Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

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In the shadow of Cuauhtémoc: commemorative

sculptures, indigenous heroes, and indigenismo in
Mexico and Brazil, 1944-1958

Laura Giraudo

To cite this article: Laura Giraudo (2022) In the shadow of Cuauhtémoc: commemorative
sculptures, indigenous heroes, and indigenismo in Mexico and Brazil, 1944-1958, Latin
American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 17:4, 399-422, DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2022.2041349

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2022.2041349

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Group.

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LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES
2022, VOL. 17, NO. 4, 399–422
https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2022.2041349

RESEARCH ARTICLE

In the shadow of Cuauhtémoc: commemorative sculptures,

indigenous heroes, and indigenismo in Mexico and Brazil,
1944-1958
Laura Giraudo
Escuela de Estudios Hispanos-Americanos/Instituto de Historia, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas (EEHA/IH, CSIC), Sevilla, España

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article addresses the Brazilian interpretation of the Day of the Indian, Araribóia; Brazil;
a hemispheric indigenista celebration created in 1940 and observed in Cuauhtémoc; Day of the
Brazil since 1944. It especially focuses on the prominence of the figure of Indian; Indian heroes;
indigenismo
Cuauhtémoc after the Mexican government sent a monument of the
‘Aztec hero’ to Brazil in 1922. The arrival of the Cuauhtémoc monument PALABRAS CLAVES
in Rio de Janeiro triggered a debate about who Brazil’s Indian hero Araribóia; Brasil;
should be, which continued until 1965 when a sculpture of the ‘Indian’ Cuauhtémoc; Día del Indio;
Araribóia was placed in Niteroi, on the other side of the Guanabara Bay. héroes indígenas;
In the Day of the Indian ritual, the figure of Araribóia achieves some indigenismo
importance, but no autochthonous local figure could displace the
mighty Cuauhtémoc and his status as Amerindian hero. The analysis of
these specific stagings suggests a strong connection between the public
displays of the ‘Indian heroes’ and the concomitant processes of national
institutionalization and international recognition of Brazilian indigen­
ismo. In the end, the heroic figures promoted by the Day of the Indian
were not the Indians, but the indigenistas themselves. Their model,
General Rondon, would be recognized in 1958, the year of his death,
as ‘Indigenist hero.’
RESUMEN
El articulo analiza la versión brasileña de los rituales asociados al ‘Día del
Indio,’ una celebración indigenista continental creada en 1940 y cele­
brada en Brasil desde 1944. En particular, aborda el protagonismo de la
figura de Cuauhtémoc, cuya estatua había llegado de México a Rio de
Janeiro en 1922, provocando un debate acerca de cuál debía ser el héroe
indígena brasileño, retomado en distintas ocasiones, hasta que, en 1965,
se instaló en Niteroi (al otro lado de la bahía de Guanabara) una estatua
del ‘indio’ Araribóia. En las celebraciones del Día del Indio, la figura de
Araribóia adquiere cierta presencia, si bien ningún héroe autóctono local
consiguió desplazar a la poderosa figura del ‘héroe azteca,’ que asume
en el ritual el perfil de ‘héroe amerindio.’ El análisis de estas puestas en
escena revela una profunda relación entre la exposición pública de los
‘héroes indígenas’ y el paralelo proceso de institucionalización nacional y
reconocimiento internacional del indigenismo brasileño. Finalmente, las
figuras heroicas que promueve y refuerza el Día del Indio no son los
indígenas, sino los propios indigenistas. Su modelo, el general Rondon,
alcanzará en 1958, el año de su muerte, su mayor reconocimiento como
‘héroe indigenista.’

CONTACT Laura Giraudo laura.giraudo@csic.es Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos/Instituto de Historia,

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (EEHA/IH, CSIC), Alfonso XII, 16, Seville 41002, Spain
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
400 L. GIRAUDO

Introduction
In April 2019, the Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (APIB) once again held its
Acampamento Terra Livre in Brasilia, a national conference dedicated to defending the
rights of indigenous people.
The timing was no accident: April is the month of the Semana do Índio (Week of the
Indian), Brazil’s expanded version of an annual event, the Dia do Índio (Day of the Indian),
created in 1940 at the First Inter-American Conference on Indian Life (Primer Congreso
Indigenista Interamericano, ‘Pátzcuaro First Conference’ from now on) and introduced to
Brazil in 1943. The event has been a Brazilian holiday since 1944 and is part of Brazil’s
official indigenist activities. As in other countries in the Americas, throughout its history,
this commemoration has been compared to, attached to, and confused with other events.
It has been debated and even rejected, only to be resignified and championed by other
actors in the present day.
In this article I address a peculiar aspect of the Dia do Índio in Brazil: namely, the
leading role played by the figure of Cuauhtémoc, Mexico’s ‘Aztec hero’ who, in this
context, assumes a profile as an ‘Amerindian hero,’ potentially representative of all
indigenous groups across the Americas. Beside him, the relative prominence of a local
autochthonous hero, the ‘Indian’ Araribóia, a national hero associated with the expulsion
of the French, is indicative of the place assigned to indigenous heroism in the construc­
tion of the nation and in Brazilian indigenist discourse. My analysis focuses primarily on
the 1940s and 1950s, but the background also involves two symbolic dates: 1922, the year
when the statue of Cuauhtémoc came to the Praia do Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro, and
1965, the year when the statue of Araribóia was inaugurated in Niterói (on the other side
of the Bay of Guanabara). Neither Araribóia nor any other local hero managed to displace
the powerful figure of Cuauhtémoc from the privileged place it occupied during the Dia
do Índio celebrations in the mid-twentieth century, but in 2013 Araribóia (a Temiminó
chief), Tibiriçá (a Tupiniquim chief), and Poti (a Potiguara chief) were finally inscribed on
the Pantheon of the Fatherland and Freedom. In an avowed exercise of ‘rewriting history,’
the legal project underscored the role of indigenous leaders who, by fighting for their
communities’ survival, contributed to the construction of the Brazilian nation. Rather than
‘naïve victims of historical contingencies,’ they acted as ‘heroic protagonists, forgers of
their own destiny and of this country that we have inherited.’1
My analysis of the staging of indigenismo in the Dia do Índio regards the public display
of ‘indigenous heroes’ as part of the construction of Brazilian indigenismo, in a context in
which Mexico and Brazil both claim a leading role in the inter-American indigenist
movement.
First, I review the figure of Cuauhtémoc as emblematic of the Americas, and the
Brazilian quest for an autochthonous local hero. Next, I analyze the commemorations
themselves, which reawakened the debate about a suitable Brazilian emblem that was
only partially and temporarily resolved by enlisting Araribóia. Third, I examine the rela­
tionship between these two figures and the framing of the celebration as an act of justice
and reparation. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the utility of these ‘indigenous
heroes’ for the simultaneous construction of the heroism of the indigenists themselves,
emphasizing their continuity with the role of Brazilian indigenismo in the national and
international spheres in the mid-twentieth century.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 401

Cuauhtémoc, representative of the ‘Amerindian race’

