Even today the voyages undertaken to the Amazon before the twentieth century and the accounts that the region inspired invite complex discussions about the prospects, impasses, and meanings unique to the construction of civilization in the tropics. Written by both foreign and Brazilian scientists and intellectuals, the records of these travels helped shape persuasive representations that served as points of departure for broader discussions about Brazilian society. These voyages became the setting for an exchange of ideas, interpretations, and impressions about nature, culture, local populations, and the relations between that region of Brazil and the entire nation, and even between Brazil and the rest of the world. And, as such, these travels and their corresponding accounts were of crucial importance to the nation during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

One emblematic case was the Brazilian Commission for the Survey of the Alto Purús [Comissão Brasileira de Reconhecimiento do Alto Purús], led by Euclides da Cunha, and the texts subsequently written by the author about the Amazon, which truly established a representational paradigm. Other accounts were also important during the first two decades of the century, but all of them, directly or indirectly, take into account Cunha's travelogues and texts about the region. Having these important antecedents in mind, and going back to them occasionally, the present essay explores Mário de Andrade's travelogues and literary pieces on the Amazon as they relate to other contemporary foundational texts on Amazonian social thought, namely, the texts that result from Carlos Chagas's incursion as a tropical scientist in this region from 1912 to 1913.

From October 1912 to April 1913, a team sent by the Oswaldo Cruz Institute [Instituto Oswaldo Cruz] and led by Carlos Chagas (1878–1934) surveyed the sanitary conditions of Brazil's main rubber production centers, acting in response to a request from the Rubber Protection Agency. The descriptions and analysis found in the team's report on the voyage draw an image of the Amazon region that was marked by a tension over the category ‘tropical pathology’ and by arguments defending the role that hygiene should play in making the Amazon an integral part of Brazil's civilizing project.3 In the 1920s, modernista authors in Brazil engaged in a debate with these accounts and interpretations.