Paper short abstract:

With the aid of video footage of an ethnographic case, this paper focuses on how black rural communities have used history as a political mechanism in their claim for the status of quilombo and the legal rights to the land they occupy.

Paper long abstract:

When the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 granted black rural communities, whose members identify themselves as quilombolas, the property rights to the land they occupy, quilombos were still perceived in the popular and political imaginary as historical patrimony. This romantic portrait of settlements created by runaway slaves living in harmonious isolation soon gave way to a contemporary version shaped by pressing issues of land reform, racism, poverty and citizenship. Even though these communities are now self-identified and are no longer expected to conform to the traditional model of quilombo, the official definition of a quilombo is still based on a historical background of resistance to slavery and land occupation. This paper explores one specific case in which an anthropologist and the leaders of a black rural community collaborated to substantiate the community's cultural and historical claim to the status of quilombo by piecing together material elements and narratives of their past. I followed and filmed this process as people searched for material evidence to validate their historical ties to the land such as landmarks, fragments of ruins where old houses once stood, old land deeds and archival documents that traced the group's ancestry to a single freed slave who had originally purchased the land they occupy. While it was used as political tool to transform a stretch of land into a quilombo territory, these bits and pieces of history also entered the symbolic framework with which the community performed their quilombola identity.