From November 1943 to March 1944, the Conselho Nacional de Proteção ao Índios (CNPI)2
held various sessions dedicated to deciding on the program for the first celebration of the
Dia do Índio. Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon,3 director of the Serviço de Proteção ao
Índio (SPI), suggested a tribute to the ‘great Amerindian figures,’ and that the CNPI should
‘lay flowers at the foot of that great Mexican figure who was Cuauhtémoc’ (CNPI 1946, 9).
The new celebration was to have a long life ahead (it continues to be commemorated
today). At the time, it was important for legitimizing the position of Brazil (and its
indigenists) in relation to the indigenismo of the Americas as a whole and its association
with Mexico, the seat of the Inter-American Indian Institute (Instituto Indigenista
Interamericano, or IAII). This explains the importance of the figure of Cuauhtémoc.
Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas’s decree adopting the new holiday on April 19
(Decreto 5540 of 1943), fulfilled an agreement reached at the First Conference, which
had been held in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, in 1940,4 and which would be invoked explicitly
without clarifying anything further about the celebration’s meaning. Brazil had partici­
pated in the Pátzcuaro First Conference with a single but important delegate, who was
also part of the provisional executive committee of the IAII (from May 1940 to March
1942): the anthropologist Edgar Roquette Pinto,5 former director of the Museu Nacional
and vice president of the CNPI. At the time, the Brazilian government opted not to ratify
the International Convention that established the IAII – probably due to the presence of
the communist Vicente Lombardo Toledano – but the members of the CNPI and the SPI
did correspond and collaborate with the Instituto.6 The introduction of the celebration
was thus an important sign. When Manuel Gamio, who had been named director of the
IAII in March 1942, visited Brazil in May 1944 with the objective of promoting its member­
ship in the Instituto, the first Dia do Índio had just been celebrated.7
The program had been presented in the sessions of the CNPI by the director of the
Museu Nacional, Heloisa Alberto Torres.8 Following that first celebration, the Dia do Índio
was expanded into the ‘Semana do Índio,’ with a broad and varied program that has
included commemorative acts, lectures and conferences, radio programs, film screenings,
and ethnographic exhibitions. Rondon regarded it as a complete success in the assess­
ment he presented to the CNPI.9 The Brazilian version of the holiday overwhelmingly
fulfilled the two functions of the Pátzcuaro resolution – pedagogy and commemoration –
merging the national and continent-wide celebrations that the resolution itself had made
possible.
Following Rondon’s suggestion, 1944 also saw the birth of the tradition of inaugurating
the Semana do Índio at Cuauhtémoc’s feet, each time vindicating him as the representa­
tive of the ‘Amerindian race.’ (see Figure 1, showing the statue in 1946’s Dia do Indio)
Rio de Janeiro had received the statue as a gift from Mexico in 1922, on the centenary
of Brazil’s independence. This was a bronze replica of the monument to Cuauhtémoc on
the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, sculpted by Miguel Noreña and inaugurated in
1887, which had already been sent to Paris in 1889 and to Chicago in 1893.
In contrast to other ‘vanquished Indians,’ Cuauhtémoc is the only one who is depicted
as haughty and defiant in nineteenth-century painting (Christo 2011), a period that saw
the consolidation of his characterization as a warrior-emperor, a stoic martyr on the stake,
defeated but morally superior to the invader (Salazar 2010). After a first monument to
402 L. GIRAUDO

Figure 1. ‘Monumento em homenagem ao índio,’ 1946. (Photo by H. Forthmann, Dia do Índio, 1946,
Acervo do Museu do Indio – FUNAI, Brasil. [MI-FUNAI, Fondo SPI, BR MI SPI DA SE CDI 10004–10022/
SPI10005]).

Cuauhtémoc (1869), the most successful representation would be the one from 1887, a
year when an annual celebration began on August 21, the anniversary of his torture. Since
then, literary and visual representations of Cuauhtémoc proliferated, included commercial
ones (Campos Pérez 2017; Fulton 2008a; Lecouvey y Bonilla 2018; Schavelzon
1988,115–135; Tenenbaum 1994).
The 1887 monument consecrated Cuauhtémoc as a martyr and Mexican national hero,
a symbol of the pre-Hispanic past that was explicitly included in official history on a
continuous line with his successor, Miguel Hidalgo, the hero of independence. At the end
of the nineteenth century, in the context of the rise of allegorical national representations
and the production of public monuments (Garrigan 2012, 107–133; Gutiérrez Viñuales
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 403

2004; Ranger and Hobsbawm 1983; Zárate 2003), what Schavelzon (1988, 11) has called
the ‘neo-pre-Hispanic’ style responded to both a selective recovery of origins (competing
with the ‘neocolonial’ style) and a new urban aesthetic.
Work dedicated to indigenous heroism also appeared in other countries, such as
Nicanor Plaza’s Caupolicán in Chile (inaugurated in 1869). A few decades later, in ‘indige­
nist statuary’ (Gutiérrez Viñuales 2004, 484) we find several examples of ‘national indi­
genous heroes’: David Lozano’s Manco Capac in Lima (inaugurated in 1926), Abayubá and
Zapicán (inaugurated in 1930) and Los últimos Charrúas (inaugurated in 1938) in
Montevideo. There were even homages to the ‘collective hero,’ like the group of sculp­
tures Los Andes by Luis Perlotti in Buenos Aires (inaugurated in 1941) and Enrique Prat
Gay’s Monumento al Indio in Tucuman (inaugurated in 1943). In fact, Perlotti’s work was
inaugurated during the first celebration of the Día del Indio in Argentina, with the name of
Hombre Autóctono [Autochthonous Man] (“Argentina. Celebración,” 1941; “Argentina.
Carta,” 1941) and the unveiling of his stone figure of Indio Pehuenche, in Bolívar, a province
of Buenos Aires, had a prominent place in the same celebration in 1957 (“Argentina.
Celebración,” 1957).
In addition to establishing the emblematic representation of Cuauhtémoc and provid­
ing a source of iconographic inspiration in Mexico, Noreña’s Cuauhtémoc would take on
even bigger dimensions and become a representative of the entire continent. Having
become a ‘kind of ambassador of Mexican honor abroad’ (Salazar 2010, 419), the ‘warrior
hero’ would enable, as I will show in the Brazilian case, a contemporary appropriation of
‘pre-Hispanicness’ that would redound in its use as an indigenist emblem.
In Brazil, the statue’s arrival in the context of the centenary occurred in a general
situation of late, uneven production of national civic monuments, characterized by a lack
of consensus about a coherent national narrative, as compared to other Latin American
countries (Wink 2014). Furthermore, Mexico’s gift sparked a debate about which indigen­
ous emblem was right for Brazil. As shown below, this debate resurfaced decades later.
The central event of the Brazilian centennial in 1922 was an International Exhibition. It
was widely publicized and received an important ‘special’ delegation, presided over by
José Vasconcelos, one of the most important intellectuals of the era and then Mexican
Secretary of Public Education. This was an opportune moment for Álvaro Obregón’s
government to improve Mexico’s international reputation and defend its revolution. For
Vasconcelos, however, Cuauhtémoc was an inadequate symbol with which to promote
the image of the new Mexico, and although he was unable to prevent the monument
from being reproduced, he succeeded in building a pavilion in neocolonial rather than
Aztec style – i.e. one that was more in line with his vision of hybridity in which the Hispanic
element was predominant (Tenorio 1994, 1996, 203–215). His ideas about the cosmic race,
the hybrid Ibero-American race, expounded in the book that grew out of notes he took
while traveling in Brazil and Argentina (Vasconcelos 1966[1925]), dialogued and at the
same time clashed with an indigenist narrative that, in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin
America, was already being consolidated in the 1920s. Among other manifestations, this
narrative was apparent in the recuperation of the pre-Hispanic past in public space,
including the representation of indigenous heroes in paintings and statues. Invoked by
post-revolutionary Mexican administrations in particular as part of their foundational
myth, this narrative nevertheless also contributed to the staging of an equivalence
between ‘pre-Hispanic’ and ‘indigenous’ across the Americas, and had profound
404 L. GIRAUDO

