Abstract
In the forty days he was in Ceará, Brazil, at the service of the Baturité Railway, Francisco Saturnino Rodrigues de Brito mapped the territory and reported an opinion on the best route for the extension of said railroad, which should cross Ceará lands and reach the banks of the São Francisco river, in Pernambuco. In this documentation, the engineer, convinced of his obligation to the Brazilian nation and the country’s progress, defined the marks for the production of a modern territory, which would ally Ceará to the speed and efficiency of the Western European molds. His affirmations, as a rule, presented a prejudiced look on the reality he observed, classifying anything different as uneven and inferior. This is a plentiful documentation from which it is possible to reflect on the modernization projects for Brazil of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Keywords:
History; territory; modernization; time; railroad
