Identidades (re)descobertas e a luta quilombola por direitos territoriais no Estado do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil

Abstract

In the last decades there has been an increase in the debates in the academic and social movements about the conflicts in the countryside and the demands of the quilombolas territories throughout Brazil. Attempts to invalidate the struggle of the peasant and, in this context, the quilombolas (descendants of Afro-Brazilian slaves who escaped who from slave plantations that existed in Brazil until abolition in 1888, were strengthened by the consolidation of a rural aristocracy and an urban bourgeois elite, years before the official abolition of slavery in 1888, which produced and reinforced the ideologies of denial the black quilombola presence and the existence of pleasant slave relations in states such as Rio Grande do Norte. Until the mid-1920s, quilombola recognitions, which had the first materialization within the colonial quilombos, suffered invisibilization by the state and social agents linked to it. The resurgence of this discussion results from struggle of social movements from the 1920s onwards, such as the Brazilian Black Front or the Unified Black Movement, contributing to official re-discovery of quilombola identities, with the input its demands on the legislative agenda and the emergence of new political subjects understood outside the unilateral idea of social organization originated by the escape. The thesis aims to analyze the rediscovery and official recognition of quilombola identities and the struggle for territorial rights in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, assuming, initially, that the ideology of pleasant and / or nonexistent black slave relations in the state produced discourses denying the existence of blacks and fragmentation of their identities that faces, on the other hand, bureaucratization in the effectiveness of public policies and confrontations with local agents that make up the spatial arrangements of conflicts in the territory. The theoretical-methodological build is based on historical-dialectical materialism influenced by post-structuralist views to reflect the structuring of society in different times and spaces and the relations of dominance, by the capitalist economic and sociocultural perspective, between ethnicities and social classes. We did fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with community leaders: Jatobá in Patu county, Boa Vista dos Negros in Parelhas, Acauã, in Poço Branco and Macambira located between the counties of Lagoa Nova, Santana do Matos and Bodó. The data collected, as well as records and semi-structured interviews with representatives of the State and movements dealing with the quilombola issue in Rio Grande do Norte, build the range of information for the field of study. The quilombo struggle not only in Brazil, but in all the countries that have consolidated the slavery regime, crosses the attempt to break with the political force which historically minimize or deny the existence of quilombos demands, founding the strengthening of ethnic identities to combat historical oppressions; besides setting up a confront with the agents of capital, landowners, private companies, among others, who represent the old forms of repression against the quilombos in order to delegitimize the struggle for territorial rights.