LAURA R.
GRAHAM
Quoting Mario Juruna:
Linguistic imagery and the transformation of indigenous
voice in the Brazilian print press
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I reveal the textual mechanisms that
influential news editors employed to manipulate
popular understandings of Mario Juruna, a Xavante
leader who played an important role in advancing
democracy during Brazil’s military dictatorship and
became the first Indian elected to national office. I
argue that editors used the implicit messages of
represented language to initiate shifts in the
public’s perception of the Xavante leader and
thereby to change its opinion of him. Juruna’s case
illustrates that linguistic resources are powerful
tools that hegemonic institutions, such as the press,
and other dominant parties may employ to advance
their own interests and influence public opinion on
matters of political and social import. [language
politics, linguistic discrimination, politics of
representation, textualizing practice, print media,
indigeneity, Brazil]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 164–183, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01299.x
University of Iowa
uring the 1970s, a central Brazilian Xavante leader named Mario
D
Juruna pioneered the strategic use of indigenous culture to at-
tract the attention of the mainstream Brazilian press and used
the celebrity and publicity he achieved to advance Xavante
claims to land. He also initiated the use of new media tech-
nologies within Brazilian indigenous struggles for rights. In 1982, he was
elected to Congress, becoming the first (and so far only) native Brazil-
ian to be elected to national office. Remarkably—although Juruna was an
eloquent orator when speaking his native Xavante (a central Brazilian Gê
language)—he had only elementary control over Portuguese, the language
of national political discourse. Juruna’s Portuguese speech, especially me-
dia representations of it, played a major role in public perceptions of the
Xavante leader and his political career.
At the same time that Juruna was creatively using new media technolo-
gies and the press to bring attention to the Xavante fight to recoup lands,
the press was using Juruna to advance the agenda of business elites to oust
the military government. When the Xavante leader debuted on the national
scene, boldly issuing public critiques in his dysfluent Indian Portuguese
of government officials who lied about the return of stolen Xavante lands,
the privately owned mainstream press (known in Brazil as the imprensa
grande) was subject to harsh censorship. Although its voice, like other op-
position voices, was muted out of fear of violent reprisal, including death
threats against newspaper staff (carried out in some cases, such as that
of journalist Vladimir Herzog, who was killed in October 1975), the main-
stream press used Juruna—particularly his defiant declarations against the
state—to signal to the general public the existence of civil dissent. Then,
when political circumstances changed and Juruna’s criticisms of the Brazil-
ian government ceased to advance elite interests, mainstream media spun
its influential representational weight 180 degrees to turn Juruna’s positive
image on its head. These two disparate media depictions invoke the oppos-
ing tropes of the colonial Noble Savage narrative. In one political context,

Juruna is a pure and primitive champion of noble political
virtues; in another, he is an insolent political barbarian who
must be muted or silenced and put in his place—removed
from the public spotlight and out of audible range.
In this article, I draw on the tools of linguistic anthro-
pology to show how print media manipulated depictions
of Juruna’s language and speech to mobilize these conflict-
ing narrative tropes and influence public perceptions of the
Xavante leader. Through critical analysis of the language
forms they used (see Fairclough 1989, 1995a, 1995b; van
Dijk 1991, 1993, 1999), I demonstrate how prominent news
editors dramatically transformed practices for representing
Juruna’s speech and language in print, as “textual artifacts”
(Silverstein and Urban 1996). My study is based on analy-
sis of textual representations of Juruna’s quoted speech and
debates about his language collected from over 300 arti-
cles in daily newspapers and weekly news magazines from
1973, when Juruna first appeared on the national scene dur-
ing the height of the military dictatorship, to 1983, when he
held office as a federal deputy. I reveal the specific linguis-
tic mechanisms that elite editors used to first valorize and
later stigmatize the Xavante leader and ultimately under-
mine both Juruna’s public image and what he stood for po-
litically. I show that, within a brief time frame, several lead-
ing and highly influential daily newspapers and major news
weeklies went from printing quotations of Juruna’s speech
in grammatically correct, even eloquent, Portuguese to de-
picting the Xavante leader as barely able to utter a compre-
hensible statement in that language.
I argue that once Juruna entered formal politics, politi-
cal rivals deployed attacks against his language and speech
and used print representations of them as primary means
for destroying his political career. Indigenous peoples are
particularly vulnerable to image manipulation because of
their extreme marginality and relative powerlessness (see,
e.g., Conklin and Graham 1995; Meek 2006); they are eas-
ily susceptible to reinscription into the deep grooves that
the Noble Savage narrative has etched in colonial imaginar-
ies (see Slater in press). Despite Juruna’s success in mas-
terfully engaging the mainstream press to advance Xavante
goals during the 1970s, he was not immune to such ma-
nipulation. While maintaining the neutral façade of news
reporting, print news media used the resources language
provides to construct a negative “linguistic image” (Irvine
and Gal 2000) of Juruna that proved damning to his pub-
lic career. This negative linguistic image corrupted pos-
itive public perceptions of the Xavante leader, corroded
his immense popularity, and laid the groundwork for his
eventual political undoing. The consequences of this press
campaign extended far beyond the Xavante leader’s politi-
cal career, for Juruna’s negative image ultimately adversely
affected other Xavante and—if election to national office
is used as a measure—indeed, all of Brazil’s indigenous
peoples.
Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist
Juruna’s case demonstrates ways that representa-
tions, or “recontextualizations” (Bauman and Briggs 1990;
Silverstein and Urban 1996), of language and speech in the
public sphere affect how, indeed if, the voices of indige-
nous leaders, and subaltern linguistic minorities generally,
are heard in national and international arenas. It also illus-
trates the almost impossible obstacles that indigenous ac-
tivists face when they gain access to formal political power.
More broadly, Juruna’s case serves as a reminder, espe-
cially to speakers of minority languages and nonstandard
varieties of dominant languages, that linguistic resources
are powerful tools that hegemonic institutions such as the
press may employ (despite editorial conventions that dic-
tate the consistent use of standardized language in print)
to advance dominant interests and influence public opin-
ion. Interested parties, whether allies or foes of those who
are quoted, can use the implicit messages of represented
language to initiate shifts in perception and even change
public opinion on matters of political and social import.
Textualizing practice in any document, including newspa-
pers and, increasingly, the Internet, inevitably carries the
ideological traces of those responsible for its production.
It may be wielded for or against politicians and other pub-
lic figures in a variety of contexts. Print quotations convey
much more than the propositional messages of speakers
whose utterances they quote. Quoting and printing are po-
litical acts that are saturated with power. In considering the
transformation that took place in editorial practice for re-
presenting Mario Juruna’s language and speech, or, indeed,
the printed representation of the speech of any public fig-
ure, it is helpful to review how and why this is so.
Quoting and printing
Quoting speech and printing it as written text are never
straightforward, ideologically neutral practices. Both in-
volve complex processes and entail relations of power
and authority. Quoted speech, as Mikhail M. Bakhtin
(1981, 1986) emphasizes, connects two discursive mo-
ments, bringing speech tokens from previous situations
into new social contexts or, in the case of written discourse,
texts. Quoting involves extracting or detaching a stretch of
words from one context and then fitting it into a new one,
processes that linguistic anthropologists call “decontextual-
ization,” “entextualization,” and “recontextualization” (see,
e.g., Bauman 2004; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Silverstein and
Urban 1996). When quoting—through processes of select-
ing, detaching, and then repositioning another’s words into
a novel context or text—the author of a new text exerts
considerable power over another’s speech (see, e.g., Lutz
1990). The ways a quoted utterance is recontextualized—
packaged to fit into new (con)texts—affects interpretations
of the original speaker or author as well as of the original
message and social situation or text.
165
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
Writing is also a form of recontextualization that trans-
forms utterances (both spoken and unspoken) into printed
texts. A written text is a product, the result of ideologically
laden processes of production (Fairclough 1989:24; see also
Haviland 1996; Urban 1996) that extend from the develop-
ment of orthographies through projects of grammar writ-
ing, standardization, and transcription to institutionaliza-
tion in schools, publishing houses, print news media, and
other venues that control and enforce linguistic standards.1
In print news media, one of several linguistically hegemonic
institutions that regiment publicly circulating language and
the language of public discourse (Bourdieu 1991; Cameron
1995; Williams 1983; see also van Dijk 1993, 1996), editors
routinely manipulate speech they quote—omitting “infe-
licities” such as “ums,” stuttering, and misspoken words
or phrases—and also regularly make decisions regarding
how to print ungrammatical utterances. Indirect quotation
and reported speech are conventions that editors can adopt
when quoting to keep nonstandard language out of news re-
porting (see Fenigsen 1999).
Journalistic cannons of objective reporting that dictate
converting ungrammatical utterances to standard forms os-
tensibly serve as means to avoid the transmission of un-
Figure 1. Map of Brazil and area of Xavante Territories, courtesy of Owners of the Water. See Graham et al. 2009.
166
ethical bias through linguistic representation (see Society
for Professional Journalists 2009). Correct or standardized
grammar makes language “transparent,” leading readers to
“look through” it (Urban 1991:1) while simultaneously per-
ceiving it as authoritative, thereby directing attention to a
text’s propositional message. Adhering to Western linguis-
tic ideologies that privilege language’s denotive function,
journalistic standards promote an illusion of linguistic ob-
jectivity. Ideologies of linguistic objectivity obfuscate ways
that editors can legitimize or stigmatize social actors whose
statements they quote in print (see Fenigsen 1999; see also
Hill 2008). Before turning to the Brazilian media and an ex-
amination of its representations of Mario Juruna’s language
and speech, I consider who Juruna was and the national
context in which he rose to prominence.
Mario Juruna (1942/3?–2002)
Mario Juruna, or Dzururã, as he was known in his native
language, was a Xavante leader from the São Marcos Indige-
nous Territory in Mato Grosso state (see Figures 1 and 2).2
Born in the early 1940s in an area known as Parabubure,
he lived Xavante’s traditional seminomadic trekking lifestyle

Figure 2. Area of Xavante Territories, courtesy of Owners of the Water.
See Graham et al. 2009.
until he was approximately sixteen or seventeen. In 1958, vi-
olent clashes with encroaching settlers and ranchers com-
pelled Juruna’s group to seek refuge at the Salesian mission
at São Marcos. While with the Salesians, Juruna was intro-
duced to life among the waradzu (non-Indians) and Por-
tuguese (Juruna et al. 1982:212–216; also Garfield 2004).
Between 1964 and 1969, Juruna traveled the central
Brazilian frontier, working as a ranch hand and boat pilot.
He visited numerous central Brazilian indigenous groups
and witnessed firsthand the state Indian agency’s corrup-
tion and complicity with powerful agroindustry that was
rapidly intruding into indigenous lands. These experiences,
as well as his witness to the Salesians’ exploitation of his
own people in São Marcos (see Juruna et al. 1982), laid the
foundation for Juruna’s development of a pan-indigenous
consciousness and his criticism of Brazil’s treatment of in-
digenous peoples.
During his travels, Juruna also practiced his second-
language skills. The ability to communicate in Portuguese
was rare among Xavante at that time, and Juruna’s lan-
guage skills set him apart from other contemporary lead-
ers. Juruna was an eloquent speaker of his native language.
