For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil

Abstract

It is a troubling time to be hopeful about land and labor in Brazil. As Merle Bowen notes in the concluding chapter of For Land and Liberty, the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his administration have dismantled environmental protections, opened protected areas to agro-industrial development, and stalled programs that provide access to land for members of Brazil's quilombo communities. Gains from conditional cash transfer programs and the rewriting of public school curriculuma are being reversed, eroded, or eviscerated. Other attacks on the lives and livelihoods of Black and Brown persons in Brazil include assassinations of environmental activists, attempts to revoke affirmative action in higher education, and the undermining of public health efforts to address COVID-19, which has disproportionately affected Indigenous and other minorities.Bowen spent fifteen years examining the ways structural racism operates in rural areas of Brazil, where access to land and labor continues to be one of the most pressing issues. Residents of Black rural communities are corralled by a “highly concentrated and racialized system of landownership” (212). The slow and highly contentious land reform process competes with agro-industrial interests, logging and mining companies, grileiros (people who claim ownership with fabricated deeds), and environmental protection projects, resulting in forced relocation, dispossession, and shifts in the nature, extent, and types of labor available.Bowen assembled information from a vast array of sources and stakeholders including anthropologists, government ministers, landowners, and Afro-Brazilian activists, as well as archives, primary and secondary publications, and ethnographic data. She provides a detailed, close-up view of what this looks like “on the ground” for twelve Black rural communities in two very different regions: Bahia (in the northeast) and the interior of São Paulo. This attention to regional differences is an important complement to the scholarly literature, as it provides a deeper understanding of the history, local conditions, demographics, crops, instability of wage labor, and the gendered nature of labor, disrupting the tendency to homogenize or romanticize the struggles that quilombolas face.Chapter 2 traces the history, heterogeneity, and shifting agendas of Black activists and the efforts that led to the insertion of a land reform initiative in the 1988 Constitution (Article 68), which guaranteed permanent collective ownership to federally recognized Maroon communities (also called remanescentes de quilombos or quilombo remnant communities). There are an estimated four thousand quilombo communities in both urban and rural areas in Brazil. The communities Bowen focuses on are representative of those still waiting for a land title. The titling process is long and complicated, and until they receive a land title, residents of traditional Black communities are under constant threat of expulsion or relocation. Petitions for land titles have generated charges of reverse racism and violence from those who refuse to accept the legitimacy of quilombola rights to territory. Since 1988, receiving a title has been the exception rather than the rule.Bowen's research provides a fine-grained assessment of the challenges in applying Article 68, including operationalizing “who” is a quilombola, and how shifting jurisdictional procedures, state laws favoring titling, and market forces have impacted the daily lives of rural quilombolas (Chapters 2 and 3). The anchor or signature of identity for those in Black rural communities is “rootedness” to the land they occupy, drawn from an intergenerational accumulation of agroecological knowledge and practices, a distinction from urban communities that do not rely on the land for their livelihood (Chapter 4).In Chapter 5, Bowen turns to the “commodification of Quilombola culture” as a revenue strategy and a chance for “self-determination and self-making” (182). There has been less investment in quilombo tourism than in tourism along coastal beach areas, ecotourism in the Amazon region, or pro-poor/reality tourism in urban shantytowns. Despite the lack of evidence, assertions are made about the potential positive impact of tourism in quilombos through job creation. Although there is little research on tourism in quilombos, some suggest that it presents a simplified and incomplete rendering of the past (and present) by focusing only on African cultural retentions while obscuring the knowledge, experiences, and skills of enslaved workers in a nation that was built on their labor. Success is more evident when quilombolas set the terms for what to showcase and have a major stake in ownership and representation. Unfortunately, conflict with tourist agencies' agendas and other imbalances in the quilombo tourism industry have reinforced racial, class, and gendered disparities, and do little to reduce poverty.Scholars of Latin American studies, Africana studies, history, geography, anthropology, and agrarian studies will get an extensive overview of the regional complexities in applying a land reform program, including what was promised and what has failed to deliver. It is not altogether a grim portrait; but the long-term benefits of these policies in transforming the livelihoods of those in Black rural communities remain contingent on access to labor as well as a land title.