implications for the interpretations and representations of the past and present, namely
by locating the qualities associated with being ‘indigenous’ (honor, resistance, valor,
stoicism) in a remote time, whose materialization in statues aspired to a character of
permanence, in contrast to the realities of contemporary indigenous people. If, in general,
this ideal of the permanence of sculptures contrasts with their inevitable instability and
obsolescence (Savage 2010, 2018), in this particular case the use of the figure of
Cuauhtémoc in Brazil’s debate about its own indigenous emblem and in the setting of
the Dia do Índio reveals a certain continuity of indigenous representation that would be
functional for the indigenist narrative.
The monument to Cuauhtémoc in Rio de Janeiro was inaugurated on 16 September
1922 with an ambivalent speech from Vasconcelos in which he assured that venerating it
did not mean a rejection of progress or a desire to return to the Aztec empire, nor was it
an act of distancing from Europe. On the contrary, he was ‘offering it as a symbol of true
independence, no longer only political, but also moral’ (Vasconcelos 1966[1925], 149; see
Marentes 2014, 71–74; Tenorio 1994, 188–120, 1996, 2012–2015). Afterward, Vasconcelos
would defend his speech against criticisms of its historical inaccuracies by arguing that
these were irrelevant; his objective was not to recount history, but rather ‘to create a
myth’ (Vasconcelos 1957, 150). His interpretation of the figure of Cuauhtémoc as a moral
hero reinforced the narrative of unification of Mexican national memory, and projected
the ‘original ancestor of the Mexican race’ (Salazar 2010, 429) across the Americas as a
whole.
The statue of the last ‘Aztec king’ was the only reference to indigenous people at the
Rio exhibition, which coincided with the Semana do Arte Moderno in Sao Paulo, asso­
ciated with the avant-garde and the search for inspiration in native cultures. A few months
later, the presence of the Mexican hero inspired the project presented by Tavares
Cavalcanti, Congressional Representative from the State of Paraíba, to pay homage to
the ‘indigenous Brazilian race’ as one of the major elements that had formed Brazil’s
‘nationality’: specifically, a monument to the Indian Poti, baptized as Antonio Felipe
Camarão, hero of the battle of Guararapes, which put an end to Dutch dominance. The
statue of Cuauhtémoc was regarded as a ‘commemorative monument of the pre-
Columbian races and civilizations of our continent’ and it was necessary to find a
comparable figure that would be able to represent the grandeur of Brazil’s indigenous
peoples (Knauss 2003a, 1053). The selection of Poti, who had converted to Christianity,
encapsulated national history as a civilizing process. As Knauss (2003a) has underscored,
the ensuing debate hinged not on the idea of paying such homage, but rather on the
emblem to be chosen. Whom should be selected as representative of all indigenous
peoples from all times and all regions in the country? Poti’s rival was Araribóia, baptized
Martim Afonso, an ally of the Portuguese and a key figure in the expulsion of the French
(Almeida 2006). In both cases, unlike Cuauhtémoc, the emphasis was not on sacrifice and
heroic resistance to an invader, but rather on their having been ‘patriotic Indians,’ allies of
the Portuguese who left their state of savagery in order to become ‘civilizing agents.’
The monument that had been proposed in 1922 was never completed, but the
symbolic redefinition of the figure of Araribóia was already underway in 1900, with the
municipal council of Niterói’s proposal to perpetuate his memory with a painting, a
commemorative plaque, and a statue. Araribóia thus became the city’s heroic founder,
joining the history of Niterói to the history of the capital of the Republic and associating
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 405

the civilizing process with the process of constructing the Brazilian state. The emphasis on
his indigenous name (Araribóia) and on the representation of the human figure signaled
the intent to distance this historical figure from the way in which he had previously been
remembered: by his Christian name (Martim Afonso) and by a fountain inaugurated in
1847 in the plaza that had been named after him. The initiatives to valorize his image were
organized by the ‘Committee to Glorify Araribóia’ (created in 1906), and became concrete
from 1912 to 1914 with the completion of the bust and the laying of the first stone for the
statue on the 339th and 341st anniversaries of the founding of Niterói. As shown in
Figure 2, despite its indigenous name, the bust presented a ‘civilized’ Araribóia with
royal medals (Guimarães 2020; Knauss 2003b).
The statue was never erected and the figure of Araribóia was temporarily displaced by
the image of the republic. Then, in 1965, another project reprised the myth, with the
installation of a statue by Dante Croce, now featuring Araribóia’s entire body, his arms

Figure 2. Bust of Araribóia, 1914. (Source: Acervo IBGE [Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística],
43142).
406 L. GIRAUDO

Figure 3. Statue of Araribóia. (Photo by Rafael Mendes Junior, 2021).

crossed, dressed in only a loincloth, with a physiognomy and posture that emphasized his
Indianness and his immobility (see Figure 3). Its position, facing the bay and with Niterói at
his back, can be interpreted, even now, in contrasting ways, making it possible to exalt or
disdain his figure, depending on whether one regards him as protecting the city and its
inhabitants from possible invaders (as official history portrays him), or, on the contrary, as
betraying his fellow indigenous people in order to ally with the Portuguese (Bastos 2018,
78–80 and 109–113; Knauss 2003b).
This trajectory of symbolic construction involving Araribóia could explain his role in the
Dia do Índio, starting in the mid-1940s, when the absence of (and need for) a Brazilian
indigenous emblem became more important to the debate. At the time, the SPI had
consolidated an entire scenography of Brazilian indigenismo thanks to an extensive body
of photographic and cinematic work that highlighted the courage, altruism, patriotism,
and self-abnegation of its functionaries, in addition to their empathy for indigenous
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 407

people, simultaneously representing indigenists as ‘Rondonian heroes’ (the prototype of

whom was Rondon himself) and depicting indigenous people in the process of
integration.10 This official mythical narrative went in tandem with the indigenist action
of the SPI, which, starting in the 1930s, more clearly took on a role of nationalizing the
‘forest’ population, adopting an ideal of ‘transitory Indianness’ that classified indigenous
groups in terms of evolutionary stages and established their territorial organization,
differentiating between two kinds of local units, each one reserved for a specific type of
indigenous people.11 Symbolic construction and indigenist actions went hand in hand,
and in both of them a given (ritual and social) place would be assigned to indigenous
people depending on their status, which outlined the heroic profile of the indigenists and
at the same time the action of the concrete actors on the terrain. In 1944, when the Dia
(and Semana) do Índio was first celebrated (Oliveira 1944), the SPI’s indigenist politics
moved away from the positivist ideals that had characterized them originally, replacing
them with an anthropological and ethnological focus that promoted both preservation
and acculturation at the same time. In spite of those internal updates – also fostered by
the desire to participate in the inter-American movement – that figure of the Rondonian
hero was renewed, maintained, and even internationalized.

