The study of Afro-descendant populations in Brazil—their histories, struggles, identities, and politics—occupies an ever-growing space in the social scientific literature on “race” in the Americas and for good reason. Brazil is the giant of South America, of Latin America, and, in terms of Afro-descendant populations, of all the Americas. The country is also the site of a dramatic shift in contemporary racial politics: the Brazilian state, historically dismissive of racial grievances, has in the last two decades adopted progressive, wide-ranging, race-targeted public policy. Affirmative action in university admissions beginning around 2003 is the crown jewel of these policies. The state’s turnabout, however, caught academics flat-footed. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, social scientists often focused on the citizenry’s supposed ideological backwardness and discounted any possible shift. Since then, scholarship has dedicated serious attention to what precipitated the state’s turnabout and points heavily to urban Black movement actors’ voiced grievances and demands. Nonetheless, questions remain about precipitating factors, such as Brazil’s rural Black actors’ role in pressuring the state toward acting. Perhaps more important, though, is the question of how progressive legislation plays out in the lives of its beneficiaries. Enter here the fantastic contribution of Merle Bowen in For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil. The author masterfully engages the struggle and victory of rural Afro-descendants in Brazil in an earlier demand for state concessions and how these concessions are playing out in rural Black communities.
Bowen’s window into the Brazilian context is the quilombo. The term refers to rural, Black populations originating from fugitive slaves. Bowen articulates the history of quilombo communities, the enshrinement of the quilombo and its land rights in Brazil’s 1988 constitution, and the impact of that legislation on the everyday lives of quilombo inhabitants. Her research into these questions spans some 15 years, though the book’s core engagement involves 12 quilombo communities in the Brazilian states of São Paulo and Bahia in 2017 and 2018. She uses various methods for her analysis, including participant observation, key informant and semistructured interviews, focus groups, household surveys (n = 451), historical research, and oral histories. Altogether, the rich data these methods produced provide the foundation for five robust and well-written empirical chapters that lead the privileged reader into the depths of rural, Afro-descendant Brazil in a historic struggle for land and liberty.
There is a keystone event around which the entire book revolves: the enshrinement of land rights for rural Afro-descendants through a quilombo clause in the 1988 Brazilian constitution: Article 68 requires that the state grant inalienable land rights to quilombo-descended communities. The author lays out how this previously unimaginable victory was born of protracted Black struggles in which these rural communities partnered with Black activists from across Brazil since the 1970s to demand state action. In addition to its immediate beneficiaries, this contest undoubtedly reverberated in Black communities and among activists all over Brazil. In this way, it laid some solid groundwork for the Black movement demands and victories of the early 2000s.
How did the concession of land rights to quilombo-descended communities affect the lives of rural Afro-descendants? The answer to this question constitutes Bowen’s most important contribution. Quilombo communities’ struggles did not cease with the proclamation of Article 68; instead, they seemed only to begin. Moreover, Bowen reports that many of these communities view themselves as more structurally disadvantaged than perhaps even before the enactment of Article 68. What happened? According to the author, a serious error arose in the formulation of the quilombo clause: it required the establishment of cultural distinctiveness as the defining criterion for quilombo beneficiary status. In essence, generations of shared racial discrimination were not enough for beneficiary status. Instead, a certain caricature of ethnicity or culture trumped race as definitional to quilombo legitimacy.
Bowen’s work details the cascading impact of this culture-based approach. Although the constitutional clause was seemingly progressive, Bowen argues that it was “shaped to be exclusionary” (p. 13). Of the countless impoverished and discriminated against Black communities of rural Brazil, very few would be able to legitimize a beneficiary status for the state’s culture filter. And those that did were forced to give up other rights and ways of eking out survival to gain land titles. In conjunction with the wealthy landed elite, the state even coerced concessions from these communities on the road to becoming land rights-bearing quilombos.
Although the author lays out several other unsavory consequences of this seemingly loaded state concession, she focuses an entire chapter on a resulting conversion of these communities into sites for ethnic tourism. This questionable shift resulted from the state’s neglect of the type of structural change that would create wage jobs for these communities to complement more traditional economies based on agriculture and fishing. Land titles were not enough for these historically and continually discriminated against communities to survive and flourish. As in an ever-growing number of communities in Latin America, and indeed in some entire countries, the tourist trade is a modern, exploitive capitalist design. Brazil’s quilombo communities had to litigate their beneficiary status by detailing their cultural distinctiveness; now, they must continually construct or accentuate certain cultural expressions to meet tourists’ expectations.
In sum, Bowen set out to detail the political economy of race, land, and Black rural livelihoods by referencing several quilombo communities of Brazil. She revealed how some of the groundwork for forcing the state’s turnabout in favor of progressive racial politics in the early twenty-first century was laid by this previous historic struggle in rural Brazil. And she has made it clear that the battle continues. Though they are not necessarily token, constrained land concessions are not nearly enough if not accompanied by the right to forge a livelihood in today’s increasingly unequal economy. One formulation of the moral of the story narrated by Bowen is that isolated state concessions can be double-edged swords absent the active construction of a broader context of liberty and justice for discriminated communities. Her intellectually mammoth work is a must-read for scholars and movement actors of the African diaspora.
