RUBBER TREE

RUBBER TREE

LATIN NAME: FICUS ELASTICA

HOMELAND: SOUTH EAST ASIA

Oral accounts refer to the soft but solid-soled sandals that Spanish Explorer Hernan Cortes, who landed in Mexico in 1519, saw on the feets of locals.

The material on the soles of the sandals is made by the local people by mixing the milk-like liquid obtained from the trunk of Castilla Elastica, a rubber tree that grows in the region, with water obtained from the branches of morning glory flower and hardened.

Modern archeology studies reveals the history of this material dating back to the 1600s B.C. and its interesting connection with the Olmec civilization which will be called rubber with the beginning of industrial use. According to archaeological discoveries, this substance continued to be used by passing from the Olmecs, the oldest civilization of Mexico, to the Aztecs, and from the Aztecs to the Mayans. The Olmec name was given by th eAztecs. The Aztec word “olli” means rubber and “mecatl” meaning people, which means “rubberpeople”.

The usage areas of rubber, which was not widely used in Europe until the first rubber derivatives factory established in Paris in 1803, began to develop very rapidly with the invention of the rubber band by Stephen Perry in England in 1845.

Rubber, which has become one of the most demanded raw materials in the World from this date until the end of the 20th century, causes the mass enslavement and exploitation of indigenous peoples living in large production areas in the north of South America by global capitalism.

Especially in Venezuela, Peru and Brazil, rubber, which has settled in the lives of the indigenous people who are mass-worked in a way that even reshapes their beliefs and traditions, takes its place in the stories of fairytales, superstitions, and even local religions.

New superstitions and tales based on the anxiety and fears that developed from the pressures of the rubber barons begin to emerge in the sub conscious of the Kukama natives, who are forced towork in rubber production in the lands spread between Venezuela and Peru.

It added a new figure to the superstitions of forest creatures of the Amazon natives of Brazil, who shared a similar fate with the Kukama people. Next to the creatures named Mapingauri and Curupira, which are believed to live in the forest and can be depicted, a divine being named "mother of trees", believed to live in the rubber tree, is invisible and undescribed. According to the belief, the man who will milk by carving from the rubber tree must never be married and must make a kind of spiritual agreement, similarto a marriage, with the mother of the trees believed to live in the rubber tree. It is believed that if he unlaterally breaks this agreement, he can be killed by the mother of the trees.