Quilombolas and Citizens: National Projects and the Right to Land in Brazil

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

Abstract

In Brazil, the statuses of the legal, political, and civil enfranchisement of the Afro-descendant population in the post-abolition period are controversial. 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 a certain segment of the population and to the detriment of others who have nevertheless attempted to subscribe to the so-called “whitening” (europeanization) of the nation. If the quest for land rights has produced several social markers in certain distinct institutional contexts of recent Brazilian history, I will point out here 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 as a means of underlining their relational differences vis à vis all other social groups.

Author

• Sandro J Silva, Brazilian Anthropologist Association