Indeed, his skills as an articulate and adept orator figured
significantly in his status as a community leader, for Xa-
vante highly value leaders’ oratorical abilities (see Maybury-
Lewis 1967:145–146; see also Graham 1993, 1995). Juruna
was not, however, especially competent in Portuguese, the
language of national discourse. He spoke in basic, terse,
ungrammatical Portuguese. Nevertheless, he was generally
successful in getting his points across to Portuguese speak-
ers. His Portuguese language skills, along with his intrepid
Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist
and assertive manner, made him an effective interlocutor
in dealings with representatives of national society.3
In the early 1970s, less than ten years after all of the
disparate Xavante groups had been contacted and settled
near government posts or near missions or evangelical out-
posts,4 Juruna took Xavante struggles to regain their lands
to the nation’s capital, a move that was unprecedented in
Brazil’s indigenous politics. He transformed the offices of
the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and the Ministry
of the Interior into the Xavante’s new battlefront. Whereas
warriors had previously brandished war clubs, bows, and
arrows to defend their lands, in this new military theater
Juruna staged dramatic confrontations with high-level gov-
ernment officials and engaged in a fierce war of words. He
ingeniously used a cassette tape recorder as well as an as-
tute sense of the power of the Brazilian press to advance
his cause. Veja, a leading Brazilian weekly news magazine
equivalent to Time or Newsweek in the United States, pub-
lished Juruna’s account of his discovery of the tape recorder,
the technological device that became his signature weapon.
According to Veja, Juruna stated, “Every time I went to
Brası́lia [to negotiate with government officials], I never got
anything, only promises. One day in Cuiabá, I discovered a
tape recorder in a store and I realized that it could help me”
(1980a: 33).
Juruna used his Panasonic tape recorder to record
high-level officials making false promises to return Xavante
lands to the group’s control. Later, in front of the press
and surrounded by dozens of Xavante warriors who, deco-
rated with body paint and feather ornaments, arrived from
Xavante communities to sing and dance to support him,
Juruna staged spectacular follow-up confrontations (see
Figure 3). He played back his recordings and publicly ex-
posed high-level government officials as liars. News of these
dramatic spectacles and Juruna’s exposés splashed across
the headlines of major newspapers and catapulted Juruna
and his demands that government be made accountable for
its promises into the national spotlight (see Conklin and
Graham 1995; Graham 1995:46–47; Maybury-Lewis 1991;
Ramos 1998:105).
The national context
Brazil’s military regime
When Juruna emerged on the national scene in the mid-
1970s, the nation was in the grip of a repressive, authoritar-
ian military dictatorship (1964–85).5 Imprisonment, torture,
disappearances, censorship, and arbitrary decrees created
a pervasive national culture of fear and muted opposition
voices. The state governed by issuing “institutional acts”
that enabled military leaders to do as they pleased. During
the height of repression, many opposition leaders, includ-
ing socialist politician Leonel Brizola (a former governor of
167
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
Figure 3. Surrounded by Xavante warriors, Juruna plays his tape record-
ings of government officials’ false promises in front of the press. Photo
by Ricardo Chaves, reproduced with permission from Content xp, Content
from Brazil.
Rio Grande do Sul state, who later became Juruna’s chief po-
litical patron) and Luis Carlos Prestes (head of the Commu-
nist Party of Brazil), fled the country to live in exile.
Congress continued to function but was dominated
by the corrupt government National Renewal Alliance
(ARENA) party. It was twice suspended and had virtually
no power (see Skidmore 1988). The state manipulated elec-
tions through various means, from campaign financing to
outright fraud, and eliminated all political parties except
its own ARENA party. In 1979, to create the appearance of
democracy, it allowed the formation of a new party, the
Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB). Later that year, to
fracture the opposition that was uniting and consolidat-
ing in the MDB, the state permitted the creation of mul-
tiple political parties (see Skidmore 1989:22–23). Also in
1979, Congress approved an amnesty bill that stimulated
the return of political exiles, including socialists Brizola and
Prestes, with their political rights restored (see Skidmore
168
1989:21). Brizola quickly formed and led the socialist–leftist
Democratic Labor Party (PDT) with which Juruna later be-
came affiliated. These political events were part of a gradual
liberalization process, known as the abertura, or “opening,”
that slowly moved the nation toward democracy.
Mario Juruna became an important opposition voice
and a significant actor in the abertura process. His attacks
against FUNAI struck at the core of military leadership, for
FUNAI, as Alcida Ramos (1998:104) points out, was military.
It was run by army generals and coronels and administra-
tively located within the Ministry of the Interior, the govern-
ment body responsible for the development of the nation’s
resources and land. By denouncing FUNAI and the govern-
ment’s indigenous policies, Juruna condemned the entire
military regime.6
Indigenous policy
Within the military regime, control of indigenous peoples
and their lands was a high-priority matter of national secu-
rity. Even though indigenous peoples made up only a frac-
tion of the national population and lived in areas that most
Brazilians still considered the “hinterland” (see Maybury-
Lewis 2002),7 military officials sought to control them be-
cause many of their territories are rich in natural resources
and are situated adjacent to unprotected international bor-
ders. Military officials perceived relatively uninhabited in-
digenous areas as particularly vulnerable to foreign ap-
propriation and communist infiltration (see Davis 1977;
Garfield 2001:138; Hemming 2003; Maybury-Lewis 2002;
Ramos 1998).
The military put forth a number of proposals to gain
control of indigenous territories and strip indigenous peo-
ples of their constitutionally guaranteed legal protections,
especially their rights to land. One of these was the “Eman-
cipation Proclamation,” in which “emancipation” meant
liberating indigenous peoples from their inalienable lands
and opening them for sale (Ramos 1998:80, also 243–248).
A set of “Criteria for Indigenous Identity” was proposed,
the adoption of which would have allowed military offi-
cials to arbitrarily determine who counts as Indian and
who does not. And an administrative restructuring known
as estadualização would have transferred oversight of in-
digenous matters from the federal to the state level, mak-
ing indigenous peoples especially vulnerable to powerful
local stakeholders, such as ranchers and mining and timber
companies.8
Juruna denounced these proposals and became ac-
tive in the nation’s fledgling pan-indigenous movement.
He participated with other indigenous leaders in meet-
ings sponsored by NGOs that were organizing around in-
digenous advocacy (see Hemming 2003:323–351; Maybury-
Lewis 2002; Ramos 1988:331–332; Urban 1982). Juruna’s
first publicly documented oppositional statement dates to
 Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist

the early 1970s, when he took part in an Indianist Mis-

sionary Council (CIMI)–sponsored meeting in Merure, a
Bororo community located adjacent to the São Marcos mis-
sion where he lived.9 His declaration—presumably issued
in Portuguese, the lingua franca of the national indigenous
movement—illustrates the defiant attitude that earned him
renown: “[We must] unite to pressure the government in
Brası́lia even more . . . Because, if we don’t shout, the gov-
ernment won’t fix anything. We must shout in [the govern-
ment’s] face” (Juruna et al. 1982:189). As Juruna extended
his criticisms of the Brazilian state beyond the Xavante
cause, he developed broader critiques of government In-
dian policy, FUNAI, and the Ministry of the Interior. Ulti-
mately, his criticism targeted the entire system of Brazilian–
waradzu (non-Indian) government.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Juruna gained in-
ternational recognition as a leading indigenous spokesman
(see Conklin and Graham 1995; Maybury-Lewis 1991;
Ramos 1998). He received numerous invitations to travel
abroad to participate in meetings that laid the groundwork
for the emerging international movement for indigenous
rights (see Juruna et al. 1982:191–194).10 In 1980, the orga-
nizers of the Fourth Russell Tribunal, a nonbinding inter-
national forum in Rotterdam, invited him to serve (along
with such distinguished figures as Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez
and Eduardo Galeano) as a member of the jury in hear-
ings convened to consider crimes against Indians in the
Americas. Brazil’s military dictatorship—which was highly
sensitive to its image abroad and wary of international
criticism (see Conklin and Graham 1995; Hemming 2003;
Ramos 1998:104–114)—attempted to prevent Juruna’s par-
ticipation. It refused to issue Juruna a passport, citing his Figure 4. Juruna with his passport ready to travel to the Netherlands for
status under the Indian Statute as a minor, a “relatively inca- the Fourth Russell Tribunal on crimes against indigenous peoples of the
Americas. Photo by Fernando Pimentel, reproduced with permission from
pable” ward of the state (see Ramos 1998:94–98).11 Juruna’s
Content xp, Content from Brazil.
response, as quoted in the press, explained the denial dif-
ferently: “FUNAI is worried that I will speak the truth about
the Brazilian Indian situation in Holland” (Veja 1980b: 26).
Juruna fought back against the decision that impeded his vocal criticisms of FUNAI to bring attention to state at-
his travel and, assisted by an NGO, filed suit against the gov- tempts to silence internal critics. It gave particular atten-
ernment. He took his case to the Supreme Court, where jus- tion to the honor the tribunal’s jury bestowed on Juruna by
tices debated Juruna’s rights, the limits of wardship, and the electing him its president. Juruna, elated by media’s sup-
state’s responsibilities as guardian of indigenous minors. In- port for the indigenous cause, is quoted in Veja as stating,
fantilizing rhetorics of indigeneity surfaced in the discus- “The media is the Indian’s best friend” (1980a: 33). During
sions of the Supreme Court justices. In a sympathetic state- the height of the military dictatorship, media was, indeed, a
ment, Judge Washington Bolı́var de Brito said, “No Nation good friend to Juruna and the indigenous cause, for the es-
has the right to prevent its children from freely leaving or tablishment press used Juruna’s voice to articulate its con-
returning” (83 TFR at 258; see Ramos 1998:108; emphasis demnation of the military state.
added). The pressure from the Russell Tribunal organizers,
who, in the interim, had elected Juruna president of the
Juruna, media censorship, and the military state
jury, was decisive in the court’s ruling (Ramos 1998:107).
Juruna won the case, was issued a passport, and traveled to Mario Juruna launched his spectacular campaign to recoup
Holland. (See Figure 4.) Xavante land in the halls of government ministries when
The press followed Juruna’s legal case closely. It cele- state oppression was at its peak. At a time when censorship
brated the Xavante leader’s defiance and used his case and and fear of repression silenced other voices, Juruna stormed

169
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
into government offices, denounced high-level officials as
liars, and, with his tape recorder and dramatic Xavante
spectacle, deliberately exposed officials’ false promises in
front of the press. During the military dictatorship, the na-
tional security state controlled access to news and the pub-
lic circulation of information through direct and indirect
forms of press censorship. The state controlled radio and
TV broadcasting through licensing and franchising and, to
a lesser extent, through programming (Dassin 1982:149).
Even though the state denied and attempted to hide cen-
sorship, repressive information policy was created at the
military’s highest echelons, in the Ministry of Justice, and
was implemented by the Federal Police (see Smith 1997).
Censorship silenced opposition voices and prevented the
general population from becoming aware of government
critics.
From 1968 to 1978, the period when government in-
timidation of the press was most extreme, the state sub-
jected several print news sources, including the major
establishment daily newspaper O Estado de São Paulo
(OESP) (September 1972–January 1975) and the promi-
nent mainstream glossy news weekly Veja (1974–June 1976)
to harsh, bureaucratized prepublication censorship (Smith
1997:82).12 For other print news sources, both established
“major” (imprensa grande) and smaller venues (imprensa
alternativa), the threat of invasion and occupation by mili-
tary censors as well as the fear of audit and other means of
financial intimidation forced compliance, euphemistically
known as “auto-censorship.”
