Emphasis and Erasure: Laundering Extractive Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon

In 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana Bertran Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. In his portraits of the North American administrative class, streamlined white suits generated a visible hierarchy of race and rank that positioned their wearers above labour and beyond disease, ensuring that they remained ‘literally but also figuratively enlightened’ (Dyer 1997, p. 101). The absence of dirt and disorder in dress amounted to a considerable presence: of cleanliness and whiteness, order and rationality, speed and progress on the railroad.

Merrill’s camera smoothed over the lived and material realities of white tropical suits, which were easily soiled, difficult to maintain, and required frequent laundering by the Caribbean women who laboured in the Steam Laundry on site. In foregrounding their hidden labour of washing, ironing and starching, this paper responds to anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s call to pay attention to ‘the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture’ (2009, p. 53), but also considers the metaphorical sense of laundering with reference to Merrill’s photographs and the written accounts that North American wearers left behind. Merrill laundered the muddy truth behind US extractive capitalism: the monumental loss of human life, environmental devastation, and expropriation of Indigenous land and livelihoods.