The long history of miners and mining culture in the Brazilian Amazon and the Guianas finds expression in local art works. Along the highway BR-163 in the Brazilian Amazon, it is impossible to miss the giant statues of garimpeiros at the entrance of villages. They are a tribute local people pay to the small-scale gold miners who are seen as significant pioneers of the Amazon. They act as a landmark claiming the identity of miners as explorers and developers, and champion gold mining for sustaining the local economy. The statues symbolize gold miners’ presence in the villages and their political position on land rights and the use of natural resources. This encounter of past, present, of old, and modern is also visible in local street art. The graffiti “Itaituba o Eldorado Encantado” (Itaituba, the enchanted Eldorado) shows the interpretation of mining culture by the younger generation in a romanticized image that hardly matches with contemporary mechanized mining. Such street art shows a romanticized image of the garimpeiro that hardly matches with the complex activity performed nowadays. In French Guiana public walls are also used for opposition to gold mining.
Personal adornment also expresses how gold mining is central to past and present personal lives. The large tattoo of a bulldozer on the arm of a garimpeiro reveals how working as a machine operator is the achievement of a life. Miners often wear golden rings, necklaces, bracelets, and watches. These jewels have an intrinsic connection with the outcome of their work, being symbols of success, of a miner’s wealth. They embody the dream of all people who have come looking for prosperity.
1/2 Statue of a garimpeiro at the entrance of Peixoto de Azevedo
These statues are common in every city along the highway BR-163. They act as landmarks that garimpeiros use to reinforce their pride as protagonists in their regional history, and as a political statement to defend their profession.
2/2 A garimpeiro
A statue on the streets of Novo Progresso.
1/3 Graffiti in the streets of Itaituba
Like statues, street art portrays the garimpeiro as a romanticized symbolic figure: a man with his gold pan. It appeals to an identity connected to history, and not necessarily to the activity performed nowadays.
2/3 Mining imaginaries
Paintings on a wall in Itaituba, conjure up popular stereotypes about gold miners and indigenous peoples. The image of an artisanal gold miner, on the right, is close to the image of a native American (not Brazilian indigenous) with an axe and a toucan, on the left.
3/3 The gold of Guyane is green
In front of one of the commercial hubs to illegal mining in the French Amazon Parc this mural reminds us that gold is not the only natural resource that is valuable. The real treasure is the green forest.
Showing a tattoo
Being an excavator driver is so important to this machine operator’s life that he wanted to mark the love and pride for his job on his own skin. In this way, he expresses his position as an “honest worker” against a general stereotype of garimpeiros as “bandits”.
1/2 The goldsmith
A small shop of a local goldsmith in Creporizão, a remote village located at the end of the Transgarimpeira road in the state of Pará.
2/2 I am not a garimpeiro, I make jewellery
A goldsmith manually crafting a ring. Next to jobs in the mines, gold offers many other income opportunities.
1/2 Garimpeiro showing his gold necklace
The use of gold jewellery is very common among garimpeiros as a symbol of wealth and success. These jewels show that the expectations of so many people who came to these regions looking for richness finally became true.
2/2 Personal adornment
Jewels made of gold nuggets are valuable, also when the gold nuggets have impurities such as flaws or small stones embedded, because they come directly from the mine.