According to historian Joan Dassin (1982), state censor-
ship of the press in Brazil ultimately backfired. It unified
the journalistic profession against the military, mobilized
journalists’ resistance, and spurred the “normally concilia-
tory establishment press to protest” (Dassin 1982:174). By
forcing journalists as well as some major newspaper own-
ers, who were normally members of the conservative estab-
lishment elite, into adversary positions, the military trans-
formed them into “temporary champions of press freedom”
(Dassin 1982:176, emphasis added).
Editors developed innovative strategies to bring pub-
lic attention to state suppression. For example, when the
state subjected the prestigious and typically conservative
OESP to prepublication censorship, owner and editor Paulo
Mesquite placed lines of poetry, culinary recipes, or pic-
tures of flowers where lines had been cut or where cen-
sored major lead news stories would have been featured.
He also buried taboo content in unexpected places and ran
insinuating metaphors in headlines that discerning readers
would understand as critiques (see Alves 1985:164; Dassin
1982:173; Smith 1997). The imaginative strategies Brazil-
ian editors invented to subvert censorship were copied
throughout Latin American during other repressive military
regimes of the 1970s and 1980s (see Dassin 1984; see also
Smith 1997).
170
For newspaper editors who were looking for ways to
alert readers to the existence of oppositional points of view,
Mario Juruna’s speech and action provided sensational ma-
terial and another creative way for editors to subvert censor-
ship. Juruna was highly suitable for articulating dissent: As
an Indian, he was protected by his “innocence,” his civil sta-
tus as a “relatively incapable ward of the state.” His sensa-
tional behavior and statements were good for selling papers
(see Fonseca 2005, 2006), and editors could bet that cen-
sors’ prejudice against indigenous peoples would prevent
them from taking Juruna’s remarks seriously. Also, largely
because of the international attention it attracted, indige-
nous rights provided one of the few sites where intellectu-
als and social activists could openly advocate for civil rights
(see Hemming 2003; Maybury-Lewis 2002; Ramos 1998). In-
digenous advocacy became a focal issue around which mul-
tiple sectors of civil society coalesced: The normally conser-
vative establishment press found common ground with the
liberal Catholic Church (Skidmore 1989:11), the bar (Alves
1985), and liberal intellectuals in defense of indigenous
rights. Using Juruna’s voice, press editors were able to pub-
licly expose the existence of dissent without running afoul
of censors. Editors slipped reports of Juruna’s extraordinary
defiance into their papers and printed his denunciations,
effectively using his voice to engage in their own “everyday
acts of resistance” (Scott 1990) against state censors.
As a Xavante, rather than a member of another of
Brazil’s indigenous groups,13 Juruna was ideally suited to
signal opposition to the state. Xavante had been made fa-
mous for their fierce resistance to “pacification” in the 1940s
in a massive, state-sponsored media campaign that cham-
pioned state control of the “hinterland” and its inhabi-
tants as part of a patriotic agenda (see, especially, Garfield
2001). The 1940s media campaign romanticized Xavante as
the iconic heroic Brazilian native. This image of Xavante
as fierce, brave, and resistant warriors made the indexical
entailments of indigenous savagery especially salient for
Brazilians who read about Juruna’s defiant speech and ac-
tions in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Ventrilocating Juruna: The grammatical amplification
of Juruna’s voice
When quoting Juruna’s oppositional statements during the
height of the dictatorship, editors printed his statements in
fully grammatical Portuguese. They represented his speech
as “civilized,” effectively masking the potentially negative
connotations of indigenous savagery that may be transmit-
ted through linguistic form (see Meek 2006). Editorial prac-
tice focused attention to Juruna’s striking oppositional mes-
sages by keeping the “set” (Jakobson 1960) toward message
content rather than the ungrammatical forms of his ac-
tual speech and thus enhanced the likelihood that readers
would comprehend and respect the full force of his defiant

messages. Through these practices, editors advanced the
elite agenda of exposing opposition to the dictatorship. This
positive publicity also served Juruna’s ends, for it increased
public attention to the Xavante cause.14
Juruna’s voice first appeared in the establishment press
in 1973, in an article by Gonzaga Junior published in Jornal
do Brasil (JB) about the discovery of an arms stash near
Xavante areas that local ranchers planned to use against
the Indians (see Juruna et al. 1982:96). The article quotes
Juruna’s ironic comments about a related issue, a recently
signed presidential decree establishing the boundaries of
the Sangradouro (Xavante) Indigenous Territory. Juruna
stated, “Só existe no papel” [It (the Sangradouro reserve)
only exists on paper]. Juruna’s skeptical statement can be
read in two ways. On one hand, it articulates the perspec-
tive of members of an oral culture who question the utility
of a piece of paper in faraway Brası́lia when they are facing
potential confrontations with armed gunmen. On the other
hand, newspaper readers, members of an elite “White pub-
lic” (Hill 1999, 2008), could also read Juruna’s remark as an
attack on the credibility of the military state, which governs
by issuing arbitrary decrees and institutional acts on pieces
of paper in Brası́lia.
By printing Juruna’s remark in grammatically correct
Portuguese, editors of JB, a daily paper that was subject to
indirect restrictions but not to direct prepublication cen-
sorship, launched a subtle but pointed critique of the state.
Printing Juruna’s condemnatory words signaled the paper’s
opposition to the state in straightforward propositional lan-
guage, rather than through the usual metaphor and allu-
sion, tactics that OESP’s owner and editor, Paulo Mesquite,
had pioneered to elude censors’ vigilant eyes. Because JB
represented the critique as coming directly out of Juruna’s
mouth, the quotation functioned as a form of editorial
ventriloquism. If questioned, the editor could hide behind
Western personalist linguistic ideologies and notions of in-
tentionality that tightly link utterances to individual speak-
ers, in this case, the quoted words of a “naive” and “rela-
tively incapable” Indian, as well as to ideas of journalistic
objectivity.15 After all, Juruna issued the critique; JB simply
reported it.
From the early 1970s, when Juruna debuted in national
media, through 1981, when he affiliated with the PDT, news
editors consistently conformed to Brazilian print media’s
conventional standards, which require editors to correct
grammatical mistakes. As they would for any speaker, edi-
tors “cleaned up” the many grammatical errors in Juruna’s
spoken Portuguese; they erased the many grammatical in-
consistencies of his actual speech from the reading public’s
view. This practice directed readers’ attention to the propo-
sitional content of his statements and also made Juruna’s
utterances maximally comprehensible to newspaper and
magazine readers, who were, by and large, members of the
elite. For example, in one of the first printed interviews with
Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist
the Xavante leader (November 20, 1974), Veja quotes Juruna
as stating,
Se o Exercito tem autoridade eu também tenho autori-
dade.
If the Army has authority, I also have authority. [Pereira
and Rollemberg 1974:5]
Given the context of the military dictatorship at the
height of repression and censorship, this statement is truly
remarkable. Indeed, that Veja, which was under direct
prepublication censorship, was allowed to publish it is
remarkable. Most likely, social bias blinded censors from
perceiving Juruna as a threat, in the same way that racist
attitudes initially prevented FUNAI’s military leaders from
taking him—an Indian—seriously when they allowed him
to tape-record their conversations. This bold statement il-
lustrates Juruna’s lack of intimidation in the face of state
authority and signals to readers the existence of a fearless
oppositional voice.
Notice also that, in this sentence, editors represent
Juruna controlling fundamental grammatical operations—
in this case, distinctions in person and number as well as
basic verb agreement. The verb ter (to have), which is com-
mon in spoken Portuguese, is correctly conjugated here
in two distinct forms—third-person present-tense singular
tem (it has) and first-person present-tense singular tenho
(I have). I have underlined these forms in the quotation
above to make them easy for readers to observe.
Many news stories during this period printed quota-
tions that represent Juruna using eloquent forms charac-
teristic of the speech of educated members of the elite.
An example from the issue of Veja cited above depicts his
speech replete with sophisticated grammatical construc-
tions and phrases: imperfect subjunctive and conditional
forms (double underlined in the quotation below) as well
as relatively complex gendered noun–pronoun agreement
across clauses (single underlined below). These verb con-
structions are not typical of the speech of rural people or
those who do not have formal education, not to mention
recently contacted indigenous peoples.
Á medida que a população indı́gena fosse aumentando,
eu tiraria mais terras para ela.
In the event that the [fem] indigenous population [fem]
were to increase, I would take more land for it [3 fem].
[Pereira and Rollemberg 1974: 5]
Fosse is the imperfect subjunctive form of ser (to
be). Tiraria is the conditional form of the verb tirar (to
take). This sentence also contains relatively complex arti-
cle and noun agreement. The quotation, as printed, shows
Juruna correctly using the feminine form of the definite
article a (the) to agree with the irregular feminine noun
171
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
população (regular feminine nouns end in a) of the preced-
ing clause. Moreover, the quotation demonstrates correct
pronoun agreement across clauses, a fairly complex gram-
matical construction. Printed quotations such as this one—
containing complex verb tenses, correct noun–modifier
concordances for irregular nouns, and anaphoric con-
cordances across clauses—represent Juruna’s Portuguese
speech as correct, coherent, even elegant.
These elegant forms contrast with Juruna’s actual
speech, even relatively late in his political career. For exam-
ple, in an election rally speech that Juruna gave in Cuiabá in
1984, when he would have had more practice speaking Por-
tuguese, he uses no subjunctive or conditional forms.16 Fur-
thermore, he makes mistakes in simple verb conjugations,
mixing up person and tense marking, as illustrated in the
following sentences:
Eu quero defender vocês porque eu naceu pra defender
vocês. Eu não naceu pra ficar rico nas costas do povo.
I want to defend you all because I borned to defend you
all. I not borned to become rich on the backs of the peo-
ple. [Centro de Documentacão, Rede Globo (CEDOC)
1984]
In these sentences, Juruna incorrectly uses nasceu, the
third-person past-tense form of the verb nascer (to be born)
instead of the first-person past-tense form, nasci. Correctly
spoken, these sentences should be [or should have been] ut-
tered as follows:
Eu quero defender vocês porque eu naci para defender
vocês. Eu não naci para ficar rico nas costas do povo.
I want to defend you all because I was born to defend
you all. I wasn’t born to become rich off the people’s
backs.
The appearance of forms associated with the educated
speech of elites validated Juruna and his cause and facili-
tated the transfer of positive social meanings onto his per-
sona and his message (see Fenigsen 1999; Silverstein 1996,
1998). Moreover, the appearance of eloquent and articu-
late quotations signaled to elite readers that Juruna—who
many readers likely would have dismissed because he was
an Indian—and his message were worthy of attention and
respect. Above all, these editorial practices focused public
attention on his defiance of military rule.
Although these grammatical points may seem trivial,
they are significant because, as I show below, later print
depictions in Veja and other influential daily newspapers
represent Juruna as completely lacking command of very
elementary grammatical functions (person, number, gen-
der, simple present-tense concordances), not to mention
subjunctive and conditional forms and erudite phrases that
are characteristic of elite speech. Until Juruna entered offi-
172
cial party politics in September 1981, news editors consis-
tently upheld standardizing editorial conventions that kept
the distracting grammatical inconsistencies of his actual
speech off of the printed page.
