Fashion and the Devil’s Railroad: Masculinity, Migration, and Modernities in the Brazilian Amazon

This chapter examines a set of glass plate negatives which document the global migrant workforce who built the Madeira-Mamoré railroad deep in the Amazon jungle between 1907 and 1912. Taken by New York fashion photographer, Dana B. Merrill, the click of the camera’s shutter marks a literal pause in the working day. Merrill’s intricate documentation of worn and weathered overalls and dungarees, cotton shirts, functional trousers, and utilitarian jackets are punctuated with occasional global accents, such as a Balkan waistcoat, which cast light upon the geographic networks of industrial modernity. Nicknamed the ‘Devil’s Railroad’, due to the vast numbers of workers who died from a catalogue of disaster and disease, the railroad was an American-Brazilian venture intended to expedite the global exportation of rubber and other tropical commodities from landlocked Bolivia.

The anonymous workforce elevated within these portraits had travelled to the Amazon from over 52 nations. They were exposed to all the elements, while responsible for the hard manual labour of culling the jungle, laying the tracks, building bridges and maintaining the right of way. Given the considerable dearth of everyday and working dress preserved in museum collections in the U.S. and Brazil, this chapter uses poetry, diary extracts and memoirs to breathe life into the visual. Personal accounts of life in frontier societies such as the Madeira-Mamoré railroad and Panama Canal facilitate our understanding of the embodied and experiential memories of wearing, working and caring for clothes, but also highlight how salient aspects of dress were for social distinction and masculine identity construction.