Cuauhtémoc and Araribóia: mythical evocations and contemporary settings

The importance assigned to the Dia do Índio in Brazil those first years and the symbolic
importance of the Aztec hero is apparent in a publication by the CNPI (1946) that
compiled speeches, conference papers, and articles in the press about the 1944 and
1945 commemorations. The volume opens with Vargas’s decree, the text of a ‘Canção do
Índio’ set to the music of ‘Soldados do Brasil,’12 and a design by Kurt Krakauer that
reproduced Cuauhtémoc’s torture by Leandro Izaguirre.
In his speech at the first celebration, Rondon (1944, 198) evoked the figures of the
‘indomitable defenders of this Amerindian land:’ Cuauhtémoc, Lautaro, Caupolicán and
Guairacá, ‘the symbolic hero.’ He associated the Mexican/American hero (Cuauhtémoc)
with other indigenous heroes (the Mapuches Lautaro and Caupolicán in Chile and the
Guaraní Guaicará in Brazil) and closed his speech with, ‘Long live the heroic Amerindian
race!’ In his report (Botelho de Malgalhães 1944), the secretary of the CNPI included a list
of 23 ‘famous Indians’ from other countries and 10 Brazilian Indians, naming Guairacá first
and describing him as a great cacique, the most notable chief of the Guaraní, for his heroic
battles against the Portuguese and Spanish. Botelho de Magalhãs underscored the
enthusiasm that his story had generated among intellectuals and in the current genera­
tion, inspiring the formation of a ‘Guairacá Legion’ in Sao Paulo in December 1941. In
1939, the Comisión Pro-Monumento a Guiaracá had organized a caravan to the federal
capital to promote the raising of a statue in the Bay of Guanabara (Martins 1941; Scvarça
1993, 61). The project was never completed, but Romario Martins, the founder of the
Paranista movement, contributed to spreading – or, according to some, creating – the
myth of Guairacá, as part of his historical and literary production dedicated to exalting
Paraná (Salturi 2009; Scvarça 1993).
A few days after the second celebration of the Dia do Índio, the newspaper A
Vanguarda (“O Dia do Índio” 1945) suggested the formation of a commission to identify
the name of an ‘indigenous Brazilian chief’ who would represent the ‘races’ that inhabited
408 L. GIRAUDO

Brazil and their ‘heroic virtues.’ Once the symbol had been chosen, a monument could be
raised, and homage could be paid to it instead of Cuauhtémoc statue on occasions like
the Dia do Índio. Even though Cuauhtémoc might stand in for the autochthonous ‘races’
of the Americas as a whole, including Brazil, it would be more appropriate and more
interesting, according to the article, to gather around a statue of ‘one of our own Indians.’
Rondon wrote to the editor of the newspaper, without any explicit reference to the Dia do
Índio, to report on a project to build a Casa do Indio on the grounds of the botanical
garden and to install a monument to the ‘fierce Guarani chief’ (Oliveira 1945a, 27).
Because he had fought against the Spanish, Guairacá could combine indigenous resis­
tance to the invader and the birth of (Brazilian) national sentiment in a single figure.
We have no evidence that the commission proposed by the newspaper ever came
together, but we do know that the site of the inauguration of the Semana do Índio was
unchanged. Nevertheless, the speech delivered at Cuauhtémoc’s feet in 1945 included an
explicit reference to Guairacá, in a dual homage (Oliveira 1945b, 71):

Here, beside the statue of Cuauhtémoc, we come to pay homage, to do justice to the great
representative of the Aztecs, and like him, to the representatives of the indigenous
Amerindian races. We also bring our nostalgia [saudade] for and awareness of the great
Guarani chief Guairacá, and we swear that like him we will always know to proclaim loudly,
‘This land has an owner.’

Perhaps this was what prompted the proposal that appeared in A Vanguarda.
Furthermore, Guairacá reappeared in many of the statements from that year, playing
more or less a leading role. At a conference about José Bonifacio,13 sponsored by the
Sociedade de Cultura Positivista, he was included on a list of ‘brave Indians’ that also
featured Tabira, Ajuricaba, Poti, and, in Mexico, Cuauhtémoc and Juárez, ‘a pure, Mexican
Indian, the greatest of the modern era’ (Neiva 1945, 105). The closing speech defended
the institution of the Dia Americano do Índio as an homage to ‘the heroic race of primitive
inhabitants of the New World,’ as not only the day of the true defender of the fatherland,
on which to admire the bravery and heroism of Atahualpa and Cuauhtémoc, but also the
day of the ‘heroic Brazilians of the autochthonous race’ (Poti, Ajuricaba, Ararigboia,
Tebirica, Paiaguá, Terena, Guaicuru). Guairacá merited special mention as the ‘immortal
symbol of Brazilianness’ (C. Rondon, 1945, 161, 168–169).
In other cases, Guairacá appeared more as a regional hero than a national symbol.
Boaventura Ribeiro da Cunha (1945, 123–125), a member of the CNPI, asserted that
Brazilians who are not ‘pure of skin’ should be proud of their ancestors, of ‘Tabira, the
lightning bolt-Indian’ in the northeast, of Guairacá in the south, and of Ajuricaba in the
Amazon.
Among the celebrations in the individual states, organized that year by the Inspetorias
Regionales (e.g. SPI 1945), the inspector of the Amazon, Alberto Pizarro Jacobina, took up
this same story about the territorial assignment of indigenous heroism, combined with
the defense against foreigners, but failed to recall that, in this case, the resistance had also
been to the Portuguese: ‘Ajuricaba, in the north and Guairacá in the south, appear to us as
perfect symbols of a moving heroism, in their defense of this Brazilian land against foreign
usurpation’ (Pizarro Jacobina 1945, 177). In Curitiba, the idea of Cuauhtémoc as a ‘pan-
American symbol of the Amerigena [Amerindian]’ was reiterated, and it was proposed that
each country raise up a monument like the one in Rio, in homage to Mexico, homeland of
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 409

