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Mariléa (re)visits quilombos

The historian carried out around 50 interviews to show female protagonism in 17 “territories of affection”

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Mariléa reminds me of Marielle Franco not only in the similarity of her name, but in her wide smile and the precise way she uses words, as demonstrated in the excerpt above. Both black and concerned with the issues that afflict the most vulnerable population in the State of Rio de Janeiro: those who live in favelas or remnants of quilombos. On the same day that Mariléa gave this interview (March 14) to Journal of Unicamp, Marielle would be murdered.

Mariléa de Almeida is the author of the thesis “Território de Afetos: anti-racist feminine practices in contemporary quilombos in Rio de Janeiro”, defended in the Postgraduate Program in History at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp. She visited 17 quilombos in the State of Rio de Janeiro and carried out around 50 interviews with the aim of learning about political practices, especially those linked to the female and quilombola universe, present in the communities. The research was guided by professor Margareth Rago.

Photo: Perri
Mariléa de Almeida, author of the thesis “Território de Afetos: anti-racist feminine practices in contemporary quilombos in Rio de Janeiro”

The author of the thesis details that territories of affection are not defined by quilombola legal identity, but by the relationship established with the place and with those who live there. “It is a political attitude that privileges the uses of knowledge as a way of expanding spaces of subjectivation, constituted through displacements of meanings that quilombola female leaders carry out in relation to the effects of race, class or gender exclusions that affect their bodies and the territories of their communities”. 

The work uses the term affection in the path opened by Spinoza, that is, as “the affections of the body, through which its power to act is increased or diminished, stimulated or restrained, and, at the same time, the ideas of these affections”, adds the researcher.

The starting point for the investigation developed in the thesis was the reading of anthropological identification reports, documents used during the legal process of land claims. Mariléa realized that, despite the constant presence of women and cultural practices related to the feminine field, the literature that dealt with the resemantization of the term quilombo, during the 1990s and early 2000s, did not emphasize the gender dimension. in the process of constructing meanings about the territories of rural black communities that claimed territorial rights.   

For the author, practices attributed to feminine culture, such as care through the use of medicinal herbs, religious practices, among others, mobilized new meanings about the term quilombo in the 1990s, which was traditionally constructed under the idea of ​​war, virility and strength.  

According to Mariléa, this does not mean that men do not share these experiences around care and the transmission of knowledge, but the author suggests that there is a political technology, which is feminine and fundamental for the survival of families in the territories, which is the of care. “This is extremely political, especially if you look at the development rates within quilombola communities.”

According to the historian, schools or medical care are generally not available in quilombos. “Racist exclusion devices are much more perverse within quilombola communities. The development rates are alarming from the point of view of access to public policy.”

Care practices, he explains, involve transmission of knowledge, whether related to medicinal herbs, religion or cultural practices. “A series of technologies that are obviously not capable of stopping a racist structure, but were fundamental in trying to maintain life in these communities.”

Right

Only in the 1988 Constitution was the quilombola right to the remaining territories recognized. According to data available on the website of the National Coordination of Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (Conaq), there is no consensus on the precise number of quilombola communities in the country. The Special Secretariat for Policies to Promote Racial Equality (Seppir) and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra) currently estimate 2.847 certified communities in Brazil. There are 1.533 open cases.

The number of certified communities is not greater, argues Mariléa, because of bureaucracy, one of the expressions of racism, according to the author. “Until the 1980s, the quilombo model was thought of from a perspective very close to the imagery related to Quilombo dos Palmares, that is, a refuge for black people with a certain ethnic-racial homogeneity, a place of resistance and warlike and warlike confrontation against the system. ”. Due to a mistaken notion, it was believed that there were very few quilombos in Brazil.

However, a large part of the communities that were formed and that can be called quilombos or mocambos were made up of networks that were not isolated, adds the researcher. “With the emergence of quilombola rights, several rural black communities are beginning to claim their territorial rights. However, the trajectory of these communities did not converge with the traditional conception of quilombo”.

Some were created through the donation of land formally or informally, pre- or post-Abolition. Others are occupations of vacant land. “All groups have some characteristics in common. These are kinship groups that have a peasant relationship with the land. These formations constitute the new quilombola communities. In the 1980s, the concept of quilombo did not take into account the countless experiences and singularities of the communities”.

Mariléa highlights that territorial rights in the Constitution were achieved through the mobilization of rural black communities. “It was the first time that the Brazilian State recognized the weight of racism in structural terms in reversing the conditions of quilombola communities.” But the racist model remains in legal practices, according to the thesis. The author uses the term racist governmentality to translate how the impediment of access to land and public policies as a whole is articulated.

