Fordlandia: A Novel

by Eduardo Sguiglia, Patricia J. Duncan (Translator)

Fordlandia is a haunting, evocative novel at whose core lies a nugget of In 1929, Henry Ford, presiding in divine authority over his automobile empire, grew tired of the British monopoly on Brazilian rubber. So, with signature hubris, Ford decided he would produce his own rubber and set about colonizing the Amazon, ultimately investing millions and founding an entire city around his rubber plantation. The name of the city was Fordlandia.

Surrounding this historical curiosity is a rich, captivating tales that explores the fundamental struggle between man and the natural world. Eduardo Sguiglia's exquisitely imagined Fordlandia is a town of characters by turns engaging and enigmatic, who draw the reader into their various worlds so effortlessly and ingenuously that their dreams, discoveries, and downfalls begin to seem as immediate and piercing as one's won.

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Eduardo Sguiglia (Rosario, 1952) vivió entre 1976 y 1982 exiliado en México, y en la actualidad reside en Buenos Aires. Ha ejercido la docencia universitaria, el periodismo y la función pública. Hasta la fecha ha publicado seis ensayos sobre la sociedad argentina y tres novelas. Fordlandia fue elegida como una de las mejores cuatro obras del año 2000 por The Washington Post y también resultó finalista del Dublin Literary Award.

Reviews

[Bruce · Rating 1 out of 5]

This double review is a tale of two forms. Eduardo Sguiglia's fiction Fordlandia proves among other things to be a study of the pitfalls of first-person narrative. Ostensibly a heart-of-darkness rewrite set in the Amazon -- damaged protagonist travels up-river on an unknown mission to correct the dysfunction that corrupts a jungle enterprise, only to surface his own demons -- the book has an annoying structural flaw. It oscillates between first-person-subjective and third-person-omniscient narrative, toggling plot chapters with the protagonist in Brazil against expositional scenes starring Henry Ford in Michigan. If the point is to instill reader sympathy with a potentially unreliable narrator, the conceit is undercut every other chapter. In any case, the experiment is wholly unnecessary. There are better ways of addressing first-person POV constraints. For example, the memoir form permits superior knowledge by allowing the protagonist to reflect with experience and research on events as they are related, while still allowing the potential for subjective coloration.

The author compounds these storytelling sins by failing to achieve historical accuracy in his choices of setting and characters. With the exception of Henry Ford (whom he even arranges to have visit the plantation, something which apparently never happened), Sguiglia's central figures are wholly fictitious. There was no Rowwe in charge, no Argentine responsible for workforce recruitment and retention, and after the demolition of a neighboring shantytown along with its brothels and bars, no women except spouses brought to Fordlandia to serve as domesticating influences. The best that can be said of the fictional Fordlandia is that it offers a glimpse of plantation life, but even this description of neatly ordered clapboard bunkhouses on a bermuda grass plain may be wrong. If so, then this book which lacks in sufficient style or literary verve to otherwise justify it is an utter waste of time.

Not so Greg Grandin's nonfictional study Fordlandia, which deconstructs the origins, history, setting, and principals of Ford's Amazonian experiment alongside that of his industrial Michigan home, all the while painting a telling portrait of an industrial lion in winter. On the shores of Muscle Shoals as much as those of Belterra, we encounter a utopian beating against the limits of his antiquated understanding of this world. Here I was surprised to learn that Ford imagined and promoted a Tennessee Valley Authority a decade or so before its invention as an early piece of New Deal infrastructure. Of course, Ford had wanted the TVA to be a "self-sustaining" Ford-built and run concession, one whose industrial elements would subsidize farmers on a seasonal basis when not tilling their fields. That vision of rural-industrial interdependence proved delusional, and in any case irrelevant as the Senate had the foresight and sense to keep the project under public auspices. Still, Grandin makes the case that Ford's plans to place colonies along the banks of the Tapajos River were a direct outgrowth of his failed attempts on the Tennessee.

