The end of Grão-Pará and the institutionalization of the Amazonian region: the role of liberals from Pará in changing the regional status in the nineteenth century

Abstract

Regions are not given or ready to be just unveiled. Regions are also the result of social processes manifested in practices and discourses. In nineteenth-century Brazil, the geographical and political vocabulary gave significant prominence to the administrative unit called the province, leaving the idea of region out of the political debate. However, the Brazilian regions had their emergency movements in the second half of the 19th century. In this sense, this article aims to analyze the institutionalization of the Amazon region through the speeches of Amazonian political representatives in the Brazilian Parliament. It is understood that these discourses developed a political regionalism in this area, in the sense of contributing to the aforementioned institutionalization process, that is, in the institutional set-up of ways to delimit, name, and signify the region. Amazon Valley and the Amazon region were nomenclatures that represented the regional reconfiguration of the former province of Grão-Pará, as with the creation of the province of Amazonas, in 1852, northern representatives forged a new regional entity, this time provisionally called Vale do Amazonas and consolidated with the name of Amazon.