These positive depictions of Juruna and his defi-
ant stance in Brazil’s print media elevated the indige-
nous leader to national prominence in the late 1970s
and early 1980s. Juruna’s declarations resonated with the
civil and political frustrations of the general public—elites
and labor, rural and urban, and other minorities—and
won him national acclaim as one of Brazil’s most out-
spoken opposition voices. While Juruna earned national
recognition as a champion of indigenous and other op-
pressed groups’ rights, elites celebrated him for his oppo-
sition to the military state. At this unique historical mo-
ment, the desire for political change united groups that
did not typically align. Juruna embodied this historical
convergence.
As campaigns for the November 1982 elections got
underway, politicians and opposition parties perceived
Juruna—with his popular status as a national civil-rights
hero—as a potent public-relations ally. Several parties, in-
cluding the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB),
courted him as a potential candidate for national office.
The Xavante leader eventually aligned with Brizola and the
newly formed leftist PDT, the only political party to mention
blacks and indigenous peoples in its platform, and Brizola
convinced Juruna to run on the PDT slate for a seat in the
National Chamber of Deputies. He ran in Rio’s Zona Sul,
an urban, working-class district where workers’ support for
Brizola, who was running for mayor, and the PDT was ex-
ceptionally strong.
Juruna embraced the PDT agenda and campaigned vig-
orously for the party, not only in the Rio de Janeiro dis-
trict where he was a candidate but also across the nation.
Folha de São Paulo (FSP) printed a quotation from one of
Juruna’s campaign speeches that illustrates the inclusive
socialist position that won him favor among members of
the working class. Observe that this quotation also contains
relatively complex constructions (e.g., future subjunctive,
which I underline, and present perfect indicative, double
underlined) that are characteristic of educated speech but
were not typical of Juruna’s spoken Portuguese.
Se eu for eleito, . . . vou lutar junto com outros pobres que
nem os ı́ndios, com os pretos, com os favelados, que eu
conheco bem porque tenho vivido igual a eles. Vou lutar
pelo direito de salário para o trabalhador, pela escritura
da terra do ı́ndio, que também é filho de Deus.
If elected, . . . I will fight alongside all those who are
poor just like indigenous peoples, with blacks, with
slum dwellers whose situation I know well because
I have lived in the same conditions. I will fight for
workers’ rights to fair wages and rights to land for

indigenous people who are also God’s children. [FSP
1982]
Debate and ridicule in textualizing practice
Once Juruna entered formal politics, political rivals began
to perceive the Xavante leader as a threat. Abandoning their
previous valorization of Juruna as a childlike innocent, a
simple man who could speak the truth without fear because
he did not recognize the social constraints on truth telling
(see A Gazeta 1982), opponents began to operationalize the
other trope of the Noble Savage myth, depicting Juruna
as a belligerent, uncontrollable savage. Attacks against his
Portuguese speaking competence became a means of dis-
crediting and muting him (see Arndt 2010), his populist
message, and, by association, the PDT. In October 1982, as
the election date approached, Veja—a news venue that had
previously favored Juruna with positive coverage but turned
against him when he affiliated with the Left—noted the Xa-
vante leader’s “communicative difficulties” in a report on
his campaign: “The cacique [chief] discoursed in his usual
‘xavanguês,’ a mixture of Xavante with Portuguese which
more than half the audience of 1,500 did not understand”
(1982: 26).
The article reported that Brizola came to his rescue and
declared, “Juruna is going to the National Congress where
he will speak in his own language, in Xavante. And the Rep-
resentatives will have to put little earphones in their ears
for simultaneous translation” (Veja 1982: 26). Asserting his
right to speak in Xavante, an indigenous Brazilian language
rather than a foreign one, Juruna declared, “If whites learn
to speak French and English, why not Xavante, which is a
language of this nation?” (O Liberal 1982).
Juruna won in the November 1982 elections with 31,904
votes. These elections were significant because, for the first
time since 1965, voters had the opportunity to cast bal-
lots for candidates at every level except president, and they
turned out in large numbers to express opposition to the
military state. As the major outspoken critic of Brazil’s treat-
ment of indigenous peoples, who—thanks in large part to
his representation in the press—also represented the inter-
ests of the working poor and other oppressed minorities,
Juruna had come to stand for political change as well as so-
cial reform and justice; he stood for a radical departure from
the status quo.17
After the election, Juruna revived his proposal to of-
ficially address the legislative body in his native Xavante.
This precipitated a major congressional debate. Congress
refused to allow use of an indigenous language within an
official government body and made it clear that if Juruna
chose to speak Xavante, no one would hear what he said.
No attempt to provide translation would be made. Because
lack of translation is an effective way of silencing subal-
terns who have not mastered majority languages and be-
Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist
cause the Xavante language had no positive symbolic value
in this context (see Graham 2002), to make himself heard,
Juruna’s only option was to speak Portuguese to the best of
his ability.
If members of the general population—elite, working
class, or rural—had not actually heard Juruna’s Portuguese
speech before he affiliated with the PDT (which was pos-
sible given previous state censorship of radio and tele-
vision), once he joined the campaign, they had numer-
ous opportunities to listen to the Xavante leader. The PDT
made Juruna’s voice and populist message prominent in
its national campaign. At numerous PDT-sponsored ral-
lies, Juruna addressed thousands of cheering fans in per-
son across the nation, and many of his speeches, either
in part or in their entirety, aired in radio or TV broad-
casts. By this time, relaxed restrictions on electronic me-
dia allowed all political parties (not just the government
ARENA party, as before) to make extensive use of radio and
television in their campaigns (see Guimarães and Amaral
1988). These broadcasts did not alter or correct Juruna’s
speech, as print editors previously had done. Juruna’s voice
as well as his dysfluent Portuguese were clearly audi-
ble to the listening public.18 Despite his aberrant speech,
which many middle-class urban dwellers found amusing,
Juruna’s social-justice message won over the working class,
blacks, and other oppressed groups. His actual speech sig-
naled that Juruna was not a member of the elite and in-
dicated that he spoke as a representative of, and for, the
masses.
As a contender for a seat in the national Congress for
the leftist workers’ party, Juruna presented a real threat to
the elite opposition. He continued to issue public state-
ments indicating his belief in the need for radical social and
political transformation. For example, in November 1982,
Juruna is quoted as stating, “In my opinion, Brazil needs
radical reform” (O Liberal 1982). In retaliation, the elite tar-
geted Juruna’s language and speech. Influential press edi-
tors ridiculed his speech, characterizing it with defamatory
terms and expressions, and also transformed their print de-
pictions of his statements to undermine his credibility. Be-
ginning with the electoral campaign and continuing there-
after, journalistic representations of Juruna’s quoted speech
in the imprensa grande ceased to consistently conform to
conventional standard Portuguese.
Satirical depictions of Juruna’s quoted speech first ap-
peared in political cartoons, a form of public roasting and
ridicule that no politician escapes. Cartoons are a journal-
istic form in which otherwise socially unacceptable par-
ody is sanctioned (see Fenigsen 1999). In Brazilian print
journalism, satiric depictions of nonstandard varieties of
Portuguese can acceptably occur in cartoons; regional vari-
eties, for example, are especially subject to parody in Brazil-
ian cartoons.19 In Juruna’s case, nonstandard Portuguese
forms served, like the appearance of Bajan Creole in the
173
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
political cartoons that Janina Fenigsen discusses, as “inten-
sifier[s] of the cartoons’ satirical edge, funny precisely for
[their] impropriety” (1999:76). The covert racist messages
that are often discursively embedded in cartoons and other
elite, or White public places (Hill 1999)—such as films, lit-
erature, and news stories—convey powerful discriminatory
messages that create and uphold social divides and ideolo-
gies of racial and ethnic prejudice.20
Some political cartoons represented Juruna’s speech in
blatantly denigrating ways, using forms that he certainly did
not use.21 One example shows Juruna (dressed in a suit and
tie but with his distinctive Xavante coiffure) dancing around
a boiling cauldron filled with his political rivals (Bergocce
1984). (See Figure 5.) The text shows Juruna uttering “uuu
uuuu,” as he taps one hand over his mouth. Pointing to
violent cannibalism, “primitive” language, and Hollywood
representations of Indians, including the demeaning Hol-
lywood Indian English (HIE) that Barbara Meek (2006) de-
scribes, the scene indexes Juruna as maximally “Other” and
savage. With his speech reduced to grunting, Juruna em-
bodies the Ignoble Savage who is incapable of (“civilized”)
speech and therefore is effectively silenced. Although anal-
ysis of satiric representations of Juruna and his speech in
political cartoons is beyond the scope of this discussion
(see Graham 2008a), I raise the topic here to point out that
Juruna and his speech provided especially rich material for
such lampooning, which led the way for pejorative repre-
sentations of Juruna’s speech in serious print journalism.
Figure 5. Cartoon by Fausto Bergocce: Juruna and his political rivals
Jânio Quadros and Paulo Maluf. Courtesy of Fausto Bergocce.
174
As derogatory depictions of his speech appeared in car-
toons, they also slipped into serious news reporting. Influ-
ential news media sources—including Veja, FSP, and CB22 —
subsequently relaxed their adherence to journalistic stan-
dards for textualizing Juruna’s speech. Ungrammatical rep-
resentations of his aberrant Portuguese speech began to
show up regularly in serious news reporting. Printing un-
grammatical quotations in serious news stories brought at-
tention to Juruna’s dysfluent Portuguese and highlighted
the disjuncture between his speech as quoted and the stan-
dard speech of its textual surround. Even if printed quo-
tations did not precisely replicate Juruna’s actual utter-
ances (and there is no way to know exactly what Juruna
said), printing direct quotations exaggerated this “intertex-
tual gap” (Briggs and Bauman 1992) and made Juruna’s
speech stand out as incongruent and anomalous.
An FSP article that appeared on April 20, 1982, went so
far as to embellish its direct quotation of Juruna’s utterance
with demeaning editorial annotations.
Brasil é do ı́ndio e também de vocês, pobres . . . a
Tribunal (a Justiça) é nosso, é do preto também. Eu vou
lutar aqui . . . Se nós todos não gritar (sic), o Diabo toma
conta do Paı́s
Brazil belongs to Indians and also to you, poor peo-
ple . . . The Court (Justice system) is ours, it belongs to
the blacks as well. I am going to fight here . . . If we all
doesn’t shout (sic), the Devil will rule the nation.
Although the editorial additions that appear in this quo-
tation might seem to have been intended to illuminate—
or “decode”—Juruna’s nonstandard utterances to enhance
readers’ comprehension, their overall effect is to bring read-
ers’ attention to errors in Juruna’s spoken Portuguese, es-
pecially when this quotation is set against the backdrop of
editors’ previous consistent and invisible practice of stan-
dardizing Juruna’s quoted speech. Here, FSP editors make
their interventions clearly visible; they highlight Juruna’s
use of ungrammatical forms and his mistaken use of cer-
tain lexical items. For instance, the editor brings attention
to Juruna’s misuse of the word Tribunal (court): The printed
text uses parentheses to show what the editor takes to be
Juruna’s intended meaning (a Justiça, justice system). This
intervention directs readers’ attention to Juruna’s mistake.