The thesis defended by Mariléa is that this racist governmentality is expressed in three ways: extreme bureaucracy, the exoticization of bodies and cultural practices and very precarious access to public policies. In other words, mechanisms are created to perpetuate inequalities. “During the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to obtain land, communities had to prove that they had remained there for 100 years, which represents illegality even from a legal point of view. Access to land is difficult.”

According to Mariléa, the loss of territory represents, from a symbolic point of view, the loss of a series of knowledge, identities and values. “We are talking about a death of epistemologies, a death of knowledge”.

Since the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, there have been significant changes, with the creation of the Brasil Quilombola program, extinguished by the government of Michel Temer. “There have been advances in public policies, but not much in land regulation.” In this area, he states, what there are are “clashes between individuals and government agencies, business owners, and landowners against rural black communities with very high rates of illiteracy”, he comments.

In addition to the bureaucracy that makes it difficult to obtain land ownership titles, racist governmentality is expressed in the exoticization of bodies and cultural practices. The author emphasizes that practices such as jongo, for example, contain certain values ​​and world views that oppose the capitalist values ​​of contemporary society. “When exoticized, values ​​are emptied and cultural practice is transformed into a product for the delight of tourists.”

The third form of racist governmentality described in the thesis concerns the limited scope of public policies. “When men are killed by bullets, alcoholism or precarious working conditions, we will see the importance of women in structuring these families, even though the person who appears in the story is Zumbi and not Dandara or Aqualtune”, exclaims the author, referring to Dandara, who was married to the leader Zumbi dos Palmares, and Aqualtune, her maternal grandmother.

Mariléa draws attention to the micropolitics that occur in the daily lives of communities, such as having to deal with a fence that is reaching the territory. Of the quilombos visited in Rio de Janeiro, the researcher narrates some of these experiences. In the community of Sacopã, it is a feijoada with samba that keeps the neighbors of Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas awake at night. There are still daily clashes between the communities of Campinhos da Independência, in Paraty, with the condominium that makes access to part of the coast and subsistence fishing difficult, or in Quilombo da Tapera, in Petrópolis, where the construction of another condominium forces the quilombolas crossing a gate to get home. “The biggest tragedy is that many residents work as maids, caretakers and gardeners in the condominium itself. When the paving ends, the quilombo begins.” A slave past that never ends.

 

Four characters

Photo: Aaron Jaekel (2016)
Marilda de Souza Francisco, 52 years old, from the Bracuí quilombo (Angra dos Reis), storyteller and promoter of the community's local history | Photo: Aaron Jaekel (2016)

 “[...] our fight continues to be for the conquest of the land and the strengthening of the community, of people, like education, self-esteem, because we black people have very low esteem for what happened in the past”.

 

Photo: Aaron Jaekel (2016)
Fabiana Ramos, 31 years old, from the Bracuí quilombo, with a degree in rural education from UFRRJ and a quilombola education activist. Photo: Aaron Jaekel (2016)

“[...] when I started taking the test, I thought I wouldn’t pass. Like: I won't be able to pass Federal. In fact, our psychology within a public school is not self-esteem. It lowers the total esteem. So: we weren’t worked.”

 

Photo: Aaron Jaekel (2016)
Laura Maria dos Santos, 57 years old, from the quilombo of Campinho da Independência (Paraty), pedagogue, jongueira and activist for differentiated education | Photo: Aaron Jaekel (2016)

“I only went to school when I was nine years old. I loved studying. My first day at school is the day I remember most. I remember that I really liked reading. Read everything. So I read all those books. I remember that I would hide in the basement to read, because if my aunt caught me reading, she would beat me. In fact, when she said: 'I'm going to give this girl an education', she wanted to teach me the skills, but I didn't care about that. That was my first act of resistance: not wanting to learn what my mother [aunt] wanted me to learn. I got hit a lot. You imagine as a child, in the place where we lived on the outskirts, what I had was the backyard. A girl in prison, that very strict upbringing. So, I remember that what I had was the backyard. Good thing, the yard was big, there were almond trees, mango trees, guava trees.”

 

Photo: Carla Marques (2014).
Terezinha Fernandes de Azedias, 72 years old, from the quilombo of São José da Serra (Valença), mother of a saint from an Umbanda terreiro. Photo: Carla Marques (2014).

“The jongo people left for São Paulo. In their time, children didn't enter the jongo, they could only dance in the tent, they couldn't get into the jongo. So, they left, leaving the tambu with Dad. Then she came here, mom was responsible and she taught all the children how to dance.”

 

 

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Audio description: Montage with photos, and in the foreground, on the left, a woman, in a bust and profile image, speaks gesturing with her hands, keeping her fingers interlaced in front. She wears a black sleeveless blouse. In the background, occupying the entire image, are several photos with women's faces, arranged in rectangles, one next to the other, similar to three-by-four size photos. Image 1 of 1.

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