the ‘Indian President’ Benito Juárez, ‘pioneer of Amerigenismo,’ and birthplace of the Dia
do Índio. At the same time, it was recalled that each country also had to identify, ‘in the
pageantry of its History, that Indian figure who has most stood out for his qualities and for
his actions, and regard him as a national indigenous symbol, raising monuments to him in
the state capitals and in the major cities, so that he will be venerated and serve the young
and the people as an instrument of education and respect for the indigenous people of
their land’ (Veloso 1945, 200–201). Nevertheless, no specific indigenous Brazilian heroes
were suggested (Estado do Amazonas 1945).
The ambiguity of the way autochthonous heroes were exalted in the national narrative
– premised on their ‘civilizing’ role and their defense of a ‘Brazilian fatherland’ projected
back into the past – is even more apparent in the explicit contrast between ‘Indians’ and
‘civilized people’ in celebrations carried out in different parts of Brazil. In the State of
Amazonas, the participants in the ceremony organized by the Inspetoria included not
only federal, state, and municipal representatives, but also the ‘Indian Marcelino’ who
read a speech ‘written by himself and only by himself [. . .]. It will be seen that the style,
phrasing, and simplicity of expressions are quite characteristic of their origin.’ The son of
Coi-Coenanca, a Tariano tuchaua (chief) known by the ‘civilized’ name of tuchaua
Leopoldino, and Chamava-se Hori, a Tiratapuia, Marcelino had studied at the Salesian
mission school and wanted to be a ‘telegraphist,’ which indicated his acceptance of
‘modernization.’ His speech recalled the mistreatment suffered by his ancestors prior to
the foundation of the ‘Serviço de Proteção aos Selvagens’ and affirmed his pride ‘at being
a Brazilian savage’ (“A comemoração” 1945, 171). Not only was the name of the SPI
modified (using ‘Savages’ in lieu of ‘Indians’), but the official report itself spoke of the
‘Dia do Selvícola’ (Day of the Forest-Dweller).
In addition to the ‘Indian Marcelino,’ another indigenous presence stands out in this
tale: that of a child, Lanau Aiauâ Xiriana, who participated in the event by joining the choir
of the Instituto Benjamin Constant, singing the Canto do Pagé and the national anthem.
The federal comptroller had brought her to the celebration from the upper Rio Negro. Her
compensation, a doll, was greater than that of the other girls, who received some
chocolates (“A comemoração” 1945). Both Marcelino and Lanau appeared on stage as
proof of the success of the SPI’s aid work. Another significant aspect of this staging of the
Dia do Indio in Manaus was the homage to the figure of the inspectors, local representa­
tives of indigenismo, with the inauguration of their portraits, together with the acknowl­
edgement of tuchaua Leopoldino, Marcelino’s father, whose portrait, posing on the
Columbian border, was given to Comptroller Maia. The honorific portraits seem to have
been used as bargaining chips, but only after the position and role performed by each
actor had been accepted and the distinct use of language and names had been taken on.
This was how the SPI’s local functionaries positioned the ‘Rondonian hero’ of the indige­
nist narrative, while indigenous actors (including figures of authority) were acknowledged
once they had accepted ‘civilized’ names and practices that originated with the former.
At the Posto Indígena de Cacique Doble, the activities on April 19 of 1945 consisted of a
speech, ‘in the Portuguese language’ and in front of the Brazilian flag, by a student about
‘the life of the Indian and the life of the civilized person’ and a parade for authorities and
families in which it was demonstrated that ‘Indians know how to behave themselves and
obey’ (Borges 2003, 78–79). In Nimuendaju (previously Araribá), Avaí, São Paulo, the
celebration in front of the flag featured an homage to a war hero (an example of a
410 L. GIRAUDO

Brazilian Indian at the service of the nation), with Guaraní devotional songs and Terena
dances in addition to the national anthem. At another São Paulo community, Itaoca, the
Guaraní professor Pedro Aquiles ‘dressed as an Indian’ for a visit from students during the
Dia do Índio (Borges 2003, 130, 133). In 1948, the SPI’s regional head forwarded school­
work by the Canela (Apanyekrá) students at the Posto Indigena de Capitão Uirá
(Maranhão) to Rio. In it, the precolonial past was reduced to forests and tribes and was
described by its absences, while the school christened the students with ‘Brazilian names’
(in Portuguese) as part of its modernizing mission (Devine Guzmán 2013, 31–35).
As these practices reveal, a consensus about the need for an autochthonous hero as a
national emblem was being forged at the same time that the local representatives of the
SPI were associating modernization with de-Indianization, leaving only a few visible marks
of Indianness (language, attire, music, and dances) for ritual expression.
Without resolving the argument about the most representative emblem, Araribóia
came to the fore in 1950. On April 19, ‘the important figures of the great Cuauhtémoc and
Araribóia were duly exalted beside their monuments in Rio de Janeiro and Niterói
respectively’ (“Brasil. La Semana” 1950, 296). In Rio, Antonio dos Santos Oliveira spoke
beside the statue of Cuauhtémoc and in Niterói, Colonel Francisco Jaguaribe Gomes de
Matto ‘discoursed about Araribóia, Brazil’s great Indian chief’ (“Brasil. Celebración”
1950, 142).
In 1951, the programming of the Semana do Indio kicked off with two civic acts, one in
the morning and one in the afternoon, alongside the monuments to Cuauhtémoc and
Araribóia, respectively (CNPI 1951).
In Rio, the secretary of the CNPI highlighted Cuauhtémoc as a meaningful figure for all
of the Americas, articulating a desire that all countries would ‘do the utmost to assure that
just reparations be made to the indigenous people, who need them so much and have
suffered so much’ (Oliveira 1951, 208). In Niterói, the head of the SPI’s Research Section,
Herbert Serpa, spoke at the other civic act celebrated ‘next to the statue of the Indian
Araribóia, who was one of the greatest national heroes and who stood out in particular for
having succeeded in expelling the French invaders in the earliest days of colonization’
(Oliveira 1951, 208).
The statue mentioned by Serpa was probably the bust delivered in 1912, since the
monument that had been proposed in 1922 was never erected. Thus, opposite the warrior
emperor who had been defeated by the Spaniards but whose defiance is acknowledged
as an indispensable part of the heroic Mexican narrative, Araribóia participated in the
ritual of the Dia do Índio in his own name but in Portuguese garb.
It is unclear whether this symbolic split between Cuauhtémoc and Araribóia persisted
in the following years. In 1954, for example, there is no mention of the national hero and
the only protagonist appears to have been ‘Mexico’s greatest indigenous hero’ (“Brasil.
Conmemoración” 1954, 106). That year it was especially important to underscore the
relationship with the inter-American indigenist organization; after a decade commemor­
ating the Dia do Índio, Brazil had ratified the International Convention of 1940. There were
no allusions to Araribóia in 1955, either (“Brasil. As comemorações” 1955), although we do
know that his bust was moved that year to the front of the church of São Lourenço dos
Índios, and that Rondon participated in its reinauguration (Guimarães De Carvalho
2020, 67).
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 411

The celebration was tightly interwoven with the very development of Brazilian indi­
genismo, the renewal of which in the late 1940s also entailed an institutional displace­
ment. While at first the main forces behind the annual organization of these celebrations
were the CNPI, the Museu Nacional, and the SPI, starting in 1953 the baton would be
passed to the Museu do Índio, ‘a museum against prejudice,’ opened precisely that year
on April 19, with the mission of producing knowledge, preserving indigenous cultural
heritage and promoting a ‘correct’ image of the Indian (Ribeiro 1962, 169–170).
In 1956, the director of the Clube Positivista, Venancio F. Neiva, once again mentioned
Araribóia alongside other national heroes and once again, in addition to the ‘heroic and
martyred’ Cuauhtémoc in Mexico, Guairacá came to stand for Brazil (Clube Positivista
1956, 19). The 1958 celebration was marked by Rondon’s passing, and the bulletin of the
IAII only mentions having dedicated it to the ‘illustrious indigenist’ and the issuing of
commemorative seals, one of them being inter-American (“Brasil. Comemoração” 1958).
Despite its apparent resolution in the 1950 and 1951 celebrations, the argument about
the Brazilian indigenous emblem was still unsettled.