As printed, the quoted text also emphasizes errors in ba-
sic grammatical function; it depicts Juruna making multi-
ple mistakes in gender concordance (between the mascu-
line noun Tribunal and the definite article a [it should be
o]) and also highlights the lack of concordance between the
definite article a and the possessive pronoun nosso.23
Perhaps the most striking thing about this print quota-
tion is that FSP editors explicitly bring attention to Juruna’s
“inept” speech by printing “(sic)” next to a grammatical
error in the third line of text. To be grammatically correct

in this context, the verb (gritar, to shout) should appear in
the third-person plural form gritamos. Instead of correct-
ing this error (in ways that all editors did previously), the
quotation depicts Juruna using the incorrect infinitive form:
gritar. The appearance of “(sic)” in this quotation shouts
to readers. It magnifies the grammatical error and brings
Juruna’s “bad” grammar into sharp focus.
The social meaning of “bad” grammar is not teleologi-
cal. In some contexts, such language may have positive con-
notations or covert prestige as, for example, in the case of
the lower-class male speech in urban Norwich, England,
that Peter Trudgill (1972) describes.24 But, in the context of
news reporting, where editorial conventions prescribe stan-
dardization, incorrect and nonstandard forms stand out.
Printing “(sic)” within a quotation in the context of a news
report visually lifts the grammatical error off the page. It
represents a deliberate editorial move to call attention to a
mistake. In Juruna’s case, editors’ use of sic signals Juruna’s
lack of speaking competence and is indexical of limited cog-
nitive ability (see Holland and Quinn 1987; Irvine and Gal
2000; Lippi-Green 1997; Meek 2006).
In 1983, Deputy Juruna precipitated another public de-
bate about language, one that nearly cost him his office.
This time, Juruna stimulated polemic by publicly calling
the presidential cabinet a “corrupt bunch of thieves.” Ac-
cording to CB, Juruna stated “in his heavy Xavante accent”
that “todos ministros é ladrão” [the entire cabinet is thieves]
(1983a). Printed in grammatically incorrect Portuguese and
said to have been delivered in “heavily accented” speech,
this denunciation is not unlike the direct accusations of
Figure 6. Cartoon by Lopes: Caça o ı́ndio – Cassa o ı́ndio. Courtesy of Lopes/CB/DAPress.
Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist
government corruption that Juruna had made in the 1970s.
Then, making these kinds of statements had won him na-
tional acclaim and were widely quoted in the imprensa
grande—in standard Portuguese. But within the new politi-
cal context, with the abertura (opening) well underway and
Juruna a member of Congress, his accusations did not find
favor among elite civilian politicians who—now in elected
positions—were jockeying to wrest control of the govern-
ment from the military. Similarly, Juruna’s comments failed
to find favor among imprensa grande newspaper owners.
Instead, his declaration prompted deliberations within a
congressional committee over whether to censor the petu-
lant Juruna, as if disciplining a misbehaving child–Indian,
or to take the dramatic step of annulling his congressional
mandate.
Debate over Juruna’s annulment centered on the ques-
tion of his intended meaning. What did the Xavante politi-
cian actually mean by this accusation? Did his statement re-
fer to specific cabinet members, to the Brazilian–Western
system of government, or possibly to Europeans and their
descendants’ treatment of indigenous people over the last
500 years? The cartoon in Figure 6 (Lopes 1983) plays with
the homophone caça (hunt) and cassa (annul) and captures
the debate exceptionally well. It reads, “Meanwhile, history
repeats itself: 1500 . . . caça o ı́ndio [hunt the Indian]; 1983 . . .
cassa o ı́ndio [annul the Indian’s mandate].”
Juruna’s semantics were widely discussed in the press.
Commentaries and editorials on the topic appeared in all
of the major newspapers. Generally, they were sarcastic in
tone, and their authors parodied Juruna’s language, making
175
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
his speech the butt of jokes. One tongue-in-cheek edito-
rial elaborated a set of hypothetical semantic differences
between Xavante and Portuguese, providing so-called Xa-
vante glosses for “key” Portuguese words (Castro 1983).
When Juruna used these words, the editorial claimed, their
meanings differed from the meanings ascribed to them by
nonindigenous Brazilians. For example, when Juruna said
“foreigner,” he supposedly meant “indigenous Brazilian.”
Beyond poking fun at Juruna for not speaking standard Por-
tuguese, this gloss leveled a critique at the military state for
having classified Juruna as a de facto foreigner when it de-
nied him a passport to attend the Russell Tribunal in the
Netherlands. In this new political context, though, it was
the press rather than the state apparatus that emphasized
Juruna’s “foreignness.” Editors used his Portuguese speak-
ing incompetence to underscore his status as Other (see
Berkhofer 1988:528; also Meek 2006).
As Congress considered the possibility of censuring
Juruna or canceling his mandate, CB (1983b) published an
interview with him. Its representation of Juruna’s quoted
speech differed dramatically from the previous eloquence
and elite speech that had characterized its print depictions
during his early years as a public figure. This recontex-
tualization shows Juruna uttering grammatically incorrect
statements. In the sentence reprinted below, Juruna does
not even correctly conjugate one of the most commonly
used verbs in spoken Portuguese: poder (to be able). Instead
of using the first-person eu posso (I can), the printed quota-
tion shows Juruna’s utterance in third-person form, pode.
Moreover, Juruna makes this mistake repeatedly.
Se eu não pode falar na Câmara, eu pode fazer comı́cio
na rua . . . Eu não pode voltar mais pra tráz.
Free translation: If I can’t speaks in Congress, then
I can holds rallies in the street. I can’t goes backward.
Correct: Se eu não posso falar na Câmara, eu posso fazer
comı́cio na rua . . . Eu não posso voltar mais para atrás.
[CB 1983]
The printed text portrays Juruna as an incompetent
speaker, for he fails to dominate even the most basic of
grammatical constructions when using one of the most
commonly spoken verbs. Jokes about Juruna’s “bad” spo-
ken Portuguese abounded in the popular press and in other
mass-media forms. Editorial practices that depicted Juruna
as an incompetent speaker invoked discriminating ide-
ologies that helped to transform popular opinions of the
Xavante leader.
It is important to point out that not all editors dropped
the prescriptive standardizing filters. This suggests that
those who printed agrammatical forms made conscious
editorial decisions not to “fix” Juruna’s speech. These lin-
guistic depictions reinforced political mistakes that Juruna
176
made independently. The most damaging of Juruna’s polit-
ical gaffes occurred when the Xavante leader publicly of-
fered to return a bribe he had accepted from Paulo Maluf,
a PMDB politician. Instead of focusing on the illegality
of Maluf’s offer, the press focused on Juruna’s dishonesty
for taking the bribe. Subsequently, it redoubled its harass-
ment of Juruna and hastened the Xavante leader’s political
demise (see Ramos 1998:105).
By undercutting Juruna’s legitimacy, the press—
representing the interests of the business elite—eliminated
one of the most outspoken critics of hegemonic social re-
lations in Brazil. No major public figures protested editors’
discriminatory textualizing practices. Indeed, referentialist
ideologies (Hill 2008) that privilege message content over
form prevented most members of the reading public from
consciously noticing this form of editorial discrimination.
In fact, because printing grammatical mistakes made direct
quotations appear more like Juruna’s actual speech than
eloquent quotations did, the occurrence of such mistakes
would have appeared natural to most readers. This practice
may even have suggested editorial objectivity.
As linguistic prejudice swelled against Juruna, other
media also sanctioned forms of linguistic discrimination. In
his popular weekly television show, the comedian Jô Soares
roasted the Xavante politician by parodying his semicon-
versant Portuguese. His jokes objectified Juruna’s manner
of speaking in ways that many people today would con-
sider extremely offensive and politically incorrect. Soares’s
imitations, like grammatically incorrect quotations in print,
provoked audiences to laugh “at” Juruna and his way of
speaking and promoted popular ridicule of the formerly
celebrated Xavante leader.
Conclusions
In its print depictions of Mario Juruna, Brazilian news me-
dia mobilized both tropes of the infantalizing colonial and
colonizing Noble Savage narrative. It celebrated his politi-
cal innocence and used his bold childlike critiques as a foil
to signal broad dissent and to critique the military state. In-
deed, indigenous peoples were legal wards of the state. But
when Juruna entered the formal political scene, he was no
longer behaving like an innocent child. This time, media, in-
stead of the state apparatus, assumed the parental role and
scolded the Xavante leader. It effectively used negative lin-
guistic imagery to put Juruna in his proper place; it “muted”
him by causing him to be heard in a discredited way (Arndt
2010).
In a commentary printed in CB in April 1983, columnist
Walter Sotomayor condemned editors for the discrimina-
tory double standard they displayed by using ungrammati-
cal forms in print quotations of Juruna’s speech. Sotomayor
drove the point home with his observation that editors rou-
tinely corrected grammatical errors when they quoted the

speech of Anthony Motley, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil at
the time, but that they failed to do so in Juruna’s case. This
differential treatment, he stated, “reveals an attitude [of re-
spect for Motley] that doesn’t exist for Juruna” (Sotomayor
1983).
The editorial disrespect that Sotomayor observed was
communicated through the linguistic forms and textual
strategies that I have illuminated here. I have used the tools
of linguistic anthropology and critical discourse analysis to
reveal the exact mechanisms that authoritative, linguisti-
cally hegemonic, and influential print venues used to rep-
resent Juruna’s language and speech in ways that advanced
historically specific elite agendas. The imprensa grande
“cleaned up” Juruna’s grammar and reproduced his utter-
ances using eloquent forms associated with the educated
elite to widely disseminate Juruna’s defiant messages and
signal civil opposition to military rule during a particularly
repressive moment within the military regime. Then, with
the political opening, when Juruna became a real threat
to social and business elites and he no longer served to
advance press editors’ agenda, influential venues dropped
their editorial filters. In fact, once he was no longer use-
ful, they turned editorial practice 180 degrees to represent
Juruna’s language and speech in demeaning ways. In do-
ing so, they reproduced the social hierarchy and placed
Juruna—the Indian—in the subordinate position where, ac-
cording to the status quo, he belonged.
Mario Juruna was sensitive to his linguistic vulnerabil-
ity. Like members of any group that experiences linguis-
tic discrimination and the effects of linguistic hegemony
(see Urciuoli 1996; Zentella 2003), he sought ways to re-
duce his susceptibility. He attempted to avoid live inter-
views with journalists whom he knew to be unsympathetic
(Juruna et al. 1982) and challenged Congress to accept his
native language in congressional debates. But the press,
which once had been—as Juruna stated during the Russell
Tribunal episode—“the Indian’s best friend,” turned against
him. In 2002, Juruna died in a Brası́lia hospital from com-
plications associated with his long battle against diabetes.
Media paid scant attention to his passing, despite his im-
portance as a publicly outspoken opponent of the military
state during a critical point in national history and despite
the way media had parroted his remarks to serve elite ends,
in contrast to familiar accusations that it is Indians who
parrot the remarks of their more powerful allies (see, e.g.,
Graham 2002 for a discussion of Napoleon Chagnon’s criti-
cism of Davi Yanomami).
