Covert cultivars and clandestine communities: rice and the making of an Afrodescendant peasantry in Maranhão, Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rice is a keystone crop of the peasant farming system of Maranhão, Brazil. Its origins can be traced to the food fields of fugitive slave communities that proliferated throughout the Amazonic frontier during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maranhão was the setting for a rice plantation economy, which knowingly exploited enslaved West African rice growers. Plantation runaways carried rice to maroon (quilombo) communities where the esteemed dietary staple was planted. Oral histories commemorate the role of enslaved African and Afrodescendant women in quilombo rice transfers and the subsistence practices that shaped the rice-based peasant farming systems of the African Diaspora.