The Caboclo Population of the Araucaria Forest of Santa Catarina: Common Use of Land, Expropriation and Marginalization

Abstract

From the end of the eighteenth century, a substantial portion of Santa Catarina state’s population settled in its region of Mixed Ombrophilous Forest or Araucaria Forest. Known as Caboclos, these people lived on the margins of the cattle ranches in the Grasslands region. Their basic source of income was subsistence farming and other practices linked to the exploration of common forest resources, such as breeding free-range pigs and harvesting yerba mate. Like land ownership and social life, access to these resources was regulated by a set of practices, norms and customs consistent and sustainable with this environment, which also served as a kind of territorial delimitation of these populations. The aim of this article is to analyze how the private appropriation of land – represented by colonization and the activities of the timber industry, which devastated the region’s forests, especially from the first two decades of the twentieth century onwards – led to the disintegration of spaces of common use, increased the instances of expropriation, and exacerbated the marginalization of this Caboclo population.