Media’s devastating portrayals of Juruna have had last-
ing political repercussions and consequences for indige-
nous participation in Brazilian national politics. In the
elections that followed Juruna’s controversial term, several
highly capable indigenous leaders ran for public office, as
Juruna had predicted. In the wake of Juruna’s political ca-
reer, however, they confronted powerful negative stereo-
Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist
types and stigma. None won in any election. Now, over
20 years after Juruna completed his term, many indigenous
leaders hold seats at local and regional levels. But since
Juruna, no indigenous Brazilian has achieved elected na-
tional political office.25
Juruna’s case highlights the tremendous obstacles that
indigenous leaders, as well as speakers of minority lan-
guages or linguistic varieties, face when they gain access to
formal political power. Speech and language are powerful
tools that can be wielded both for and against minority or
subaltern groups to advance the interests of those who con-
trol means of representation and public circulation. Those
who do not dominate national languages are at the mercy of
hegemonic institutions (and individuals) that broker repre-
sentations of language, be it through translation, transcrip-
tion, or any form of linguistic mediation. Language and lin-
guistic representations matter, as many scholars show, and
this is especially true when members of groups subject to
discrimination enter formal politics.
Recently, in neighboring Peru, which has a majority in-
digenous population, public debate erupted over the lit-
eracy skills of Congresswoman Hilaria Supa, a Quechua–
Spanish speaker. The daily newspaper Correo (April 23,
2009), printed images of Supa’s notes, which were written
in an Andean variety of Spanish and interpreted as indexes
of inferior cognitive capacity and inability to competently
represent the nation (see Niño-Murcia in press). Because
Supa is a participant in formal politics, her language (writ-
ing, in her case) has been subjected to particular scrutiny.
Such scrutiny exhibits the vitality of elitist notions of lan-
guage and literacy, pointing to and simultaneously reinforc-
ing social hierarchies.
Brazilian media similarly invoked linguistic discrimi-
nation to tarnish the image of at least one other political
leader besides Juruna whose populist messages and class
background threatened the status quo. Candace Slater (per-
sonal communication 2009), a scholar of Brazilian literature
and culture, recalled that during Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva’s
three unsuccessful presidential bids, “he was often referred
to in everyday exchanges, as well as on TV programs and
in various newspaper opinion pieces, as a kind of semi-
literate bumpkin who would not be able to represent Brazil
in a competent, articulate, and elegant manner.” More sys-
tematic study of print depictions of Lula’s speech during
his electoral bids, and his linguistic makeover after he won
the 2002 election and became Brazil’s 35th president, would
make a fascinating study in language politics. Lula’s case
suggests that any individual whose social profile—be it eth-
nic, class background, or gender—fails to conform to es-
tablished elite standards may be subjected to powerful lin-
guistic discrimination. This is because, as James and Leslie
Milroy (1999:2) observe, linguistic discrimination is socially
acceptable when other means of expressing prejudice are
not.
177
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
Contemporary Brazilian journalists I consulted in the
process of reviewing news texts for this research expressed
shock when I showed them examples of the editorial dis-
crimination exercised against Juruna. Several exclaimed,
“Editors can’t do that!”; many stated that the print news me-
dia’s treatment of Juruna was “outrageous.” Clearly, the ed-
itorial adjustments I pointed out violated journalists’ pro-
fessional ethics and contradict uncritical celebrations of
the press’s role in promoting democracy during the mili-
tary dictatorship; many with whom I spoke asserted that
such journalistic transgression would not be possible to-
day. Unfortunately, this is not the case: I have noted the
same tactics that were deployed to undermine Juruna used
against another confrontational Xavante leader who is cur-
rently emerging on the national scene, but this is the subject
of another study.
Because linguistic ideologies privilege attention to ref-
erential content over message form, manipulation of lin-
guistic form is a particularly powerful means of exercis-
ing discrimination. Although this type of discrimination
frequently slips past people’s notice, it has a powerful ef-
fect. Awareness of ways that media and powerful language-
brokering institutions exercise this form of discriminatory
control can alert scholars and activists to future abuses and
contribute to understanding the specific linguistic mech-
anisms that perpetuate social injustices and ways that
language can be pressed into the service of hegemonic
agendas.
Members of dominant groups have manipulated rep-
resentations of indigenous speech to advance nonindige-
nous agendas since Europeans first set foot in the Americas.
These representations, both positive and negative, have ex-
tended and perpetuated images of the Noble and Ignoble
Savage into the 21st century (see Sorber 1972). Juruna’s case
is particularly compelling because the linguistic images that
print media created through its depictions of his quoted
speech changed so dramatically within a relatively short pe-
riod of time. The manipulation of indigenous speech to re-
produce social hierarchies is, however, nothing new. Power
and authority work in language in an often-camouflaged
fashion that masks the ways language can be manipulated
to promote the agendas of dominant groups and actors and
in the service of hegemony and oppression. The represen-
tation of anyone’s speech, including that of politicians and
public figures, whether indigenous or not, can be a powerful
weapon in the hands of interested parties. Indigenous peo-
ples, as I hope I have shown, are particularly vulnerable to
this form of representational abuse.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Research for this study was supported by a
Global Scholar Award from the University of Iowa; I revised an ear-
178
lier version of this article as a scholar in residence at the Univer-
sity of Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Study. Most of the
print materials analyzed came from the archives of the Instituto
Socioambiental (ISA), where Leila Maria Monteiro da Silva pro-
vided invaluable assistance in helping me to locate the materials
I sought and subsequently assisting me to identify the copyright
holders of the cartoons I reproduce here. I thank Fausto Bergocce
for personally authorizing me to reprint his cartoon. Alcida Ramos
also graciously offered copies of articles and cartoons from her per-
sonal collection. My good friends Sylvia Caiuby Novaes and Rene
Castelo Branco performed numerous jeitinhos that enabled me to
view Xavante materials in the private television archives of A Globo;
they also provided many forms of support for me and my family
during numerous trips to Brazil. Without their help, I could not
have completed this research. Journalists Rene Castelo Branco of A
Globo, Rosa Gauditano and Mônica Telles of Istoé, and other Istoé
and Jornal do Brasil colleagues provided useful information re-
garding editorial policy in Brazilian print media. I am indebted to
Maria José Barbosa and Candace Slater for their careful review of
Portuguese grammar in the print quotations that appear in this ar-
ticle and especially to Maria José for her patient answers to many
questions. I thank Bret Gustafson and Judith Maxwell for organiz-
ing the session titled “Indigenous Movements and Language Poli-
tics in Latin America: Speaking, Representing, and Mobilizing” at
the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Associ-
ation, at which I delivered a very preliminary version of the ideas
presented here; I am grateful to Pat Kwachka and Bruce Mannheim
for their thoughtful discussant comments at that session. I also re-
ceived valuable comments in discussions following presentations
in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California,
San Diego in 2006 and the Group on American Indigenous Lan-
guages at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. I am in-
debted in so many ways to Richard Bauman and thank him for en-
couraging me to think critically about distortion in quoted speech.
I greatly appreciate the helpful comments and suggestions on ear-
lier drafts provided by Grant Arndt, Sylvia Caiuby Novaes, Virginia
Dominguez, Francisco Fonseca, Brigittine French, Seth Garfield,
Ilana Gershon, Dorothy Hodgson, Mercedes Niño-Murcia, Glenn
Penny, Michael Silverstein, Janet Shibamoto Smith, and Candace
Slater as well by Don Donham and AE’s anonymous reviewers. I
thank Linda Forman for her expert copyediting and attention to
detail. Wendy Hunter and Eliza Willis helped me to find resources
regarding Brazilian politics and the press. Jenny White, Jane Hill,
and T. M. Scruggs deserve special thanks for encouragement, crit-
ical reading, and comments on multiple draft versions. Conversa-
tions with all of these individuals greatly helped me to sharpen my
thinking and this argument. Any errors of fact or interpretation are,
of course, my own.
1. For discussions of ideological debates involved in develop-
ing orthographies, see, for example, Jaffe 1996, Rhydwen 1993, and
Schieffelin and Doucet 1994. Gal and Irvine 1995, Cameron 1995,
Clark and Ivanič 1997, Irvine and Gal 2000, and Salomon and Niño-
Murcia in press discuss ideological entailments of writing gram-
mars and standardizing languages, and Bourdieu 1991; Fairclough
1989, 1995a, 1995b; Foucault 1984; Fenigsen 1999; and Hill 2008 il-
luminate ideological dimensions of language institutions such as
publishing and news media. For discussions of ways that ideology
affects transcription, see, for example, Urban 1996, Haviland 1996,
Ochs 1979, and Bucholtz 2000.
2. Contemporary Xavante, who belong to the central branch of
the Gê family, live in 11 indigenous areas in Mato Grosso state,
four of which are not parsed on Figure 2: Areões I and II, which are
contiguous with the larger territory of Areões, and Chão Preto and
Ubawawẽ, which are contiguous with Parabubure (see Instituto

Socioambiental [ISA] 2010c for specific legal divisions within Xa-
vante areas). For discussion of Xavante social organization and tra-
ditional subsistence patterns, see Maybury-Lewis 1967; also see
Lopes da Silva 1986; Graham 1995, 2008b; and Coimbra et al. 2002.
3. The ability to communicate in the dominant national lan-
guage is an important skill among native Amazonian indige-
nous leaders more generally (see, e.g., Brown 1993; Graham 2002;
Jackson 1991, 1995; Oakdale 2004; Ramos 1988). Today many Xa-
vante, especially men, speak some Portuguese. The few who speak
well are exceptional individuals who have spent time living among
Brazilians, usually to attend school. Xavante from Salesian mission
communities speak more Portuguese than those from areas where
missionary presence has been less consistent or nonexistent.
4. The period of Xavante contact spanned nearly 20 years. From
the late 1940s through 1962, distinct Xavante groups established
peaceful relations with representatives of outside society in differ-
ent ways. For good descriptions of the overall profile of Xavante
contact, see Lopes da Silva 1992; see also Garfield 2001.
5. The military ruled Brazil from March 1964 to January 1985.
For overviews of Brazil’s political history during the dictatorship
and the transition to democracy, see Alves 1985 and Skidmore 1988,
1989.
6. Curiously, works by political scientists and historians of the
period fail to mention Juruna as an important actor in this process
(see Alves 1985; Skidmore 1989).
7. In contrast to some Latin American nations—such as Bolivia,
Peru, and Guatemala—where indigenous peoples are either the
majority or make up a large percentage of the population, indige-
nous peoples in Brazil constitute only .17 percent of the total (see
Maybury-Lewis 2002:344; see also ISA 2010c). The majority of the
nation’s population is concentrated in industrialized urban zones
located along the central and southern Atlantic coast. In 1977, the
nation’s demographic balance tipped from predominantly rural to
urban (Alisky 1981:91).
8. See Ramos 1998 and also Hemming 2003 for excellent
overviews of these proposals.
9. CIMI, an official arm of the liberal National Conference of
Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), actively supported the organization of
indigenous leaders, including Juruna. It sponsored numerous in-
tertribal gatherings, many of which took place in indigenous com-
munities, where they were less susceptible to state attempts to
ban them. CIMI’s attempts to facilitate the organizing of indige-
nous leaders was analogous to work done by proponents of liber-
ation theology to form “base communities” (comunidades de base)
among rural and poor peoples (see Burdick and Hewitt 2000 for
a good overview and discussion). In Brazil, as elsewhere in Latin
America, the post–Vatican II Catholic Church was frequently a prin-
cipal opponent of repressive right-wing state governments. The
church was one of the few institutions to effectively oppose Brazil’s
military government (Skidmore 1989:11) as well as one of the prin-
cipal advocates for indigenous peoples (see Alves 1985:153–160;
Hemming 2003; Juruna et al. 1982; Maybury-Lewis 2002; Ramos
1998).
