Fazendas e casas de taipa: a dinâmica do sistema de moradores no semiárido

Abstract

In the same way they extinguished the Indians of Ceará by means of a decree in the second half of the nineteenth century, they want to extinguish the category of “moradores” (rural property tenants), “emptying the farms” due to a supposed modernization of the production relations of the semi-arid region. Influenced by studies on rural areas with high capitalization, which modernized labor relations, they generalize, therefore, this particularity for the whole Brazilian territory. Thus, by abolishing the “morada” (the traditional rural dwelling system), they decree the end of the traditional domination of coronelism, it means, the vow of obedience or the voting halter, and also the electoral votes or “electoral corrals”. This paper, however, highlights the dynamics of the social processes of the semi-arid, showing that there is a continuous movement of settlement, emptying and repopulation of the dwellers on the plantations, which, in the structured history of the region, tends to the stability of the “moradores system”. Indeed, this system remains an economic alternative for farms and rural enterprises, because the capitalist expansion and the access of the “moradores” to social and labor rights were not able to dissolve it completely, but to transform it, without expropriating, in a generalized way, the resident workers. I come, with this dissertation, to demonstrate this dynamic of the relations of dwelling through the Marxist dialectics, comparing the past, inscribed in a long duration, with the present time. That way, in the first part of this paper, I problematize the elements that form the “moradores system “(land structure, patrimonial organization of work, protagonists, peculiarities, drought and State intervention in the region. And in the second part of this paper, I question its dissolving elements (migration, drought, the development of capitalist exchange, and agrarian reform). For that, I make use of history sources and research techniques, such as participant observation, observant participation and semi-structured interviews on two semi-arid farms: Fazenda Assunção, in the north of Ceará, and Fazenda Santa Fé, in the Central Hinterland.