“If We Didn't Have Water”: Black Women's Struggle for Urban Land Rights in Brazil

Abstract

This article explores the relation between black women's quest for environmental justice and the struggle for urban land rights. Using ethnographic research conducted in Gamboa de Baixo, a coastal community in the center of Brazil's northeastern city of Salvador, I defend the claim that Afro-Brazilian religious thought has shaped blacks' relationship to the sea, and subsequently community politics defending their right to occupy the land alongside it. More important, we are able to understand black women's leadership in religious communities as intertwined with their central roles in building neighborhoods and fighting for material resources such as water necessary to sustain them.