This Land Is Ours Now: Spatial Imaginaries and the Struggle for Land in Brazil

Abstract

In recent years, scholars of “contentious politics” have paid increasing attention to the dynamics of space and place in the construction of organized resistance. To date, however, the literature has tended to focus on the social construction of space rather than the equally important spatial constitution of the social. In this paper, I analyze how particular understandings of space, or what I call “spatial imaginaries”—cognitive frameworks, both collective and individual, constituted through the lived experiences, perceptions, and conceptions of space itself—influenced the formation of the largest grassroots social movement in Brazilian history, the Movement of Rural Landless Workers (the MST). I analyze the decision to join the MST among small family farmers in southern Brazil and rural plantation workers in northeastern Brazil. People from both groups decided to join the movement, but the farmers from southern Brazil used their spatial imaginaries to embrace the act of occupying land and to create new frontiers for colonization while the rural workers from northeastern Brazil overcame the spatial imaginaries produced through the plantation labor system and joined the movement because they had few other options available to them. Because such imaginaries stay with people long after they engage in the initial acts of mobilization, incorporating this sort of analysis introduces an important dynamic component into the analysis of movement formation.

Key Words:

• social movements
• agrarian political economy
• Brazil

Acknowledgments

This research was generously supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute for the Study of World Peace. This paper was submitted to the AAG Nystrom Competition for Best Dissertation in 2002 and selected as a co-winner. Theauthor would like to thank the Nystrom selection committee as well as Julie Guthman, Felicia Mebane, Andrew Perrin, Charles Postel, Jessica Teisch, Michael Watts, and Angus Wright for their help with previous drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Some of the most comprehensive and informative pieces on the movement include: Fernandes 1999, Rocha and Branford 2002, and Wright and Wolford 2003.

2. This research was generously supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute for the Study of World Peace. I spent one year (1996–1997) in Brazil conducting preliminary research and returned in 1998 and 1999 to carry out the field research. I spent seven months in Santa Catarina and seven months in Pernambuco, interviewing approximately 200 MST settlers, as well as many MST leaders, local politicians, small farmers in the regions surrounding the settlements, agrarian reform agents, and agricultural day-laborers living in urban peripheries. A return trip to Brazil in the summer of 2001 helped me to solidify my arguments.

3. In the 1930s, the political-economic basis of development shifted from a fairly exclusive focus on agricultural commodities to include industrial manufacturing. See Warren Dean's (1985) work on the transition from coffee to industry in São Paulo in the early 20th century. Despite this shift, rural elites continued to be a strong political voice. Inequalities in the rural areas have arguably generated the most consistent political tension in the country.

4. In 2000, the population of São Paulo was estimated at 17.8 million. These figures almost certainly underestimate the actual population given the difficulty of counting heads in rapidly changing urban squatter settlements.

5. In 1960, the wealthiest 5 percent of Brazil's economically active population earned 27.7 percent of the country's total income. In 1990, the top 5 percent earned 35.8 percent of total income (see Skidmore 1999,; 198).

6. Brazil's foreign debt increased from US$49.9 billion in 1979 to US$91.0 billion in 1984 (see Hirst at http://www.mre.gov.br/acs/diplomacia/ingles/h_diplom/gm017i.htm).

7. During the years that the military held power in Brazil (1964–1985), the fiction of civilian elections was maintained. Upon being nominated for president, the indicated military leader revoked his military status and technically became a civilian leader. Nineteen eighty five was the first year since 1964, however, that the president of Brazil did not come out of the military's ranks.

8. The Official Genesis Story may be as effective as it is because it fits into the movement's “master frame” (Benford and Snow 2000), actively constructed (although not necessarily intentionally) to legitimate the movement's actions both internally and externally. The movement's master frame focuses on capitalism and the state as key figures in the exploitation of rural landless workers and calls on thepower of the Catholic Church to justify mobilization. The state is portrayed as a class enemy that will only accede to demands for land under great pressure and if people mobilize within the movement. MST documents stress the need to experiment with economic and political alternatives in the settlements, working toward the creation of a “new society.” In this context, the Official Genesis Story appears self-evident and serves to bolster the movement's master frame.

9. Not the community's real name.

10. All names have been changed.

11. The state of Santa Catarina made colonization a priority because of territorial disputes with the neighboring state of Parana. These disputes culminated in the Contestado War (1912–1916) (see Diacon 1991).

12. All direct quotes in this paper are taken from interviews conducted by the author between October 1998 and November 1999. Interviews were either taped or written down, depending on the circumstances. The author received approval from the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects at the University of California at Berkeley (approval #99-4-76).

13. Maria Paulilo (1996) found that the settlers she interviewed in Santa Catarina had moved an average of three times before joining an MST occupation (124).

14. Western Santa Catarina was an area of relatively recent colonization in Brazil. The region offered a seemingly generous spatial frontier that began to attract people—primarily small farmers—in the 1920s and did not fill up until the 1970s.

15. The contracts mediating rental varied considerably, although they generally exchanged usufruct rights to land for anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of production income.

16. Not the community's real name.

17. Another strategy used by the mill owners was to order workers to do jobs for which they were either not qualified or which were below their previous position (cf. Siguad 1977). As one former cane worker said, “I stayed there for four years all at once, I worked with the tractor there. And…something happened there—the tractor broke down—and the man said, ‘If you want, you can go cut cane’ and so I said, ‘If it's to cut cane, I will do it somewhere else, but not here in your mill.’”

18. After the First National Congress in 1985, MST activists attempted to establish a branch of the movement in Pernambuco. The movement saw the sugarcane region of Pernambuco as important because of the region's history of rural organization and because of the return of Miguel Arraes (in 1986 and 1994) as governor of the state. Arraes, who had been governor of Pernambuco at the time of the military coup, became known as a friend of the rural poor because of his support for rural workers' rights. MST's efforts to organize in Pernambuco during the 1980s were unsuccessful however. The leaders attributed their difficulties to a surprising lack of support from Arraes and to an unwillingness to organize among the local population.

19. According to federal law, the mill owners are expected to sign working papers for every person employed on the plantation. The papers are intended to ensure that the workers receive their rights, that they are eligible for union membership, and that they have their years of service counted in the interests of receiving their benefits. Uncertified workers, on the other hand, did not receive any of the public or private benefits of being registered as a legal worker.

20. The uncertified workers were also kept from joining the rural unions, a traditional source of protection for the plantation workers. The unions were hurt badly by the region's sugar crisis because when there aren't any jobs, nobody pays the union fees. The unions were also deeply implicated in the sugar industry and highly ambivalent about supporting MST: “In seven or eight cities around here, it's the mill owner who controls the unions, so the president of the union does whatever the boss says.”