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Benedito Marinho is a farmer and activist from Sao Pedro, one of eighty-eight rural black communities descended from fugitive slaves that call the Atlantic Forest of Sao Paulo state and Paraná their home. Two hundred years ago, Marinho's ancestors escaped the gold mines and rice plantations that dotted the landscape of the Ribeira Valley to establish these communities, known as quilombos, along with fugitive slaves in scores of maroon communities throughout the Americas. In 1988, one century after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Marinho and his neighbors pressed for the ratification of Article 68 a constitutional provision that granted legal recognition and territorial rights to quilombo descendants (remanescentes de quilombos). While 158 quilombo communities in Brazil have received titles from the government, more than 3,000, including Sao Pedro, still await certification. Like their ancestors, Sao Pedro residents face threats to their livelihood, this time from the intrusion of ranchers, mining companies, and forest rangers. "Brazil waited almost 500 years to recognize quilombos," Marinho told me in a 2015 oral history, "now it feels like we will have to wait another 500 years for our government to enforce its own laws."1
This essay traces the long-term struggles of the black peasantry in Brazil over land, natural resources, and autonomy. Focused on the Atlantic Forest of Sao Paulo state and Paraná, it engages with the literature on critical geography to illuminate how Afro-Brazilian political mobilization in the countryside remains linked to historical conflicts over the use and control of space (Oslender, "Geographies" 26). Geography as a discipline, from its origins in European colonialism, produced racial identities by demarcating where non-dominant groups "naturally" belonged (Stoler and Cooper 11). Colonial officials in Brazil regarded black and indigenous peoples as "inferior" and sought to transform their "inhospitable landscapes" into "productive settlements" (Naro 34). Yet rural Afro-Brazilians, through their actions if not words, shaped counter-narratives that drew heavily from a language of place-based dominion. This study analyzes how the descendants of fugitive slaves have asserted an autonomy that is bound up with past and present socio-spatial struggles.
Early historiography described fugitive slave communities as an attempt to recreate Africa in Brazil through the formation of autonomous and geographically isolated communities dedicated to the overthrow of the slave plantation system (Kent...