This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil (review)

Wendy Wolford uses her fifteen years of experience with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Terra, or MST (the Rural Landless Worker's Movement) to write This Land is Ours Now. The book is centered on extensive ethnographic research in two states in Brazil, Santa Catarina and Pernambuco. Wolford seeks to understand social mobilization within a movement. In her own words "… to understand how the movement works in particular places" (6) To achieve her goals, she presents an innovative framework by focusing on ordinary people, on everyday political economies, and common sense. Two MST settlements are compared and contrasted: the Campos Novos settlement in Santa Catarina state in southern Brazil, and the Água Preta settlement in Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil. The settlers in Campos Novos were characterized as small farmers for generations before joining the MST, while settlers in Água Preta had almost all worked in sugarcane plantations for a wage. Consequently, the two locations represented different political economies, customs, culture, and context, or "moral economies." Wolford shows that in mobilizing throughout Brazil, MST seeks to produce a coherent movement identity, or its imagined community of landless people. However, this is not always possible.

The author argues that when settlers joined the MST, they did so with a variety of aspirations. In general terms, all settlers had similar desires such as the dream of a better life, but what they wanted depended on a whole set of specific meanings: what land meant to them, what family meant, what justice meant. Wolford argues that to understand these meanings and how they influenced people's decisions to join the MST we need to understand how the institutions that structured their lives, and the norms that shaped their behavior, were rooted in each particular place, family practices, and community traditions. In this context, in the Campo Novos settlement, small farmers joined the MST in order to continue the way of life that they had practiced for generations. On the other hand, in the northeast two factors were important in joining the movement. First, MST members were pushed into the movement by their desperate situation and lack of alternatives. Second, they were pulled into the movement by the prospect of belonging to an organization directly connected to channels of power.

Before delving into a deeper examination of each settlement, Wolford starts by conducting an analysis of historical property relations in Brazil. Three points are highlighted. First, the historical circumstance and conditions have produced a smallholder farm-based politics in southern Brazil. Second, the author argues that any analysis of the MST official genesis story is incomplete without an accounting of structural factors and moral economies. Third, the MST ideals, strategies, and culture were heavily influenced by the moral economies of smallholders from southern Brazil. However, the influence of smallholders from southern Brazil did not transform the MST into a regional movement. On the contrary, the author suggests that the identity that MST created relies on a politics of scale and that the MST has privileged scale over place in an effort to nationalize the struggle for land. Consequently, this allowed the movement to achieve significant success at the national and international levels, but it has also generated contradictions in particular places. A good example of this contradiction is found in the Água Preta settlement in the zona da mata of Pernambuco state, a region characterized by sugarcane plantations. The author argues that MST took so many years to develop in this region because the moral economies of sugarcane plantations were so different from the moral economies of small family farms in southern Brazil. Wolford analyzes social mobilization by providing testimony from several movement members as an example of diverse membership within the movement and she situates the decline of the movement in the zona da mata through three important issues: production, property and politics. The book...