10. See Niezen 2003 for discussion of the emergence of the inter-
national indigenous movement, particularly Cree involvement.
11. Prior to the new Constitution of 1988, which redefined In-
dians’ legal status, indigenous peoples were considered to be in
a transitional condition that would last until they civically “came
of age” and were “emancipated.” The new Constitution defines in-
digenous status as a permanent condition and specifies that special
legal rights conferred by ethnicity cannot be divested (see Ramos
1988:96).
12. Prepublication censorship was extensively practiced in Brazil
from 1969 to 1979, when the state provided all news venues with
Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist
lists, called “little memos” (bilhetinhos) of prohibited topics (Smith
1997:120–124). Anne-Marie Smith (1997:82–83) points out that
such censorship affected a small number of publications that were
broadly representative of journalism in Brazil: In addition to OESP
and Veja, it was aimed at Opinião and Movimento, two opposi-
tion political weeklies; an iconoclastic alternative publication; O
São Paulo, a diocesan newspaper; and Tribuna da Imprensa, a city
daily (Smith 1997:203 n. 3; see also Smith 1994:208–227). Postpubli-
cation censorship was widespread; government agents confiscated
parts of or entire issues (or broadcasts, in the case of electronic
media), closed newsstands, and, in some cases, when editors vi-
olated prepublication prohibitions, shut down entire media oper-
ations (Alves 1982:163–164). For further discussion of press cen-
sorship during the military dictatorship in Brazil, see Dassin 1982,
1984; Alves 1985:148; and Smith 1997.
13. According to ISA (2010a, 2010b), there are 227 distinct indige-
nous groups in Brazil.
14. Editors’ practice of indigenous voicing and its indexical en-
tailments is reminiscent of early Americans’ use of savage “Indian”
imagery in expressions of resistance to British rule, as in the Boston
Tea Party (see, e.g., Deloria 1998). I am grateful to Jane Hill for not-
ing this comparison.
15. For discussions of Western personalist linguistic ideologies
and notions of intentionality, see Hill 2008; see also Hill and Irvine
1993 and Keane 1991.
16. I am immensely grateful to Renée Castelo Branco for invalu-
able help that allowed me access to Globo’s private archives, where
I obtained this recording of Juruna’s speech.
17. Some Brazilians attributed Juruna’s victory to voter cyni-
cism, and, indeed, given the context of the military dictatorship,
voters approached these elections with considerable distrust (see
Skidmore 1988:223). But voter skepticism does not entirely explain
Juruna’s victory at the polls. In casting ballots for Juruna, disen-
chanted working-class voters in Rio’s Zona Sul voted for a man
who opposed not only the military regime but also the system of
Brazilian–Western government, and this was significant.
18. As far as I know, television broadcasters did not post subtitles
when they aired Juruna’s speech. Had they chosen to do so, the sub-
titles would have had the effect of focusing additional attention on
Juruna’s dysfluent Portuguese. The embedding of covert messages
in television and film subtitles is little studied and is a potentially
fertile area for contributing to understanding the mechanics of lin-
guistic discrimination.
19. Brazilian Portuguese has many varieties associated with
class, region, age and race; rural and urban distinctions are also no-
ticeable. For recent discussions of variation in Brazilian Portuguese
and Brazilian sociolinguistics, see, for example, Ilari and Basso
2006; Peres 2008; Roth-Gordon 2007, 2009; Rubio 2007; and Meira
2007.
20. For discussion of covert racism in “White public space,” see
Morrison 1992 and Cassuto 1997 on representations of African
Americans and Native Americans; Butler 1997 on representations
of African Americans and women; Quiroga 1997, Urciuoli 1996,
2003, and Hill 2008, 1993 on representations of Hispanic Ameri-
cans; Chun 2004 and Palumbo-Liu 1994 on representations of Asian
Americans; and Meek 2006 on representations of Native Americans
in film.
21. Cartoons often represented Juruna using the first-person
direct object form mim (me) instead of eu (I) in subject posi-
tion (see, e.g., Kácio 1984), invoking a pattern that is prevalent
in speech characteristics stereotypically associated with English-
speakers’ version of the “White Man’s Indian” (see Berkhofer 1978,
1988; for more on the linguistic implications of this concept, see
Meek 2006). The use of the object pronoun me in subject position is
179
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
not among the grammatical errors that Xavante make when speak-
ing Portuguese, no matter how limited their command of the lan-
guage. I have never heard a Xavante speaker mistakenly use me
for I.
22. It is not possible at this time to identify affiliations between
specific political parties or platforms and news venues or edi-
tors. Mainstream editors and owners were in general solidarity
against the military (Francisco Fonseca, personal communication,
February 2009).
23. The printed quotation thus brings obvious attention to the
mistaken concordance by showing Juruna correctly getting one—
but not both—of the forms that must agree with the masculine
noun Tribunal.
24. Some individuals who possess sufficient social, economic, or
political power can use nonstandard language or language that is
grammatically incorrect without suffering serious consequences.
Before the White House took measures to limit press access to G.
W. Bush’s spontaneous speech, the mainstream media preserved
his “intriguing” use of English grammar (Silverstein 2003) to make
the blue-blooded politician appear more “normal,” more like the
average U.S. citizen. General Patton is another historical case of
an Anglo-American whose bad grammar may have had positive
value. In another case of editorial representation of Native Ameri-
can speech, in mid-20th-century Wisconsin, newspaper editors in-
tentionally printed the ungrammatical indigenous English of Ho
Chunk columnist Charles Round Low Cloud both to signal the au-
thor’s native authenticity and to dampen or mute his social cri-
tiques (Arndt 2010).
25. Indigenous candidate Marcos Terena, from Mato Grosso do
Sul state, ran in the October 2010 elections for a seat in the National
Congress of Deputies but was defeated.
References cited
A Gazeta
1982 Juruna. A Gazeta, February 25.
Alisky, Marvin
1981 Latin American Media: Guidance and Censorship. Ames:
Iowa State University.
Alves, Maria Helena Moreira
1985 State and Opposition in Military Brazil. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Arndt, Grant
2010 The Making and Muting of an Indigenous Media Activist:
Imagination and Ideology in Charles Round Low Cloud’s “In-
dian News.” American Ethnologist 37(3):499–510.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M.
1981 Discourse in the Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Michael Holquist, ed. Caryl Emer-
son and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
1986 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Bauman, Richard
2004 A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on
Intertextuality. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs
1990 Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Lan-
guage and Social Life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–
88.
Bergocce, Fausto
1984 Cartoon (Juruna and his political rivals). Folha de São Paulo,
November 3.
180
Berkhofer, Robert, Jr.
1978 The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian
from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf.
1988 White Conceptions of Indians. In History of Indian-White
Relations. Handbook of North American Indians, 4. Wilcomb
E. Washburn, ed. Pp. 522–547. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution.
Bourdieu, Pierre
1991 Language and Symbolic Power. John B. Thompson, ed.
Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, trans. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Briggs, Charles, and Richard Bauman
1992 Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power. Journal of Linguis-
tic Anthropology 2(2):131–172.
Brown, Michael
1993 Facing the State, Facing the World: Amazonia’s Native Lead-
ers and the New Politics of Identity. L’Homme 33(2–4):307–
326.
Bucholtz, Mary
2000 The Politics of Transcription. Journal of Pragmatics
32(10):1439–1465.
Burdick, John, and Warren Edward Hewitt
2000 The Church at the Grassroots in Latin America: Perspectives
on Thirty Years of Activism. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Butler, Judith
1997 Excitable Speech. New York: Routledge.
Cameron, Deborah
1995 Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.
1998 Why Is Language a Feminist Issue? In The Feminist Cri-
tique of Language. Deborah Cameron, ed. Pp. 1–32. New York:
Routledge.
Cassuto, Leonard
1997 The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Lit-
erature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Castro, Tarso de
1983 A lı́ngua dos Xavante. Folha de São Paulo, October 13.
Centro de Documentacão, Rede Globo (CEDOC)
1984 Mario Juruna Comı́cio Cuiabá, November 10. RJ50-0074049.
Globo Archives, Rio de Janeiro.
Chun, Elaine W.
2004 Ideologies of Legitimate Mockery: Margarte Cho’s Revoic-
ings of Mock Asian. Pragmatics 14:263–290.
Clark, Romy, and Roz Ivanič
1997 The Politics of Writing. London: Routledge.
Coimbra, Carlos E. A., Jr., Nancy M. Flowers, Francisco M. Salzano,
and Ricardo V. Santos
2002 The Xavánte in Transition: Health, Ecology, and Bioanthro-
pology in Central Brazil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Conklin, Beth, and Laura R. Graham
1995 The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-
Politics. American Anthropologist 97(4):695–710.
Correio Braziliense (CB)
1983a Juruna acusa todo ministério. Correio Braziliense,
September 27.
1983b Ninguém vai me censurar. Correio Braziliense, October 5.
Dassin, Joan
1982 Press Censorship and the Military State in Brazil. In Press
Control around the World. Jane Leftwich Curry and Joan R.
Dassin, eds. Pp. 149–186. New York: Praeger.
1984 The Brazilian Press and the Politics of Abertura. Journal of
Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 26(3):385–414.
Davis, Shelton
1977 Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of
Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Deloria, Philip
1998 Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Fairclough, Norman
1989 Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language.
Harlow, UK: Longman.
1995a Language and Power. London: Longman.
1995b Media Discourse. London: Hodder Arnold.
Fenigsen, Janina
1999 “A Broke-Up Mirror”: Representing Bajan in Print. Cultural
Anthropology 14(1):61–87.
Folha de São Paulo (FSP)
1982 Juruna promete só falar xavante caso seja eleito. Folha de
São Paulo, April 20.
Fonseca, Francisco C. P.
2005 O consenso fojado: A grande imprensa e a formação da
agenda neo-liberal no Brasil. São Paulo: Hucitec.
2006 Media and Democracy: False Convergences. Revista de So-
ciologia e Polı́tica 1(2):13–24.
Foucault, Michel
1984 The Order of Discourse. In Language and Politics. Pp. 108–
138. New York: New York University Press.
Gal, Susan, and Judith Irvine
1995 The Boundaries of Languages and Disciplines: How
Ideologies Construct Difference. Social Research 62(4):967–
1001
Garfield, Seth
2001 Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Fron-
tier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
2004 Mario Juruna: Brazil’s First Indigenous Congressman. In
The Human Tradition in Modern Brazil. Peter M. Beattie, ed.
Pp. 287–304. Wilmington, DE: SR Books.
Graham, Laura R.
1993 A Public Sphere in Amazonia? The Depersonalized Collabo-
rative Construction of Discourse in Xavante. American Ethnol-
ogist 20(4):717–741.
1995 Performing Dreams: Discourses of Immortality among
the Xavante of Central Brazil. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
2002 How Should an Indian Speak? Brazilian Indians and the
Symbolic Politics of Language Choice in the International
Public Sphere. In Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation,
and the State in Latin America. Jean Jackson and Kay Warren,
eds. Pp. 181–228. Austin: University of Texas Press.
2008a No Laughing Matter: Racist Language in Political Cartoons
of Brazil’s Mario Juruna. Paper presented at the 107th An-
nual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association,
San Francisco, November 19–23.