Justice, historical debt, and reparation: the Dia do Índio and indigenismo
In 1877, the plans to beautify the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City and raise a
monument to Cuauhtémoc were framed as an act of justice: ‘Justice demands that we
pay homage to the heroes who fought against the Conquest in the sixteenth century, as
well as those who fought for independence and reform in the present’ (Schavelzon
1988, 127).
This recognition was part of the Porfirian project of constructing a unified national
memory in which the heroism and sacrifice of the ‘vanquished race’ would be remem­
bered alongside that of other national heroes, repaying the ‘debt of gratitude,’ as
Francisco Sosa put it at the time, ‘incurred by the Mexican people over three centuries
ago’ (1887, 3). At the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of a moral debt took on a
central role in the construction of Mexican public memory (Garrigan 2012, 129). In the epic
tale of martyrdom, with its typical elements of sacrifice and honor, the military defeat of
the Aztecs was compensated by their moral victory (Campos Pérez 2017, 1836–38).
After the Mexican Revolution, Cuauhtémoc acquired new meanings, not only nation­
ally, but internationally as well. In 1929, for example, the monument was part of the
ceremonial tour programmed for the Día de la Raza, declared a national holiday that same
year (Rodríguez 2004, 84–85). His figure was especially revitalized in the 1940s, when he
reemerged as a popular artistic subject and reclaimed his place in the pantheon of
national heroes (Fulton 2008b). The cult to Cuauhtémoc inflamed passions and polemics
when the supposed bones of the emperor were discovered in 1949 (Gillingham 2005;
Johnson 2004) and the monument was used by indigenous organizations that adopted
the Día del Indio as part of their activist calendar.
Outside Mexico, the Brazilian appropriation of Cuauhtémoc as a representative of
American Indians across the continent went hand in hand with the emphasis on the Dia
do Índio as part of a process of reparation. At its first celebration, Rondon (1944, 194)
regarded it as an ‘institution of historical justice, as reparative as it is restorative.’ At the
closing of the Semana do Indio, the feeling of solidarity and the need to provide restitu­
tion for historical injustices were once again invoked as the origin of the celebration
412 L. GIRAUDO

(Rabelo 1944, 5). The same thing happened the following year, when the Dia do Índio was
framed as an act of reparation for ‘the descendants of the populations that the conquerors
of the Americas encountered here and uselessly sacrificed in a holocaust driven by greed
and bloodthirsty envy that fanaticism and ignorance had pushed to the point of parox­
ysm’ (Rabelo 1945, 61–62). It was thus the obligation of the conquerors’ descendants to
repair those moral and material damages, and at the same time, to pay just homage to
‘the true proprietors of this land, where, for 445 years, they have lived as tenants’ (Cunha
1945, 118).
In general, these speeches tended to invoke a discourse of moral debt and reparation.
Organizing the Pátzcuaro First Conference and thereafter creating the IAII appeared as
ways to correct the errors of the past: ‘to redeem the bloody crime of which the forest-
dwellers of this continent were victims’ (Horta Barbosa 1944, 78). The voice of the
Amerindian representatives in Pátzcuaro was ‘a voice that calls out for acts of penitence
and reparations [for] historical justice’ (Serpa 1945, 99), a voice that echoes ‘the past’ for
the redemption of the indigenous people of the present. The celebration revealed ‘the
spirit of Justice among today’s generations, now engaged in the praiseworthy work of
repairing the errors enacted against the inhabitants of the Americas’ (C. Rondon
1945, 161).
This emphasis on justice, historical debt, and reparation, accompanied by the reiter­
ated use of terms like ‘crime,’ ‘holocaust,’ ‘victims,’ and ‘extermination,’ is specific to the
celebrations of the Dia do Índio in Brazil. Such terms do not appear in the April 19
speeches by the director of the IAII during those years, and only later, on a few occasions,
in the speeches of other representatives of inter-American indigenismo (Giraudo 2017).
This language contributed to reinforcing the origin myth of Brazilian indigenismo (embo­
died in the SPI and in Rondon), associating it with a movement that encompassed the
Americas as a whole:

A movement with major practical consequences of which we are the proponents in Brazil is
now gaining ground in the Americas, bringing together what remains of those indigenous
populations, protecting them and safeguarding them from extermination, educating them
and transforming them into beings who contribute to collectivities, while at the same time
attempting to enrich our ethnographic and historical knowledge by keeping the last relics of
a martyred race from being destroyed. (Rabelo 1945, 61)

In other respects, the official Brazilian rhetoric of the celebration coincided with that
which was being broadcast from the IAII’s headquarters, namely, its story about indigen­
ous peoples’ past from the Conquest to the twentieth century, which emphasized both
the continuation of domination and oppression and the turning point that had been
reached with the rise of indigenismo. Thus, those ‘good people, who lived happily in their
primitive civilization’ (Neiva 1945, 103) were conquered, colonized, and even enslaved,
generating an enormous difference between the ancient inhabitants of the Americas and
their descendants:

On one side were vigorous, daring men, masters of their pure, physical qualities, of their
intellectual qualities, and their legitimate and illegitimate moral virtues. They were the
integral representatives of their original ancestry, of their racial lineage. On the other are
the distant descendants of those primal populations and the product of four centuries of
struggle, persecution, plunder, and servitude, interbreeding and mixture, physical
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 413

mistreatment and moral trauma, organic degeneration resulting from vices, afflictions, and
poverty, and psychic degradation resulting from evil, disrespect, degrading example, and the
corruption of customs. (Veloso 1945, 25)

One recalls, nevertheless, Brazil’s specificity within the indigenous problem common to
the rest of the Americas: its ‘more forest-dwelling’ population (Rondon 1944, 196), or the
fact that the question in Brazil has two different facets, the so-called ‘national workers’
consisting of ‘a mixture of Africans and Indians,’ and the ‘savages’ or ‘pure Indians’ (C.
Rondon 1945, 50).14 In any case, both would be in the same ‘agonizing situation’ resulting
from the ‘social crimes’ of predecessors and contemporaries (Neiva 1945, 114).
This story is also useful in Brazil for legitimizing the indigenists’ actions and their
declared objective of reversing the situation of indigenous people. During the second
celebration, the director of the SPI explicitly left to others the task of celebrating ‘the
innate value of that strong, indomitable race’ that had not been defeated by over four
centuries of oppression and persecution, in order to claim that Brazil, within the concert of
American nations, complied with its human and civic obligation of lending assistance to
its indigenous people, in accordance with the aims of the SPI itself (Paula 1945).
The organizers of the CNPI and the SPI used the Dia do Índio to defend the role of
Brazil and its indigenists within the continent-wide movement, especially during the
early years when the country had not officially joined the IAII, and the recognition of the
celebration (which, unlike in other countries, had been extended to a full week) could be
presented as a first step in the adoption of the other recommendations that had come
out of Pátzcuaro.
In these speeches Brazil’s role in indigenismo was recalled again and again, situating its
indigenist politics as part of the continent-wide effort and at the same time vindicating
having been a pioneer when it created the SPI – the ‘most perfect pro-Indian organization
in the Americas’ (Rabelo 1944, 58) – in 1910. There was also room for an ‘inward’ reading,
as a way of pressuring the Brazilian government, reiterating the need to comply with the
program laid out in Pátzcuaro First Conference, and advocating a swift decision to join the
IAII in order to strengthen the inter-American project as well as Brazil’s role in it (e.g.
Rabelo 1944, 1945; J. Rondon 1945). The focus on the Americas as a whole stood out when
referring to other national indigenist institutions, being addressed to the ‘Indians of all the
Americas’ and ‘American indigenists,’ or mentioning the celebrations in other countries (C.
Rondon 1945). In 1950, the opening of the first Inter-American Indian Exhibition during
the Semana do Índio was also presented as the ‘beginning of a new phase in indigenist
relations between Brazil and the rest of the countries on the continent’ (“Brasil. La
Semana” 1950, 298).
When Brazil finally ratified the Pátzcuaro Convention in 1954, in addition to
Cuauhtémoc – both representative of the generic ‘Indian of the Americas’ and ‘Mexico’s
greatest indigenous hero’ – homage was also paid to a local hero: not Araribóia, but
Rondon, ‘the greatest indigenist in the Americas’ (“Brazil. Conmemoración” 1954, 106 and
108). Already regarded in 1944 as a modern apostle of Indians and an emulator of Las
Casas (Horta Barbosa 1944, 85), in 1958 Rondon was the first Brazilian to be nominated for
the Nobel Peace Prize.
414 L. GIRAUDO

