Who owns paradise? Afro-Brazilians and ethnic tourism in Brazil’s quilombos

ABSTRACT

In twenty-first century Brazil, Afro-Brazilians have embraced various cultural markers of their ethno-racial identity to improve their economic survival and well-being. Although these markers may take many forms across Brazil, this essay examines the growing enterprise of ethnic tourism in quilombos or communities of African descent. The work of John L. and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc., is introduced as a point of departure to explore the two different manifestations of the ethnic commodity economy: the commodification of culture and the incorporation of identity. I argue that the ethno-commodity phenomenon is not a scalable or equitable model of development for Brazil’s quilombos. Case studies show that quilombolas or residents of these communities have adopted ethnic tourism primarily because of the loss of wage employment alternatives and environmental policies that threaten their livelihoods. The examples also illustrate that quilombolas continue to sell their labor, even as they are forced to insert themselves into the global economy by commodifying their culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic tourism
• quilombos
• black rural communities
• ethno-racial identity
• Afro-Brazilians
• Brazil

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Quilombos are popularly referred to as runaway slave communities but the term no longer refers only to this historical process. The term continues to evolve, with new meanings and uses (Leite 2015). Quilombola refers to the people (singular or plural) living in such a community. The term quilombola can also function as the adjectival form of quilombo, as in quilombola community (Ansell 2014).

2 For more detail on forms of whitening in Brazil, see the papers in this volume by Mitchell and Sullivan.

3 Bolsa Família is a successful conditional cash transfer program for the poor that the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva established in 2003.

4 In October 2015, President Dilma Rouseff combined three separate Secretariats, including SEPPIR, into a new ministry called the Ministry of Women, Racial Equality and Human Rights, as part of her cabinet reshuffle.

5 The Ribeira Valley is situated between two states: the southeastern region of São Paulo and the eastern region of Paraná. Together this area is home to 88 quilombo communities (Andrade and Tatto 2013).

6 Piaçava is a palm tree fiber that is peeled from the tree’s trunk and used to make natural brooms that are widely sold throughout Brazil.

7 The quilombola territories are collective properties of land and the communities are not allowed to sell, transfer, or rent the land.

8 The situation is similar in the Amazon region where quilombolas have increasingly abandoned the classic slash-and-burn technique on their farms or rocados. See Arregui (2015, 259–265).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from the University of Illinois Research Board [RB15124], the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Lemann Institute of Brazilian Studies.