Grandin glosses over Ford's early years to better dwell on the scion during the crucial gestation period and lurching life of the plantation. There is a there there, though, one nicely grounded in reality. By contrast, Sguiglia chooses to leave his narrator's troubles shrouded in a vague past. As such, Sguiglia's Argentine Horacio is something of a cipher, a chain smoking, hard drinking, laconic tough guy of the type played by a young Sean Connery or middle aged Humphrey Bogart. Sguiglia's unwillingness to commit to the limited knowledge that adopting the narrator's exclusive point-of-view typically requires leads to some jarring moments [emphasis added]:

On the way back I bumped into Jack…. Jack could be seen around the plantation at all hours of the day, with men armed with shovels, machetes, and hoes, giving orders to clear a path and measuring the terrain with his footsteps…. I never found out if the reason for his zeal was because on the plantation he did not have to deal with the authorities or put up with the opinions of Rowwe or anyone else, or if it was because working the land brought back fond memories of the beautiful lands in Michigan, where he spent his childhood, the only truly happy time of his life. -- p. 36

There are occasionally other awkward passages, as well:

When I got home I stretched out on the bed and reread the report on the people of the Amazon from the beginning to end…. The report went off into the description of the different feats that a young Indian named Tero had to accomplish in order to be recognized as the new warlord of the Munduruku tribe. I had the impression that a woman had written it. -- pp. 36-7

This struck me as a confusing statement. What does that mean? How would one write a sociology report in a gendered way? ("The natives row rough-hewn canoes carved from their makers' stubble and sweat." "Scents of vanilla and clematis suffuse the villages, light thatch dispersing the mist that floats in with the dawn.") I made these up. Do either seem particularly masculine or feminine?

I dunno… in retrospect, I think the observation was just Sguiglia's clumsy, probably misogynist way of foreshadowing his femme fatale. Thus introduced, the sociologist is immediately reduced to an object, subjected first to voyeurism before being relegated to service as a discardable trophy. Does her femaleness matter? She is made to be sympathetic to the indigeneous population, but rather than serving as their champion she is rendered to be their nurturer, an Occidental uberMom. I'm surprised Sguiglia didn't simply make her a sexy nurse.

Although Grandin draws an impressive psychoanalytical portrait of Henry Ford's latter years, exploring the psyche that drove his antisemitism, failures as father and patriarch, and obsession with creating in reality the imagined mid-nineteenth century New England towns Walt Disney would later realize for middle class American fantasies, far more meaningful and in-depth are the author's explorations of Fordlandia as a parable of emerging imperial capitalism. Prevailing economic thought had been that cities declined as industries failed, not as they became more competitive and powerful. However, Grandin cites an economist who studied Detroit and other declining industrial urban centers to argue that urban decline was exacerbated, if not caused, by industrial consolidation -- by emerging oligopolies' (including Ford's) failure to account for the impact of their workforce needs on the surrounding region.

Ford was happy to pay an advanced (for the time) wage and onboard a large and diverse population, but he initially neglected to ensure that all these people had homes and communities capable of supporting them. Although factories could easily be relocated to the cheaper land of the suburbs, workers could not as easily be uprooted in the absence of existing infrastructure (schools; integrated, affordable housing; groceries, stores, and services). This created perverse results: wasting the earnings, time, and energies of the working class in dealing with overcrowding in a slumlike environment with little alternatives for renegotiation or escape. The overarching lesson from the fallout that followed Ford's establishment of the enormous River Rouge plant in Dearborn, MI should have been that poverty cannot be solved piecemeal, but by consideration of the entire ecosystem: where and how people live and work and what supports their earnings, expenditures, and life cycle. Leaving any component of this out risks knocking the system out of equilibrium.

Ford's consistently undermined son Edsel certainly understood the corollary, that "smart growth" requires urban planning that facilitates expansion and contraction with minimal disruption. In effect, this is what the Ford Motor Company sought to do in its burgeoning Amazonian rubber plantation.

[O]n the Tapajos, the Ford Motor Company recognized that it couldn't escape the responsibility for supplying decent living quarters, and [overseer Archibald] Johnston… was determined to get it right. He demolished the "disreputable straw village" where workers with families had crowded, replacing it with over a hundred new palm-roofed adobe houses equipped with water and electricity and laid out in "good lines, straight and true." He cleaned up the riverfront and graded, paved, and named the streets that ran through what was finally beginning to look like a midwestern town, with sidewalks, streetlamps, and red fire hydrants…. [B]y the end of 1933 there were over two hundred "modern houses" for laborers and foremen.

Yet while the Fords may conceivably have had the right concept, they were utterly defeated by presumptuous execution. Johnston's modern houses unfortunately were designed, built, and installed by Michigan engineers, not rainforest architects. The result, as variously quoted by Grandin, was that "[w]orker's houses were hotter than the gates of hell," "galvanized iron bake ovens," or "midget hells[capes], where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night."