Coda: indigenous and indigenist heroes

In 1940, in addition to the Dia do Índio, the Pátzcuaro First Conference approved an
homage ‘to all the indigenous people of the Americas,’ which consisted of a floral offering
and an act carried out in front of the statue of Cuauhtémoc in Mexico City.
Attending to the recommendations of that and subsequent indigenist meetings,
twenty years later the IAII published a small book that summarized information about
and recounted the glorious deeds of five indigenous heroes chosen as ‘the indigenous
persons most representative of the Americas’ (Estrada Quevedo 1960, 5). At the IAII
headquarters in Mexico City, a plaque with their names was installed: Cuauhtémoc,
Tecún-Umán, Atahualpa, Tupac Amaru, and Tupac Katari. The first three were chosen to
pay ‘homage of recognition and admiration to the indigenous leaders who, at the exact
moment of Spanish conquest, knew how to immortalize their names with heroism and
courage.’ Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari, in turn, deserved this distinction because ‘they
gave their lives for freedom from the heavy yoke that the Spaniards had placed on their
shoulders’ (Estrada Quevedo 1960, 5).
The logo of the IAII, made in 1941–1942 by the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida,
represented three heads that symbolized, respectively, the birth of the ‘first men’ (the
pre-Hispanic era), the subjugation of the Indians (the colonial era), and the ‘future
maternity’ (the present/future). The current moment, characterized by ‘unanimous
remorse,’ was that of the ‘true indigenist religion’ (Girón Cerna 1942).
If Cuauhtémoc’s selection as representative of the ‘Amerindian race’ and the recogni­
tion of other indigenous heroes represented an homage to resistance in the face of
conquest and colonization, the interpretation in the logo introduced another exaltation,
this time of the present, which would primarily be promoted through the Dia do Índio:
that of indigenism itself. At the very origin of the celebration at the Pátzcuaro First
Conference, indigenists were envisioned as ‘benefactors’ and the ‘heroic Indianness’ of
the past was exalted (Jolly 2018, 165–166, 198–199). This facilitated the staging of the Dia
do Índio as part of a symbolic representation of inter-American indigenismo in which
homage to indigenous people, even when it was being presented as an act of reparation
or as the recognition of heroism, left the objects of the homage as passive subjects of the
work of an ‘indigenist redemption.’ Furthermore, in the Brazilian case, the Dia do Índio
was carried out in the shadow of the symbol of indigenous resistance to the Spanish
conquest, but the most notable local heroes were allies of the Portuguese.
The prominence given to Araribóia, with his characteristics as a civilizing agent, is
consistent with the discourse and practices of the Dia do Índio, which both commemorate
indigenous heroes and by the same stroke contribute to exalting civilization over sava­
gery. It is also consistent with the broader discourse of civilizing Brazilian indigenismo,
and with its practices and actions in the territory, whose true protagonists, represented as
heroes, are the indigenists themselves.
Although they can lend themselves to discontinuities and different uses, public monu­
ments – contextualized within a given time, place, and set of ritual practices – shape,
institutionalize, and spread a specific way of evoking and celebrating the past in the
present (Benjamin 2011). The use of the figures of Cuauhtémoc and Araribóia during the
Dia do Índio in Brazil offers us a privileged vantage point on the contemporary config­
uration of national indigenismo and its insertion in the inter-American movement.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 415

The establishment of the SPI and its subsequent revitalization were crucial not only to
the construction of the nation, but also to the bureaucratic realization of the State,
including the professionalization of indigenists as central cogs in the machinery of public
administration. This process established an official memory of the SPI and Brazilian
indigenismo that, starting in the 1940s, was in dialogue with the inter-American indigenist
movement, which was also being consolidated, institutionalized, and professionalized at
that time. Its symbolic representation in the Dia do Índio was adapted to national and
local conditions, but the most relevant aspect of the Brazilian case is that it makes
apparent things that remain implicit on the broader inter-American scale. The contrasts
between Cuauhtémoc and Araribóia on the one hand, and between the way the celebra­
tion was staged in national versus regional settings on the other, are indicative of how
indigenous heroism was represented. The sculptures of Cuauhtémoc and Araribóia both
locate that heroism in the remote past, eliding the contemporary presence and historicity
of indigenous subjects. Nevertheless, they are profoundly different in the visible elements
of Indianness that they emphasize and convey.
If these two settings for the Dia do Índio, Niterói and Rio, with their divergent inter­
pretations of indigenous heroism, marked the distance between Brazilian and inter-
American indigenismo, the regional settings, which, in lieu of ‘heroes’ in bronze and
stone, featured living indigenous people with bodies and language, as in the 1945
celebration in Manaus, they did so from a domesticated position, as legal minors and
beneficiaries of civilizing activity. The power of indigenismo is thus constructed simulta­
neously upon a narrative of salvaging precolonial Indianness (with the individualization
and personification of its heroism) and on missionary analogies in which colonization
reappears (when the referent is indigenous peoples as a collectivity).
On the other hand, the Dia do Índio in Brazil made the objective of these celebrations
on the inter-American stage even more visible: less the salvaging and vindication of
indigenous heroes and more the progressive construction of ‘indigenist heroes.’ This
helped to reinforce Brazilian indigenismo’s origin myth – which was profoundly linked
to the figure of Rondon himself, even during the stage of revitalization that coincided with
the spread of the Dia do Índio – but also to situate Brazilian indigenismo and its actors
within the inter-American indigenist field, solidifying the idea that Mexico and Brazil were
the countries that pioneered it, and Gamio and Rondon the most outstanding indigenists
in the Americas.
Nevertheless, the repertoire of images and material and symbolic elements of the
settings of the Dia do Índio continue to be available for other uses, especially on the part
of indigenous organizations, as I mentioned at the outset of this essay. Such uses might
even include the ‘naïve gaze’ of a little girl who, on the nude body of the new Araribóia,
noted the presence of a cross, thus signaling a profound continuity in the representation
of the Brazilian national hero.15

