Rubber tapper citizens: emerging places, policies, and shifting rural-urban identities in Acre, Brazil

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, a strong social movement of rubber tappers in the Amazonian state of Acre achieved remarkable policy goals, gaining new forms of land rights as well as political representation through their alliance with indigenous groups, environmentalists, political parties and human rights advocates. Allies of the social movement entered politics and took state power in 1999 as the “Forest Government,” building on the rubber tapper's legacy to embrace the unique cultural and political history of the state, and implementing ambitious plans for forest-based development under the banner of “forest citizenship.” In the past 25 years, however, rubber tapper identity has changed rapidly as many rubber tappers migrate to urban areas, or increasingly shift from traditional rubber tapping to more intensive land uses such as commercial agriculture and small-scale animal husbandry. This paper uses data collected from household surveys, key-informant interviews and ethnographic research to explore the idea of what it means to be a “rubber tapper” and “forest citizen” today. We examine the contradictory nature of changing land-use and cultural revitalization efforts among diverse rural and urban populations, and the implications of this diversity for the future of the Forest Government's policies, and the rubber tappers.

Keywords:

• rubber tappers
• identity
• place
• Amazon
• Acre
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

This research was funded, in part, by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State, the Program de Doutorado Pleno no Exterior/CNPq, and Programa BECA/Instituto Internacional de Educação do Brasil. We are grateful to Mâncio Lima Cordeiro, and the Group for Research and Extension in Agroforestry Systems in Acre (PESACRE) for continued support. We would also like to thank Mike Larson for his cartographic expertise, and Alyson Greiner, Jay H. Jump, Rebecca Sheehan, and two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments regarding this manuscript.

Notes

1. The term was coined by Antônio Alves Leitão Neto, an advisor to the state government in Acre.

2. People from Acre, according to the new spelling rules instituted in Brazil in 2008.

3. The “Legal Amazon” refers to the official designation of the Brazilian Amazon Region according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). This political and administrative region has expanded over time (see Browder and Godfrey 1997, p. 18), to include the states of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Maranhão, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocantins.

4. Given the sensitive nature of the topic and for ease of reading, direct quotations are presented here anonymously, and were translated by the authors from Portuguese. Quotations were selected from household interviews completed with rubber tapper families within the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve (CMER) between March 2004 and January 2005 (see methods section for further detail).

5. The state briefly was an independent country at the turn of the 20^th century, from 1899 to 1900 (see Schmink and Cordeiro 2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacqueline M. Vadjunec

Jacqueline M. Vadjunec, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Oklahoma State University, 324 Murray Hall, Stillwater, OK 74074, USA