A couple years ago when I was in Brazil, I visited the city of Manaus – a city surrounded by the Amazon rainforest.  Due to its advantageous location, Manaus was highly involved in the business of extracting and exporting rubber from the Amazon’s abundant rubber trees during the age of exportation.  The wealth acquired by the area in that era is bluntly evident in the form of a grandiose opera house, one of the city’s main attractions.  While the opera house is a beautiful building with elegant pillars and staircases, red velvet seats, ceilings adorned with painted frescoes, expensively furnished rooms, and a mosaic-tiled dome, many residents of Manaus despise the building and what it stands for.  Built by the wealthy barons who prospered during the controversial rubber boom, locals believe that the opera house was constructed using blood money.  This is not an unfounded claim, for the rubber boom saw much violence as foreign traders and investors unfairly treated local people and forced them to harvest rubber in brutal conditions.  Furthermore, these foreigners disrespected land claims and the natural environment, as well as the local people’s normal way of life, completely disrupting their community.  The rubber business only profited the few who owned and monopolized it, thus some elites became very wealthy at the expense of the local majority.  This unfortunate trend of violence and inequality is sadly consistent with Dawson’s descriptions of the impacts of the exportation era in Latin America.

On an entirely different note, Dawson mentions that the governments of many countries in Latin America adopted positivism during the export era, thus authoritatively controlled their nations without input from their citizens because they assumed that the citizens would not even understand their own interests.  This way of thinking makes it easy for the government to gain and possibly abuse absolute power since the citizens are so docile and disinterested/not involved in politics.  Of course, there would have been some who stood up to the government; however it seems that the people truly did think the government was acting in their best interests because no major rebellions or insurgencies occurred (that I know of from Dawson’s text).  It is unfortunate that such a dystopian form of government is evident in so many parts of history around the world, not just during this time period in Latin America.

Finally, I find it interesting that business owners found it advantageous to ‘protect the virtue’ of their female employees in order to reduce the risk of unions and revolts against the employer.  Despite gendered wage differences, this is still a considerable amount of fair treatment being offered to women in a time when this would have been unheard of elsewhere.  It is fascinating that the employers (likely all men at the time) had the foresight to treat women so well, and I wonder if this is due to a cultural belief or tradition that the men of Latin America may have respected, or if the women were involved in making this fairer treatment happen.