The Overseen and Unseen: Agribusiness Plantations, Indigenous Labor, and Land Struggle in Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the land conflict between plantation owners and indigenous activists in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, by ethnographically tracing the role of state‐issued identification and work documents in the subjugation of Indigenous laborers. Some state agencies contradictorily attempt to protect rural workers via the proliferation of such documents. In practice, this serves only to invisibly bind Indigenous workers to networks of local strongmen, who effectively operate as their overseers. As such, work documents facilitate new, but familiar, forms of exploitation of racialized labor. These circumstances are part of the impetus and logic of Indigenous land protesters’ “occupation” of agribusiness plantations. Activists seek to reclaim land as a counter to historical and ongoing conditions of displacement and coercion. [land conflict, labor, race, Indigeneity, Brazil]