Race, Inequality and the Emergence of Ethnoracial Citizenship in Contemporary Brazil

• In Event: Afro-Brazilian Citizenship and the Politics of The Past and Future

Abstract

In the decades since Brazil's 1988 constitution mandated that the state guarantee inalienable land rights to remanescentes das comunidades de quilombos (literally, descendents of escaped-slave descended communities), people throughout Brazil, particularly in rural areas, have mobilized around the provision and come to identify as quilombolas. The legal and colloquial meanings of the term, quilombola, have undergone many changes over this period, and quilombo identity and the struggles of the "quilombo movement" have generated a large and vigorous scholarship in Brazil and abroad. That scholarship divides into two poles: some scholars have emphasized the importance of the law in producing a new ethnoracial identity; others have drawn connections between contemporary quilombola identity and long-existing, often stigmatized, Afro-Brazilian identity. Both of these bodies of scholarship get a lot right, but neither has successfully inquired into the wider conditions that have made quilombola identity so powerful and charismatic to so many Brazilians. Drawing on long-term research in Alcântara, Maranhão, where communities now legally categorized as quilombos have faced more than three decades of land conflict with the launching hub of Brazil's space program, this paper identifies other reasons for the emergence of the quilombo movement as an important political force. I identify four interrelated causes: a) the decline of "whitening" as a model of mobility for non-white Brazilians, b) the decline of relations of patronage with the wealthy and powerful for poor rural Brazilians, c) the national and international symbolic currency for quilombo-identified political movements, and d) the rising power of ideologies of formal equality over older Brazilian ideologies of complementary hierarchy. Showing ethnographically how these four factors have made quilombola identity important among villagers in Alcântara, I argue that if Brazil's constitution had not propagated something like quilombola identity, someone would have to invent it.

Author

• Sean T Mitchell, Rutgers University, Newark