“The Land is Ours and We Are Free to Do All that We Want”: Quilombos And Black Rural Protest in Amazonia, Brazil, 1917–1929

“THE LAND IS OURS AND WE ARE FREE TO DO ALL THAT WE WANT”: QUILOMBOS AND BLACK RURAL PROTEST IN AMAZONIA, BRAZIL, 1917–19291 Oscar de la Torre University of North Carolina at Charlotte In Race in Another America, a fundamental synthesis of race relations in Brazil published in 2004, sociologist Edward Telles states that the recognition of black rural communities descending from runaway slaves, called quilombos or mocambos in Brazil, was “the one area in which the federal government was active in explicit support of the black community” during the 1990s.2 The inclusion of Article 68 in the Transitory Dispositions of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 granting collective land deeds to the descendants of quilombos paved the way for the relatively successful political mobilization of hundreds of black rural communities across the country.3 During those years the definition of quilombo gradually changed from communities that descended exclusively from runaways to black rural groups in general, and the joint pressure of the communities themselves, intellectuals , activists, and occasionally policy-makers, led to a significant stream of legislation at the federal, state, and local level, focusing not only on the grant of land deeds, but also on housing, sanitation, schooling, cultural activities, and income-generation programs for the quilombos.4 Despite the regional differences in governmental action, and the often overwhelming challenge of transforming the letter of the law into effective action, the contrast to the controversial application of affirmative action policies is clear. Since Brazil re-entered democracy in 1985, the implementation of affirmative action agendas in education and public institutions has met the opposition of significant sectors in Brazilian society due not only to its mixed-race population, but also to its national narrative of racial democracy. While by 2002 more than 30 quilombo communities had received their collective land deed and some states had implemented comprehensive legislative programs for quilombos, only the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) had started an affirmative action program.5 The significant institutional impact of black rural communities in the 1990s has led many scholars to focus on how during that decade many Afro-Brazilians living in rural areas adopted a new identity as descendants of quilombos.6 Aided by black movements, and seeking to become valid recipients of the collective land deeds, a number of mixed-race rural hamlets with few memories related to slavery or marronage imagined and endorsed such a past as they organized themselves as quilombo-descendants. But while the 1990s were indeed an important period of identity-building C  2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 33 The Latin Americanist, December 2012 for black rural communities, I will argue in this article that similar processes took place earlier in the twentieth century. As will be shown through the study of a cycle of protests over land and labor in the region of Baixo Amazonas (Pará), quilombo-descendants emphasized their shared history and engaged in public protest already in the 1920s. The political life of black rural communities did not start in 1988. Perhaps the main reason why black protest in rural areas during most of the twentieth century has received little attention is that at first glance it looks like a simple reaction to encroachments upon the land, not very different from that of other peasants. Nonetheless, historians of modern Brazil have already argued that peasant protest is like the fabric of a tapestry: we need to disentangle its multiple threads in order to understand how class, race, gender, region or religion have come together to weave complex historical episodes of such as the Quebra-Quilo revolt (1874–75), the episode of Canudos (1893–97), or the Contestado rebellion (1912–16)7 . In this case, by discussing in detail a 1921 black peasant protest in the county of Alenquer (Pará, Brazil), I will show how Afro-descendant peasants borrowed ideas and practices from white and mixed-race Amazon peasants , although they re-interpreted and expressed those ideas through the lenses of their specific history. They imaginatively combined references to their past as maroons with claims of being the owners of the lands where they lived on the basis of custom, echoing...