazil

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For hundreds of years, a popular saying in Brazil has described society as 'crabs clinging to the coast'. In this view, only the coastal regions-and their European-descendant elites-were deemed capable of developing a modern and civilised nation. Brazil's interior, in contrast, was largely imagined as a space of savagery and poverty, useful only for its natural resources and its labour. As a result, the so-called 'backlands' have long been stuck in the periphery of the national imaginary, marginalised by the alleged superiority of cities near the coast such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and São Paulo.To challenge the traditional narrative between coast and interior, this project re-examines Brazilian history from the inside, a framework that I call 'interior history'. Seeking to invert the conceptual and geographic boundaries often used to study the history of Brazil-and also of Latin America more broadly-I show how the people and spaces of the interior have been central to the development of national identities, politics, and culture.My interior history of Brazil focuses on a single emblematic case study: the Prestes Column rebellion. From 1924 to 1927, a band of roughly a thousand military rebels led by Luiz Carlos Prestes marched 25,000 kilometres across Brazil's vast interior regions. The rebels-known as tenentes, or lieutenants-did not succeed in toppling the government, but their inadvertent journey into the interior elevated the profiles of a new generation of military leaders and set in motion a regime change only a few years later. This period coincided with the rise of mass-distribution newspapers, and the Prestes Column became one of Brazil's first events to be followed in real time by national audiences. And because the tenentes glorified their experience in the interior-'we spent two years amongst the people, we saw poverty, we know the real Brazil'-the Column leaders were able to use the idea of the interior to justify their claim to political power. Yet this mythic status distracts from the actual experience of populations living in the interior and, moreover, it legitimised the often-violent and condescending actions of the rebels. By studying both how the mythology came to be and also what that process rendered invisible, my history of the Prestes Column reveals how the backlands were central to the contradictory formation of modern Brazil.Along with a book on the Prestes Column and a journal issue on interior history in Latin America, I will produce an interactive digital map. This bilingual visualisation tool will allow users in Brazil and abroad to trace the progress of the Prestes Column and to explore the local communities across the interior. The map will include details such as battles and troop movement, and also images of what the different locations looks like today. This contemporary view is especially useful for seeing the memory sites that have been built along the march, ranging from large-scale public commemorations to tombstones and small monuments for both the rebels and the soldiers that fought against them. The website will also have an open-source feature, where public users can offer their own contributions such as sharing family photos or local folklore about the Column's passage.The online map has acquired even greater importance in the aftermath of the devastating fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro in August 2018. Along with providing an innovative tool to study the Prestes Column, the map will serve as a digital guide for documents relating to the history of Brazil's interior. This will include archival material as well as the public contributions-a form of 'citizen science' for humanities research. The tragic fire has accelerated the network-building amongst archivists, scholars, and museum curators, and my digital map of the Prestes Column seeks to join this important movement by offering an accessible platform for historical patrimony and public engagement.