Clevelândia, Oyapock: cartographies and heterotopias in the 1920's decade

• Main Author: Carlo Romani
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi 2011-12-01
• Series: Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas
• Subjects: Agro colony; Penal colony; Clevelândia; Oyapock; Amapá
• Online Access: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1981-81222011000300003&lng=pt&nrm=iso&tlng=pt

Despite the Oyapock River border had been attached to Brazilian territory in 1900, the official colonization occurred only in the 1920's. The Brazilian Federal Government strategy was to build an agro-colony called Clevelândia. Between 1924 and 1927, it was transformed into a penal colony, causing the failure of the agro-colony experience. The populating process moved to nearly Martinique village, an oldest black and riverine community, after renamed to Oyapock. This article presents human and social relations established at those places in three different moments: the agro-colony, the penal-colony and the new Martinique community. The historical sources were used to map these places. The objective is to understand, with the aid of 'cartography', which kind of relationship among this diverse population was established and how it was happened. Despite the governmental hierarchizing of space, the individual real life reinvented it creating social relations not planned by the power of State: the 'heterotopias'.