telling them that the innermost area has never seen anything like them. Ciço declines, however, and Lorde Cigano returns to the van, and he and Salomé drive off along a highway. Geography of the movie The movie has a thematic richness that is not obvious to the non-Brazilian viewer. The region depicted is northeastern Brazil, a poor region (lack of rain) which is to Brazil something like a combination of the dry midwest and the folkloric South of the United States. It is a region many leave to find work towards the south (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo). They are in the sertão, a word for which there is no exact translation in any language, but approximately "the backlands", far from a city. Country music in Brazil is sertão music, "música sertaneja”. The partly navigable São Francisco River, at the movie's opening, is Brazil's largest river outside the Amazon watershed, and the longest river totally in Brazil. It (not the Amazon) is culturally in Brazil something like the Mississippi is in the U.S. Another major river, the Xingu, also appears. There are a number of shots of rivers, boats, and a ferry - the boats and ferry old, not pretty, utilitarian. This is the past — river transportation. Modern transportation is via highways. A major theme is the expansion of modern civilization, from the northeast into the west, into the adjacent Amazon jungle. We see a bulldozer, and television antennae are discussed — into the jungle, building highways, destroying native cultures; the Caravan, while decrying this, is in fact participating in the process. At one place, the male lead says that the Caravan is civilization, which it is bringing to those that don't have it. The mute truck driver is said to represent the working class: mute, in the Brazil of the 1960s. A social service organization, Casa do Ceará ("The Ceará House", Ceará being a northeastern state), with extravagant promises, is ridiculed. A mayor is hypocritical; women are exploited. Yet the mood is optimistic: it's great to have a truck, the title song says, and to set off on the road. "The sun will never set" are the concluding words of the title song, which concludes the movie. Native Brazilians Brazilian whites and mulattoes (more numerous than the whites) coexist with the pre-contact native Brazilians somewhat like white Americans do with native Americans. Once the Caravan takes the Pan-American