2008b Verbete Xavante. Instituto Socioambiental Encyclopedia
of Native Brazil. São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiental. https://
www.socioambiental.org/pib/epi/xavante/xavante.shtm, ac-
cessed June 21.
Graham, Laura R., David Hernández Palmar, and Caimi Waiassé,
dirs.
2009 Owners of the Water: Conflict and Collaboration over Rivers.
34 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources.
Guimarães, Cesar, and Roberto Amaral
1988 Brazilian Television: A Rapid Conversion to the New Order.
In Media and Politics in Latin America: The Struggle for
Democracy. Elizabeth Fox, ed. Pp. 125–137. London: Sage.
Haviland, John B.
1996 Text from Talk in Tzotzil. In Natural Histories of Discourse.
Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, eds. Pp. 45–78. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist
Hemming, John
2003 Die if You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century.
London: Macmillan.
Hill, Jane H.
1993 Hasta La Vista, Baby: Anglo Spanish in the American South-
west. Critique of Anthropology 13:145–176.
1999 Language, Race, and White Public Space. American Anthro-
pologist 100(3):680–689.
2008 The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Hill, Jane H., and Judith T. Irvine, eds.
1993 Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Holland, Dorothy, and Naomi Quinn, eds.
1987 Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ilari, Rodolfo, and Renato Basso
2006 O português da gente: A lı́ngua que estudamos, a lı́ngua que
falamos. São Paulo: Contexto.
Instituto Socioambiental (ISA)
2010a Povos indı́genas no Brasil, perguntas frequentes. http://
pib.socioambiental.org/pt/c/faq, accessed January 4.
2010b Povos indı́genas no Brasil, pesquisa por estado. http://pib.
socioambiental.org/caracterizacao.php?uf=51, accessed
January 4.
2010c Povos indı́genas no Brasil, Xavante, introdução http://pib.
socioambiental.org/pt/povo/xavante, accessed April 10.
Irvine, Judith, and Susan Gal
2000 Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In
Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Paul
V. Kroskrity, ed. Pp. 35–83. Santa Fe, NM: School of American
Research Press.
Jackson, Jean
1991 Being and Becoming an Indian in the Vaupés. In Nation-
States and Indians in Latin America. Greg Urban and
Joel Sherzer, eds. Pp. 131–155. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
1995 Culture, Genuine and Spurious: The Politics of Indianness
in the Vaupés, Colombia. American Ethnologist 22(1):3–27.
Jaffe, Alexandra
1996 The Second Annual Corsican Spelling Contest: Orthography
and Ideology. American Ethnologist 23(4):816–835.
Jakobson, Roman
1960 Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Style in Lan-
guage. Thomas Sebeok, ed. Pp. 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Juruna, Mario, Antonio Hohlfeldt, and Assis Hoffman
1982 O gravador do Juruna. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Mercado Aberto.
Kácio
1984 Cartoon: Juruna at microphone with Tomahawk, stating,
“Mim, modern indian . . . .” Correio Brasiliense, July 27.
Keane, Webb
1991 Delegated Voice: Ritual Speech, Risk, and the Making
of Marriage Alliances in Anakalang. American Ethnologist
18(2):311–330.
Lippi-Green, Rosina
1997 English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimi-
nation in the United States. London: Routledge.
Lopes
1983 Cartoon: . . . E entrementes, a história se repete. Correio
Braziliense, September 30:2.
Lopes da Silva, Aracy
1986 Nomes e amigos: Da prática Xavante a uma reflexão sobre
os Jê. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo.
181
American Ethnologist  Volume 38 Number 1 February 2011
1992 Dois séculos e meio de história xavante. In História dos
ı́ndios no Brasil. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, org. Pp. 357–
378. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras–Secretaria Municipal de
Cultura.
Lutz, Catherine
1990 The Erasure of Women’s Writing in Sociocultural Anthropol-
ogy. American Ethnologist 17(4):611–627.
Maybury-Lewis, David
1967 Akwẽ-Shavante Society. Oxford: Clarendon.
1991 Becoming Indian in Lowland South America. In Nation-
States and Indians in Latin America. Joel Sherzer and
Greg Urban, eds. Pp. 207–235. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
2002 For Reasons of State: Paradoxes of Indigenous Policy in
Brazil. In The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in
Latin American States. David Maybury-Lewis, ed. Pp. 329–361.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Meek, Barbara
2006 And the Injun Goes “How!”: Representations of American
Indian English in White Public Space. Language in Society
35:93–128.
Meira, Vivian
2007 The Use of the Subjunctive in Relative Clauses and Comple-
ment Clauses in Afro-Brazilian Portuguese. Estudos Linguisti-
cos 36(2):409–418.
Milroy, James, and Leslie Milroy
1999 Authoritarian Language: Investigating Standard English. 3rd
edition. London: Routlege.
Morrison, Toni
1992 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagina-
tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Niezen, Ronald
2003 The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics
of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Niño-Murcia, Mercedes
In press La buena o mala ortografı́a como instrumento de jerar-
quización social. In Procesos de literacidad y acceso a la ed-
ucación básica de jóvenes y adultos. Marietta Lorenzatti, ed.
Córdoba, Argentina: Vaca Narvaja Editor.
O Liberal
1982 Questão indı́gena, preocupação de Mário Juruna caso
eleito. O Liberal, November 7.
Oakdale, Suzanne
2004 The Culture-Conscious Brazilian Indian: Representing and
Reworking Indianness in Kayabi Political Discourse. American
Ethnologist 31(1):60–75.
Ochs, Elinor
1979 Transcription as Theory. In Developmental Pragmatics. Eli-
nor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, eds. Pp. 43–71. New York:
Academic Press.
Palumbo-Liu, David
1994 Los Angeles, Asians, and Perverse Ventriloquisms: On the
Functions of Asian America in the Recent American Imaginary.
Public Culture 6(2):365–381.
Pereira, Alvaro, and Armando Rollemberg
1974 Em busca da sobrevivência, entrevista: Dzururan (Mario),
cacique Xavante. Veja, November 20:3–6.
Peres, Edenize Ponzo
2008 O uso da forma ce em Vitoria (ES): Uma mudanca em curso?
Cadernos Camilliani 9(2):45–56.
Quiroga, Jorge
1997 Hispanic Voices: Is the Press Listening? In Latin Looks: Im-
ages of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media. Clara E. Ro-
driguez, ed. Pp. 36–56. Boulder, CO: Westview.
182
Ramos, Alcida
1988 Indian Voices: Contact Experienced and Expressed. In Re-
thinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Per-
spectives on the Past. Jane Hill, ed. Pp. 214–234. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
1998 Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Rhydwen, Mari
1993 Kriol: The Creation of a Written Language and a Tool of
Colonization. In Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia.
Michael Walsh and Collin Yallop, eds. Pp. 155–168. Canberra:
Aboriginal Studies Press.
Roth-Gordon, Jennifer
2007 Youth, Slang, and Pragmatic Expressions: Examples from
Brazilian Portuguese. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(3):322–
345.
2009 Conversational Sampling, Race Trafficking, and the Invo-
cation of the Gueto in Brazilian Hip Hop. In Global Linguistic
Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of
Language. H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, and Alistair Penny-
cook, eds. Pp. 63–77. New York: Routledge.
Rubio, Cassio Florencio
2007 For a Definition of the Stigmatized Variant in Verb Agree-
ment in the Interior of Sao Paulo State: The Scope of the Gen-
der/Sex Variable. Estudos Linguisticos 36(2):380–388.
Salomon, Frank and Mercedes Niño-Murcia.
In press The Romance of the Precise: A Peruvian Village’s Life
in Letters. In The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village’s Way
with Writing. Ch. 5. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Rachelle Charlier Doucet
1994 The “Real” Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics, and
Orthographic Choice. American Ethnologist 21(1):176–200.
Scott, James
1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Silverstein, Michael
1996 Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.
In Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium about Lan-
guage and Society, Austin, Texas. Risako Ide, Rebecca Parker,
and Yukako Sunaoshi, eds. Pp. 266–295. Texas Linguistic Fo-
rum, 36. Austin: Department of Linguistics, University of
Texas.
1998 The Uses and Utility of Ideology: A Commentary. In Lan-
guage Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Bambi B. Schieffelin,
Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. Pp. 123–145.
New York: Oxford University Press.
2003 Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to “W.”
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban
1996 The Natural History of Discourse. In Natural Histories of
Discourse. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, eds. Pp. 1–17.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Skidmore, Thomas
1988 The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964–85. New York:
Oxford University Press.
1989 Brazil’s Slow Road to Democratization, 1974–1984. In De-
mocratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation.
Alfred Stepan, ed. Pp. 5–43. New York: Oxford University Press.
Slater, Candace
In press Metaphors and Myths in News Reports of an Amazo-
nian “Lost Tribe”: Society, Environment and Literary Analysis.
In Environmental Anthropology: Methodologies and Research
Design. Ismael Vaccaro, Eric Alden Smith, and Shankar Aswani,
eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Quoting Mario Juruna  American Ethnologist

Smith, Anne-Marie van Dijk, Teun

1994 Explaining Quiescence: Self-Censorship in Brazil, 1968– 1991 Racism and the Press. London: Routledge.
1978. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Political Science, Mas- 1993 Elite Discourse and Racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
sachusetts Institute of Technology. 1999 Discourse and Racism. Discourse and Society 10:147–
1997 A Forced Agreement: Press Acquiescence to Censorship in 148.
Brazil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Veja
Society for Professional Journalists 1980a Bye, Bye Holanda. Veja, November 19:32–34.
2009 Code of Ethics. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp, ac- 1980b Juruna não voa: FUNAI proı̂be viagem e chefe xavante
cessed September 21. apela ao STF. Veja, November 12:26.
Sorber, Edna 1982 Leonel Brizola, analista do Rio de Janeiro Veja, October
1972 The Noble Eloquent Savage. Ethnohistory 19(3):227–236. 6:26–27.
Sotomayor, Walter Williams, Raymond.
1983 Chacal: Mário Juruna. Correio Braziliense, October 4. 1983 Notes on English Prose, 1780–1950. In Writing in Society.
Trudgill, Peter Pp. 67–118. London: Verso Books.
1972 Sex, Covert Prestige, and Linguistic Change in the Urban Zentella, Ana Celia
British English of Norwich. Language in Society 1:179–195. 2003 “José Can You See”: Latin@ Responses to Racist Discourse.
Urban, Greg In Bilingual Aesthetics. Doris Sommer, ed. Pp. 51–56. New York:
1982 Developments in the Situation of Brazilian Tribal Pop- Palgrave Press.
ulations from 1976–1982. Latin American Research Review
20(1):7–25.
1991 A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture. Austin:
University of Texas Press. accepted August 13, 2010
1996 Entextualization, Replication, and Power. In Natural His- final version submitted October 12, 2010
tories of Discourse. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, eds.
Pp. 21–44. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laura R. Graham
Urciuoli, Bonnie Department of Anthropology
1996 Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, University of Iowa
Race, and Class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 114 Macbride Hall
2003 Containing Language Difference: Advertising in Hispanic Iowa City, IA 52242
Magazine. In Language and Social Identity. Richard K. Blot, ed.
Pp. 171–197. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. laura-graham@uiowa.edu

183