Cultural Post 1:

“Myths are public dreams.” Author Joseph Campbell
Boto Cor de Rosa is a famous Brazilian myth stemming from both the reverence of the Pink Brazilian dolphin and the social stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancies in Brazilian culture. The myth of the Boto comes from the Amazonas region of Brazil where live the famous Pink Amazon dolphins. The story is about a figure called the Boto that can transform itself into “a human man all dressed in white and sporting a hat to cover the breathing holes on top of its head” (Athayde comic). This handsome man comes at night especially during major festivals, seduces young women, impregnates them and then disappears back into the Amazon never to be seen again. To ensure that no one at a social gathering is the Boto, it is customary in rural Amazonas for men to take their hats off indoors. Not doing so implies one could be a lothario looking to disrupt the local social order.

I first heard about this myth from the Brazilian I’ve been dating when I was showing her some American folklore such as Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan. She described the Boto as being a convenient explanation for consensual out-of-wedlock children back around a century ago. “Men were expected to be worldly, brutal if necessary, quick to defend their honor” while “women were expected to remain secluded, chaste, faithful, and devout” (Pg 8). Therefore, if a young woman behaved in a way incongruous with the expectation of catholic secluded chastity and say had an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, ‘it’s a child of the Boto’ was a convenient justification. It also doubtless served as a warning for young women to not fall in love with strangers and certainly not to have sex before marriage.

Only reading more into it, however, did I learn that this explanation ignores some of the myth's darker implications. What seems like a whimsical story about a cute animal actually ties into a dark and violent chapter of Brazilian history. Brazil has a long history of sexual abuse stemming from slavery and Iberian conceptions of masculinity. Slaveowners often had several concubines often with slaves and these relations were known and accepted by Brazilian society. “Impregnating women, be they indigenous, enslaved, or lower-class whites and women of color, [to be] a sign of masculinity and potency that contributed to a man’s honor. Pregnancy was thought to prove the viriility of men, and virility was key to the concept of male honor and prestige” (Meade 11). In rural areas like the riverbank towns of the interior far from the reach of the law and social services, this imperative for male virility often took shape in familial sexual violence. It’s no coincedence that the Boto is depicted as lightskinned and wearing clean, white, expensive clothing when much of the sexual violence perpetuated on Brazil came from European-descended male elites.

The tale of the Boto - a stranger who had his way with women and then disappeared seems then like a defense mechanism against colonial sexual violence. The cultural artifact for this post is an amazing comic by Brazilian Laura Athayde published on The Nib that details the whimsical story and its darker implications.

Meade, Teresa A. A Brief History of Brazil. New York: Checkmark, 2010.
Link to Laura Athayde’s Comic: https://thenib.com/legend-of-the-boto-cor-de-rosa/