Notes
1. Projeto de Lei 3716/2012, proposed by Rogério Carvalho, can be viewed online through the
Comisión de Cultura de la Cámara de Diputados at https://www.camara.leg.br/
proposicoesWeb/fichadetramitacao?idProposicao=541791.
416 L. GIRAUDO

2. The creation of the CNPI in 1939 was part of the bureaucratic rationalization of the Estado
Novo and of the revision of the indigenist practices of the Serviço de Proteção ao Índios (SPI),
founded in 1910, after a period of profound disorganization in the 1930s. The CNPI was
responsible for the definition of indigenist politics, while the SPI carried out and took
responsibility for the service. In the 1940s the SPI participated in the continent-wide indige­
nist debate and distanced itself from the model of ‘brotherly protection’ that, according to
the official version, was the origin of its foundation. See Freire (1990, 2005, 2011) and Souza
Lima (2006).
3. Rondon has been the object of a hagiographic literature extolling his role and that of the SPI
as promoters of a politics of protection against ‘extermination.’ This interpretation, spread by
its own protagonists, was popularized by Darcy Ribeiro (1962). More recently, the ‘tutelary
power’ of Rondon’s politics has been critically analyzed and the ‘origin myth’ of Brazilian
indigenismo has been demystified (Diacon 2004, 101-130; Souza Lima 1987, 1995, 2010).
4. Proposed by the indigenous Panamanian delegate Rubén Pérez Kantule, ‘Recomendación
LIX. El Día del Indio’ indicated to the American countries 1) that they should establish the ‘Day
of the Indian,’ ‘dedicated to studying in all Schools and Universities, with realistic criteria, the
problem of the Indian today;’ and 2) that they should adopt April 19 ‘as the Day of the
American Indian in order to commemorate the date when the Indigenous Delegates joined
the First Inter American Conference on Indian Life for the first time’ (“Acta Final” 1940, 32).
5. The author of Rondônia (1917), one of the first examples of ethnographic work, and linked to
the founding group of SPI, influenced the debates about national identity and ‘racial mixture,’
in addition to receiving important international recognition (Faria 1959; Lima and Sá 2008;
Souza Vanderlei 2011).
6. The first issue of América Indígena, the III’s journal, for example, published an article about SPI
(Fonseca Vasconcelos 1941). The correspondence held at the AHIII reveals this relationship,
especially for the 1940s and ‘50s. Among others, in addition to the exchange between
Rondon and Gamio, it underscores the collaboration of the CNPI secretaries, Amilcar
Armando Botelho de Malgalhães – who wrote several articles in América Indígena from
1943 to 1947 (Botelho de Malgalhães 1947) – and Antonio dos Santos Oliveira Jr., who
contributed to the journal and to the Boletín Indigenista, reporting on the Dia do Índio
(Oliveira 1944, 1945a, 1945b, 1951).
7. Gamio participated in the CNPI session on 23 May 1944. Intervention by Rondon in front of
the CNPI, AHIII, Brazil, ‘da Silva Rondon Candido Mariano.’ Cf. also Freire (1990, 61-64).
8. She directed the Museu Nacional from 1938 to 1955, participated in the CNPI since its
foundation (1939), and was its director from 1955 to 1967. From those privileged spaces for
defining anthropology and Brazilian indigenist politics, she defended the work of ethnogra­
phers as producers of specialized knowledge for indigenist agencies (Domingues 2010; Faria
1978; Freire 1990, 86-107; Ribeiro 2000). It was she who sent Moisés Sáenz the list of people
and Brazilian institutions dedicated to indigenist matters for the directory of indigenists that
was being prepared. Heloisa Alberto Torres to Moisés Sáenz, 30 May 1941 AHIII, Brazil,
‘Alberto Torres, Eloisa [sic].’
9. Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon to the CNPI, 4 May 1944 AHIII, Brazil, ‘da Silva Rondon
Candido Mariano.’ Cf. also Freire (1990, 93-94).
10. A key figure in the visual construction of the SPI was the photographer and film director Heinz
Forthmann. See Borges (2003, 87-134) for the case of the Guaraní at the Posto Indigena de
Nimenduaju (previously Araribá), and see Arruda (2015) for the Bororo, Bakairi, and Terena of
the Postos de Mato Grosso. Forthmann was also the photographer of the celebrations of the
Dia do Índio in Rio de Janeiro (e.g. Figure 1).
11. The regional units of the SPI (the Inspetorias Regionales) included the Postos de Atração,
Vigilância and Pacificação, reserved for ‘hostile’ and ‘savage’ groups, and the Postos de
Assistência, Nacionalização and Educação for sedentary and ‘pacified’ groups (Carnerio da
Cunha 1992, 166).
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 417

12. The author of the letter was Helena Abduch Vieira dos Santos, a professor at the Posto
Indigena Nonoai, Rio Grande do Sul (CNPI (Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios) 1946,
3). This collection of documents and other Brazilian sources from the period are from the MI-
FUNAI, unless otherwise stated.
13. José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva (1763-1838), regarded as the ‘Patriarch of Independence,’
was an inescapable point of reference for Brazilian positivists and indigenists of the period,
especially because he recommends persuasive methods with indigenous people and regards
them as part of the nation. His project, approved by the Constitutional Assembly of 1823, was
never put into practice, and the SPI made the figure of José Bonifácio into a myth that
presented the SPI itself as the fulfillment of his proposals.
14. The SPI was born as SPILTN: Serviço de Proteção aos Índios e Localização dos Trabalhadores
Nacionais. The name was changed in 1918, when it lost the attributes associated with
‘national workers.’
15. When she saw the image of the statue, my eight-year-old daughter only noticed that it was a
man wearing a cross around his neck.

Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Maria Regina Celestino de Almeida, Deborah Dorotinsky, and Haydée López
Hernández for their comments, and to Emerson Guimarães De Carvalho for sharing his doctoral
work and pointing me toward additional bibliographic references. The suggestions from the
reviewers and editors at LACES were equally valuable. I thank Guillermo Espinosa Velasco for giving
me first access to the IAII Historical Archive, and the staff at the Museu do Índio, for the access
granted in their libraries and archives. I am grateful to the Museu do Indio, the IBGE and Rafael
Mendes Junior, who provided the images.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work is an outcome of the HETERQUEST Project “Heterogeneity under question: cross-knowl­
edge and cross-practices in law, indigenismo and social issues,” PID2019-107783GB-I00, funded by
MCIN / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033. The manuscript was translated from Spanish by Christopher
Fraga.

Notes on contributor
Laura Giraudo is a researcher at the EEHA/IH, CSIC, Seville, Spain, and the coordinator of the
INTERINDI Network (www.interindi.net). Her long-term study tracks indigenismo as a broad, pan-
American field, covering a wide range of countries, case studies, projects, institutions, and actors
from its historical configuration in the late 19th century to the present.

ORCID
Laura Giraudo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9072-6435
418 L. GIRAUDO

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Archives
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MI-FUNAI: Arquivo do Museu do Índio, Biblioteca ‘Marechal Rondon,’ Rio de Janeiro.