Designed in Michigan, [Fordlandia's] houses proved to be totally inappropriate for the Amazon climate. Brazilians objected to the window screens that Ford officials insisted be used, believing that they served not to keep bugs out but to trap them in, "much as an old fly-trap collects flies." Amazon dwellers also preferred dirt floors, which were cooler than wood or concrete ones…. Metal roofs lined with asbestos, chosen by Ford engineers to repel the sun's rays, in fact kept heat in. The "workers' houses were hotter than the gates of hell," recalled a priest who ministered in Fordlandia, "because some faraway engineer decided that a metal roof was better than something more traditional like thatch." (pages 273-4)

Attempts to implant midwestern culture in the Amazonian environment were equally misguided. Ford attempted to overwrite long-evolved patterns of behavior wholesale to patterns he imagined had served him and his company well elsewhere without bothering to understand or prepare for those he meant to replace. Ironically, he ended up every bit as wrong in Michigan as he was in Brazil.

In a sense, this is the historical nuance that Sguiglia fails to communicate. Here it's worth quoting Grandin at length:

Hubris seems the obvious moral attached to Fordlandia, especially considering not just the disaster of its early years but also, even once order was established and the city was more or less functional, rubber's refusal to submit to Ford-style regimentation. Yet… the town doesn't so much invoke the plague of deforestation… [i]t rather brings to mind a different kind of loss: deindustrialization. There is in fact an uncanny resemblance between Fordlandia's rusting water tower, broken-glassed sawmill, and empty power plant and the husks of the same structures in Iron Mountain, a depressed industrial city in Michigan's Upper Peninsula that also used to be a Ford town. (page 12)

...In 1927, for instance, an article in London's New Statesman identified Americanism/Fordism as an industrial system in which the pace of the factory determined productivity (as opposed to pace being set by a wage system that rewarded output).... But the article also acknowledged that high wages, in addition to serving as an inducement to remain on the line, actually created large markets [by inventing a middle class capable of buying the consumer goods they helped produce], which allowed industrialists to increase their takings even as profit margins were reduced….[Tragically,] as an industrial method… Fordism had embedded within it the seeds of its own undoing. The breaking down of the assembly process into smaller and smaller tasks, combined with rapid advances in transportation and communication, made it easier for manufacturers to break out of the dependent relationship established by Ford between high wages and large markets [and therefore the codependent relationship Ford established between manufacturer and factory worker]. Goods [and parts] could be made in one place and [assembled] and sold somewhere else, removing the incentive employers had to pay workers enough to buy the products they made…. Already by the 1920s the component elements of the economy that in Ford's mind operated as a symbiotic whole -- land, labor, resources, manufacturing, finance, and consumption -- were drifting apart. (pages 75-6)

...It would be tempting to read the story of Fordlandia… as a parable of arrogance, just one in a long line of failed bids to press man's will on the storied Amazon. But the parable is not quite right…. Fordlandia is indeed a parable of arrogance. The arrogance, though, is not that Henry Ford thought he could tame the Amazon but that he believed that the forces of capitalism, once released, could still be contained. Cities like Manaus, based on the assembly of corporate brand-name products, are the true heirs of Ford's legacy. Their economies are made possible by a process if not started than at least perfected by Ford's factory lines, that is, by the breaking up of industrial production into a series of reducible, routinized, and reproducible parts. Ford, of course, imagined his industrial method as leading to greater social cohesion…. Today,... Harley-Davidson… does not make motorcycles from start to finish in Manaus but rather assembles bikes from parts manufactured elsewhere, which it then sells to the Brazilian market…. [T]here is no relationship between the wages Harley-Davidson pays to make its products and the profits it receives from selling them. Instead of Ford's virtuous circuit of high wages and decent benefits generating expanding markets, a vicious one now rules: profits are derived… from driving prices as low as they can go; this in turn renders good pay and humane benefits… impossible to maintain, since the best, and times the only, place to cut production costs is labor. (pages 355-7)

With a global workforce available to manufacture and assemble disparate components, high competition for cheap labor to bring cheap goods to market depresses wages without hurting sales. In this way, corporations are driven to exploit the working poor, reaping profits by continuously churning out an assembly line of chatchkes for the materially wealthy to consume and as quickly replace. This was not remotely Henry Ford's vision. Rather, it represents the inevitable output of the industrial system he helped establish unchecked by the regulatory guidance he consistently (if self-interestedly) fought. "In the lower Amazon, then, along about a three-hundred-mile axis, runs the history of modern capitalism. On one end is Fordlandia, a monument to the [pastoralist, sustainable] promise that was early-twentieth-century industrialization…. On the other is Manaus, a city plagued by the kind of urban problems Ford thought he could transcend but whose very existence owes much to the system he pioneered. Trying to reproduce America in the Amazon has yielded to outsourcing America to the Amazon." (page 360)

