Abstract
Welcome to Soylandia is a book about immigrants in Brazil who moved away from their home countries in search of better opportunities through the exploration of natural resources. Like many other governments in the Global South, Brazil invests substantially in extractivism as a means of development and the commonly associated potential for social and economic benefits.
Based largely on ethnographic research, the book invites us to get to know what is going on in Luís Eduardo Magalhães. With agronomists and farm owners migrating from other parts of Brazil, the United States, and Europe to Western Bahia, Soylandia is born, appearing as a place constructed by and for agribusiness, with a capital and science dominance over people, plants, and place.
Soylandia is defined as both a territory and an imagined future, framed at times as a utopian dream, and at others as a dystopian nightmare. The book revolves around the trajectories and possibilities of industrial farming, focusing on a movement of farmers from the US Midwest to Brazil.
Through six chapters, the author details the saga of US immigrant farmers who were not elite in their home country. However, by fleeing agricultural crises in the US, they became an elite in Brazil, with values rooted in ‘hypermasculinity, whiteness, and heteronormativity’ (p. 125).
The book starts by delving into the creation of Soylandia, an epithet that the author does not explain whether it is real or his invention. By using collective and personal narratives, he tries to explain the economic and social rationale for migration. Detailed pitches describe how investing in land and soy farming away from the US was a good deal, especially because one could ‘capitalize’ on ‘cheap’ land in Brazil. The book argues that these pitches embedded the promise of exporting the American farming model, but what was found was a way of farming that is not purely Brazilian, but rather a third possibility – a blend of bureaucratic work and supervision within the Brazilian way of farming.
It further explains why Luís Eduardo Magalhães was a particular destination for migrants and immigrants. The author elaborates on how engineers and agronomists had defined the area as a wasteland until the 1980s, when Brazilian government research led to a breakthrough: deriving soil management practices to coax production out of barren land and developing hybrid soybean seeds to adapt to the region's climate. At the same time, government support programs encouraged farmers from other Brazilian regions to migrate to Western Bahia. For US farmers, many had their first visit to the region on farm tours promoted by consultants and tour operators, where they witnessed how Brazilian farmers managed their fields, used technology, and applied other farming practices.
Chapter 3 has interesting takes on what it is like to work in Soylandia. ‘Work is alienated from the farmer by outsourcing the labor and by the bureaucratization of worker relations’ (p. 81). It describes how US farmers in Brazil spend most of their time managing – workers, paperwork, and investors – thus becoming ‘a manager of labor rather than a farmer’ (p. 97).
The following chapter describes the soil in the region and explores how culturally different Americans and Brazilians approach it. Chapter 5 discusses value and community in Soylandia. I particularly enjoyed the explanations on the social construction of farmwork and the American community in Luís Eduardo Magalhães. To the author, this community is centred on individuality and competition for land, investors, and investment capital. US farmers left their home communities and embarked on a privileged migration, marked by rural masculinity performances directed at the Brazilian business community, their workers, and US investors.
The book has three concluding parts: a chapter on the aftermath, telling the story of failed forays, the conclusion, and an appendix with methodological details.
The framing of US farmers in Soylandia as white, straight, privileged men competing over land and investors comes across as a curious finding – and, to some extent, mirrors agribusiness and its racially unbalanced power in Brazil (see Penna, 2022). When quoting interviews and talks, the author recurrently transcribes racist comments, such as ‘f* apes’ (p. 122) and ‘little brown f*’ (p. 138). These appear throughout the book in more subtle ways as well, such as when Brazilians are described as not knowing how to work ‘properly’. Yet little to no effort is made to contextualize the decision to include these remarks.
This absence, combined with the shallow mention of traditional communities and activism over land (i.e. MST), leaves gaps in the narrative. The book briefly acknowledges the presence of smallholder, indigenous, and quilombola communities, as well as the violent processes of land-grabbing and dispossession. However, these communities are not given the historical weight they deserve, despite being central to Brazil's land conflicts. Their centuries-long relationships with the land and their ongoing struggles against dispossession remain marginal in the story.
Together, these omissions raise important questions: How much does immigrant rural masculinity contribute to the perpetuation of racism, injustice, and violence in Brazil? And why were the perspectives of local communities and social movements not more fully included, given their centrality in debates about extractivism and agribusiness?
Overall, Welcome to Soylandia offers a compelling account of how migration, agribusiness, and extractivism intersect in Brazil. While it sheds light on the privileges and contradictions of US farmers abroad, it leaves important gaps regarding the struggles of local workers and traditional communities.
Still, the book succeeds in opening a valuable window into a little-known transnational farming frontier. It challenges us to think about how global agricultural crises are exported, how landscapes are reshaped by migration, and how identities are reproduced abroad. For readers interested in agribusiness, migration, and rural studies, it is a thought-provoking and timely work.
