Quilombolas and citizens: national projects and the right to land in Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Brazil, the legal, political, and civil status of the Afro-descendant population in the post-abolition period has long been a topic of conflict and controversy. Public policies relating to access to land, for example, have skewed the concentration of real estate – in both physical and symbolic terms – in favor of certain segments of the population and to the detriment of others who have nevertheless frequently attempted to subscribe to the so-called ‘whitening’ (Europeanization) of the nation. In this article, I trace the trajectory which has carried quilombolas (maroons: the descendants of self-liberated African slaves) of the north of the state of Espírito Santo to a position of publicly affirming their rights to both identity and territory by making land claims against other agents in the public sphere. I seek to identify the contexts of the formation of these assertions of agency in the midst of multiple rural and quilombola identities in order to identify how quilombolas have asserted their relational differences vis-à-vis all other social groups.