So Sguiglia's fictional account is inartful and wrong. The story of Fordlandia is neither a Heart of Darkness-style tragedy about human savagery run amok in the wilderness, nor a Jon Krakauer-style cautionary tale about the dangers of underestimating nature's power. To the contrary, the hubris there resides in culture clashes arising from wrongheaded change management and imposition of industrial technology that in the post-World War II period have inexorably, wastefully ground the mighty Amazon rainforest to sawdust. In the real world, Fordlandia represents just the tip of a global corporate juggernaut that today continues to bore through the Earth's green heart in ways Henry Ford would contradictorily have hated and disavowed, and yet in rapacious enjoyment, embraced.

[Lilian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic novel. Highly recommended.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book put me immediately in mind of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1899). The parallels are many. In both, the city stands for civilisation and the jungle stands for primitive savagery. In both, issues of racism are patent. In both, commercialism contends with cultural tradition. In both, a river demonstrates the control of Nature over the plans of men, capitalism exploits the poor, religion is distinguished from morality. It is unsurprising that this novel, set in the 1920s and 30s, touches upon issues of economic justice. The author, Eduardo Sguiglia, is an academic economist and taught economics at the University of Buenos Aires in his native Argentina. The text was written in Spanish and is adequately translated. The story is based on history. Henry Ford planted a prefabricated community for 10,000 persons on the banks of the Rio Tapajós near the city of Santarém, Brazil, in 1928. The endeavour was intended to foil the British global monopoly on cultivated rubber. It failed and Fordlandia was abandoned in 1938. I did not know, until after I read this book, that Aldous Huxley drew on the actual Fordlandia to create the London in his "Brave New World" (1932). I can't remember why I bought this book many years ago but now I'm glad I read it.

[Andee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting fictional book based on facts as to what actually occurred at the Ford plant in the Amazon jungle.

Henry Ford was in many ways a very wicked man, and this project was certainly among his most evil of ambitions. Thank god Mother Nature intervened and kicked his ass out, along with the fact that he was hornswaggled into buying worthless land on which rubber trees could never successfully be farmed.

[vida b · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an interesting premise and setting--and I could tell the author had a passion for the topic. Unfortunately, the plot never really went anywhere. The author set up some interesting scenarios, but they never resolved in any way, or at least in any way with emotional depth. There were a few scenes toward the end that were poignant, but that almost felt unearned because of how devoid of emotion most of the book was! It's a fine read if you choose to read it, but could be better.

[Michael Marsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Booklist wrote: "As sharp and slashing as a machete, Sguiglia's seductively unnerving tale of imperialism, megalomania, and capitalist folly versus the great mystery of nature and the wisdom of indigenous cultures is Conradian in its perceptions, and, by implication, incisive in its indictment of the ravaged state of the Amazon" Highly recommended

[Andres Varela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante para enterarse del proyecto "Fordlandia" (1928) aunque la novela deja que desear. Su protagonista, el argentino Horacio, no termina de convencer con sus historias en el corazón del Amazonas y mucho menos con su historia del corazón. Vale la pena por asomarse al proyecto de Ford pero creo que será mejor para esto leer a Greg Grandin y esperar la serie de TV a cargo de Herzog.

[JamesD · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading excellent reviews of this novel years ago in the NYT, The Post (which chose it as one of the best of the year), Kirkus, and many others, I decided to read it. Many thanks to all the critics. I found it truly good, interesting, and highly recommend it.

[Jutta Margarete · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book and history. And very well written.

[Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent novel. Very interesting history, well written and evocative. It could be a classic.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. Highly recommended

[Gary Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fords are overrated.

[Book Soup · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear picture of man's hubris. Henry Ford takes on the Amazon and loses.

--Kate

[Christian Layow · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is just one in a series of titles I'm reading for a screenplay idear. We'll see.

[Howard]

This is a historical novel based on Henry Ford's ill-fated attempt to set up rubber plantations in the Amazon. It's interesting but marred by a bad translation, I think.

[Sally Fouhse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't finish this one. Just couldn't get hooked into it, although the story is absolutely fascinating.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

kinda interesting