University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: February 15, 2007

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

As a former foreign correspondent who wrote about the experience of the "man on the street" after Brazil's emergence in the mid-1980s from 20 years of military dictatorship, Hal Langfur isn't the sort of person who's ever been satisfied with the "official line."

History faculty member Hal Langfur says engagement with present-day Brazilian society as a journalist has given him "a certain sensitivity for the complexities of past societies."
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

Now a scholar of colonial Brazil—a period in which confusion echoes the tumultuous political times he once chronicled first-hand—Langfur is no less committed to the impulse to dig deeper that motivated him as a journalist.

"I really am a historian committed to understanding how the world functions from the ground up," says Langfur, an assistant professor in the Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences. "Simply reading published imprints from the era can't possibly answer the kinds of questions that I'm seeking to answer."

The recipient of a bachelor's degree in the history of science from Harvard University in 1982, Langfur's first job was as a reporter at a small newspaper in Western Massachusetts. Soon after his marriage, however, he and his wife, Kerry Reynolds, set off south of the border.

"I had read a fair amount of not only Brazilian but Latin American fiction, and was enamored by the voices emerging from these novels," says Langfur, whose wife, he notes, shares a passion for Latin American literature and culture. "We went with the idea that we would make this into a very long honeymoon if we could manage to do so."

The newlyweds spent a month studying intensive Spanish in Quito, Ecuador, and then traveled overland across South America via bus and train. Langfur notes that his first exposure to Brazil came not from the massive coastal cities of São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, but from a tiny town on the western border with Bolivia. His experience in the vast interior of the country left a lasting impression—as a historian he now studies the colonial politics and culture of this frequently overlooked region.

"Deep engagement with present-day Brazilian society and culture, I think, has given me a certain sensitivity for the complexities of past societies as well," notes Langfur, who sharpened his skills in Portuguese and soon found work in the active political climate as a freelance correspondent for such news outlets as UPI and The Chicago Tribune. About the same time, Kerry found a position as a teacher near their adopted hometown of Rio de Janeiro, while Langfur reported from places throughout the country.

About two years after their voyage began, the couple returned to the U.S. and taught for six years at a private secondary boarding school in Langfur's home state of Colorado. He then enrolled in the University of Texas-Austin and earned master's and doctoral degrees in 1995 and 1999, respectively.

He returned to the U.S., Langfur says, partly due to his frustration that American news outlets relied too often on government sources for information, rather than regular citizens.

"I tried to do a different sort of journalism," he says. "A real distrust for the way history is portrayed through the lens of those who have the political and economic power carried over into my practice of history."

This perspective informs Langfur's first book, "The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence and the Persistence of Brazil's Eastern Indians, 1750-1830" (Stanford University Press, 2006), which explores the conflict-ridden and interlocked histories of the Portuguese settlers, Afro-Brazilian slaves and freedmen, and semi-nomadic indigenous peoples who populated the inland forests of southeastern Brazil. It also exposes myths from the era that no events of historical importance took place in the region.

Although settlement of the interior is a fact, standard sources reflected the view of the Portuguese crown, which forbade entrance to the region out of fear of smuggling and infiltration by other nations that sought its valuable minerals, explains Langfur, noting that current scholarship also has ignored the area in favor of three colonial political and economic hot spots: Rio de Janeiro in the southeast, Bahia in the northwest and Vila Rica, the capital of the gold and diamond district.

"I found that to be a very Eurocentric view of inland Brazil," he says. "I didn't think you needed Europeans engaged in the extraction of profitable resources to have an important historical dynamic."

The initial "great find" that launched the entire project, adds Langfur—who traveled to archives across Brazil and Portugal to recover lost information—was an enormous miscataloged collection of bound manuscript pages known as a "codex" that he unearthed in the Brazilian National Library in Rio de Janeiro.

"It takes a great deal of effort and sleuth work and flexible thinking to locate documents," he says, pointing out that the codex acted as a guide to other important papers, thanks to the names of forgotten people and places it contained.

In 2005, Langfur was granted tenure after working for six years as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, but left for the chance to work with others interested in the circulation of peoples, goods and ideas throughout the four continents of Africa, Europe and the Americas. UB's rare "Atlantic World" doctoral field is "one of the reasons I made the move to this department at this stage of my career," says Langfur, who officially joined the UB faculty in August 2005, but spent his first year researching and teaching as a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei in Brazil.

As someone who has split his time between the North and South American continents, it's fitting that Langfur, who resides in Eggertsville with his wife; son, Bridger, 17; and daughter, Devon, 14, finds himself today in the midst of a new sort of latitudinal divide: He has begun downhill skiing with his family here in Western New York and says, "The cold is easier to take knowing that a return to Brazil is always in the offing."