Eduardo Sguiglia's novel Fordlandia, the source of these two quotations, is a fictionalized account of the real-life rubber plantation established by Henry Ford in the Brazilian jungle during the 1920s. Ford's errand into the Amazon wilderness served a dual purpose. He sought to establish a source of raw rubber for automobile tires other than British-dominated Malaya, while inculcating “backward” peoples with the work ethic and the faith in material progress that characterized Fordism. Ford regulated life in his self-named company town with a giant clock, whose piercing whistle imposed time discipline over the indigenous workforce, just as he hoped social dancing and proper hygiene would civilize the natives' manners. But Fordlandia was not the success its sponsor envisioned. A cultural clash occasioned by the volatile mix of Anglo managers overseeing Indian workers and Afro-Caribbean migrants, as well as a rubber-tree blight, doomed Ford's adventure into the twentieth-century global frontier.