Exodus Revisited: The Politics and Experience of Rural Loss in Central Brazil

Abstract

The internal differences among people who have been referred to as peasants, and the long history of labour market participation by rural people in Latin America, suggest that rural exodus and urbanization must be treated as complex processes that have varied widely across time and space. Rural exodus continues to be a compelling metaphor for the contradictions of modernization today in Latin America. This article looks at the process and meaning of expulsion from the land in a prosperous agricultural region of central Brazil where almost all people today live in cities and towns. Intensive interviews with former rural dwellers, and rural union documentation of a number of cases of tenant expulsion by landowners, help situate the experience of rural exodus within two major commodity systems: free range cattle ranching and cotton production. In the first, a more traditional local system, tenant farmers known as agregados were eased off the land over a generation. Their loss occurred in a context of paternalism and negotiation which shielded many of them from the potentially devestating impact of landlessness. Workers in cotton production were first dislodged from other poorer regions in Brazil before being taken by labour brokers to the region of study. As day labourers with few local social ties, these people had a harder time in their move to town. It is important to recognize the political and economic relationships of working people to the land to understand why, in a region such as this, neither group of workers has insisted on returning to it. Resident cattle workers and cotton workers held no claims to land ownership. In addition, their long‐established dependence on town life have made them reluctant to seek returning to the land.