The struggle for black land rights in Brazil: an insider's view on quilombos and the quilombo land movement

Abstract

In recent years, land movements in many countries of the Global South have played a pivotal role in pressuring their government to pass new land legislation that recognizes both customary and ethnic land rights. In Brazil, Afro-Brazilian land activists lobbied the government to include protection of the territorial and cultural integrity of black rural communities in the 1988 constitution. Since the mid-1990s, the national quilombo movement has effectively mobilized rural black communities around the issues of landownership and the regularization of quilombo territories.