This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil

Abstract

In recent years, Brazil has used a powerful agro-export sector to fuel rapid economic growth, both agricultural and industrial. However, the country still faces stark economic inequalities, especially in rural areas. Geographer Wendy Wolford argues that Brazil suffers from basic contradictions that have complicated its history of land ownership: the fifth largest country in the world, it faces land scarcity — or more precisely a lack of access to land. With nearly four million landless people, it has the second highest inequality of land ownership in the world, and despite its impressive growth 44 million of its people endure hunger. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Brazil also has one of the world’s most visible and active social movements for agrarian reform, the Landless Workers’ Movement, or MST. In her excellent new book, Wolford examines this movement and the profound historical and contemporary contradictions in Brazil’s land regime.The concentration of land ownership does not alone explain the MST’s success. To understand its impact and growth, Wolford writes, we must understand some fundamental lessons about the nature of the peasantry and of social movements. For one thing, the peasantry exists, despite numerous theoretical models that have forecast or declared its end. Wolford claims that a tendency to see both the peasantry and social movements as “things” hinders our ability to understand them; we should instead see them as social relationships and bundles of discourses. Wolford “decenters” her analysis of the movement, allowing atypical MST members to speak and exploring settlement areas that depart from MST norms. She notes that “presenting a coherent and unified picture of social movements means choosing some subalterns over others” (p. 12). That is, making the claim of unity requires some distortion. She urges us to recognize the existence of movements within movements and to see how the picture of the MST changes at different geographical scales and locations and at different times.The crucial importance of place and conjuncture provides the fulcrum for the central comparison of two settlements: one in the MST stronghold of Santa Catarina (in southern Brazil) and one in the traditional sugarcane region of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, a site of MST gains in the 1990s. In Santa Catarina, where the movement was born in 1984, the core elements of what Wolford calls the MST’s “agrarian populism” were assembled: land as key to social reproduction, local community as the basis for a “new society,” and opposition to state and capital. In Pernambuco, by contrast, rural workers lived according to a different moral economy, one guided by a centuries-long history of plantation production. Wage labor rather than farming is the norm and sugarcane is the “commonsense” crop to plant for money. Rural workers flocked to the MST when sugar prices plummeted (hitting an abysmal six cents per pound in 1999) but when Wolford returned for more fieldwork in 2003 and found people planting cane in response to rising prices, many settlers did not even remember having been movement members.Wolford argues that the MST’s internal heterogeneity is common to social movements but that accounting for people who forget they ever joined requires attention to timing and to members’ varying relationships to movement discourses. Wolford joins a debate among geographers (and others) about the optimum scale for locating struggles for social justice. “As academics,” she writes, “we translate the creativity of social movements back into theory, just as capitalism translates the creativity of people into profit” (p. 7). Though place is still privileged in these arguments, she points out that the MST owes some of its success to its deliberate transnationalization of the struggle for land. The experience in Pernambuco points to the fact that the strategy of “scaling up” a particular and perhaps location-specific discourse comes with the tradeoff of uneven results on the ground. The MST perhaps failed to recognize how the Pernambuco sugar zone’s history of land and labor relations distinguished its inhabitants from the small farming families of Santa Catarina.The book draws on a broad range of theoretical concepts but remains attentive to the basically informed reader. Wolford explains her tools — peasant studies, Marxist geography, and subaltern studies among them — and readily places them in the context of her subject matter. Undergraduates will grasp and appreciate this prose, though better copyediting would have rid the book of some typos and minor errors (Canudos was founded in 1893 just after the establishment of the republic, for instance, not in 1839 during the early empire [p. 78]). Wolford’s narrative style accommodates her heterogeneous sources, but she is rooted in ethnography, and the density of her description is a significant virtue. She allows space for extended material directly from interviews with MST settlers and leaders, which ground her analysis. In her conclusion, she offers a careful, balanced, and subtle evaluation of President Lula’s record on agrarian reform that avoids the polemics associated with this subject.