3 - Quilombola Recognition and Criminalization of Blackness

Summary

In the 1990s there was a great upsurge of mobilization in black rural communities across Brazil (French 2009; Mitchell 2017b; Paschel 2016; Shore 2018; da Silva 2012; Sullivan 2017). Community-based leaders and black movement activists relied on the quilombo clause as a key organizing principle to unite black populations and to demand land rights. Communities identifying as quilombos proliferated in the countryside, as politicized Afro-descendants self-identified as quilombolas. By assuming a quilombola identity, however, they did not necessarily rule out multiple identifications. Ethnographic studies have shown that, contrary to the state-linked binary identification (i.e., one either is or is not quilombola), multiple orders of identification coexist among state-recognized quilombolas (Arruti 2006; French 2006; Mitchell 2017b). Most inhabitants in the studied Iguape and Ribeira valley communities who identified as quilombolas also identified as black, and they assumed other working-class-based identities as small farmers, fishing people, shellfish collectors, and rural laborers – depending on the context.