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This Land Is Ours Now
Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil
By Wendy Wolford Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4539-8
Chapter One
Mobilization within Movements
It was an unusually warm September evening in 1999 when approximately two hundred land reform settlers marched down the main street of Água Preta, a small rural town nestled in the heart of northeastern Brazil's sugarcane zone. The marchers were a dramatic presence. They were representing one of the most powerful grassroots social movements in Brazilian history, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the Rural Landless Workers' Movement, commonly referred to as the MST). The MST organizes rural workers and landless farmers throughout Brazil to fight for what is an age-old demand in the country: access to land.
The MST was officially founded in the southernmost states of Brazil in the mid-1980s. Its membership expanded dramatically in the years following, and by the late 1990s the MST was the most dynamic and well-organized social movement in Brazilian history. Since its formation, the movement has used Brazilian law to argue for the right to property that is considered unproductive and not fulfilling its social function according to Article 184 of the Federal Constitution. The MST's main tactic is large-scale land occupation, where movement activists organize recruits to enter an unproductive property (as defined by the Constitution), usually late at night to avoid preemptive violent action from landowners or the government. The activists lead the new MST members in building temporary tents and squatting there until the government comes to assess their claim to the land. If the occupation is successful, usually after many months of negotiation, the government expropriates the property and divides it among the landless poor, creating what comes to be called a land reform settlement. Today, more than twenty years after the MST first came together, more than 250,000 families have occupied land through the movement, and in 2001, the MST was directly affiliated with an estimated 1,459 settlements in twenty-three of Brazil's twenty-seven states (including the Federal District of Brasília, the country's capital).
Many of the marchers in Água Preta that September night carried the MST's symbolic red flag, and two of them held a long white banner between them that read "MST: A Ordem É Ninguem Passar Fome" (MST: Order Means No One Going Hungry). The slogan-simultaneously appropriating and recoding the words that adorn the Brazilian flag, Order and Progress-was an example of what Gayatri Spivak calls "catachresis," or "reversing, displacing and seizing the apparatus of value-coding" (Spivak 1990: 228).
These marchers were rural sugarcane workers who had joined in the MST's struggle and won access to land on former sugarcane plantations. They were headed toward Água Preta's town council building, where councilors were holding a monthly meeting. The marchers' intention was to demand the immediate payment of their subsidized agricultural credit, which (as was often the case) was already very late. As the season for planting had come and gone, local MST leaders had planned the march to publicize the demand for credit and pressure the local government to release the funds.
With the sun quickly setting behind the short row of one- and two-story city buildings, the march was proceeding smoothly. MST members steadily swarmed up the cobblestone street to the council building.
Then, suddenly, things took a bizarre turn. Armando Souto, the person leading the council meeting, urged the MST leaders to enter the council room alone to state their demands. (Souto was a high-ranking member of the Popular Party of Brazil, the ppb, and no friend of the MST's.) As the whole crowd of marchers attempted to push into the building, Souto reconsidered his position and rushed out the back door.
Souto-perhaps unaccustomed to being challenged so directly in the hierarchical political culture of the region-tried to get away from the demonstration by driving his white sedan through the crowd of marchers. He was quickly surrounded. People pulled at the car's door handle, and Souto came storming out. Loud discussion followed, and the marchers closest to the car threatened to turn the vehicle over as Souto threatened back angrily. The local trade union leader got right next to the increasingly irate politician, and Souto punched him squarely on the nose. At that moment, a heavily armed squadron of military police showed up.
The local police had called in reinforcements from a larger town nearby (later, people commented suspiciously that someone must have alerted the police beforehand because so many arrived so quickly), and things grew very tense. People began to turn away almost involuntarily and straggle off in the direction from which they had come. Loud music, intended to be soothing, poured out of the rusty speakers lining the main street as the marchers left the town center and regrouped back in the MST land reform settlement on the edge of town.
In many ways, this public demonstration represented an extraordinary moment in the politics of the sugarcane region in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. The people marching down the street were former sugar-cane workers who had won access to land of their own through the efforts of the MST. And even though the mobilization was broken up by the military police before any progress could be made, the public organization of two hundred MST members was a considerable feat.
Leaders of the movement pointed to that evening as indication of their success in mobilizing Pernambucano sugarcane workers to fight for agrarian reform under the movement's national banner. And they had reason to believe in their victory: from 1992 to 2000, twelve MST settlements were created in the municipality of Água Preta, providing approximately ten hectares of land each for 926 families. Although the land distributed represented only a fraction (approximately 15 percent) of the municipality's arable land, this was a significant amount in a region dominated for almost five hundred years by large-scale monocrop sugarcane plantations. The movement considered its organization of rural sugarcane workers to be significant in part because these were some of the poorest workers in the country-in one of the poorest regions in all of Latin America.
But the movement's considerable success in Água Preta is not where this book begins or ends. This is not the usual account of the MST that details the story of its formation and outlines the practices, processes, and events that constitute movement identity, strategy, and ideology. Those accounts, while providing valuable information, assume and assign an ontological coherence to the category of movement-a solid "thingness" that is rarely tenable on the ground. The MST does have a central coordinating committee, political symbols and slogans, membership norms, and expectations. It is more than just the sum of its members-there is an MST structure that stands on its own. However, this structure is not necessarily or naturally cohesive. It is as much a deliberate attempt to create unity as it is an expression of such.
Although the rural workers marched down the street that evening as members of the MST and successfully presented their demands, four years later none of them would consider themselves members of the movement. They had participated in state meetings and in demonstrations like the one described in the beginning of this chapter, but they hadn't always understood that the movement was supposed to be composed of landless rural workers, not simply for them. In 1999, they mobilized to demand their credit for planting bananas on their land in what the MST considered an important step toward freeing them from the colonial yoke of sugarcane, but four years later they would almost all be planting sugarcane again, some on their own land and others in the local mills. And although the movement's symbolic red flag had waved proudly at the entrance of the settlement where everyone regrouped after the demonstration, in 2003 the same settlers would request legal assistance from the federal government to prevent the MST from gaining access to physical space on the settlement. With a few exceptions, they still lived on the same settlements and saw the movement leaders regularly. The region was still presented as a stronghold of movement activity, but internally MST leaders acknowledged that the movement was in crisis.
This book then, is the study of social mobilization-within a movement. I am not trying to explain any of the MST's considerable successes per se; rather, I am trying to understand how the movement works in particular places. I do this by analyzing how the people who are called members (for however long or short a time) themselves work. This means that I focus on ordinary people, on everyday political economies, and on common sense-in other words, the banal geographies of organization and resistance.
Having arrived at this point, many people reading will be asking themselves, why would someone take one of the most exciting and successful movements of the twentieth century and focus on the banal? This is a serious question, especially because the banal is often not pretty: it is gossip, it is petty power struggles, and it is storytelling-or, as a colleague recently called it-dirty laundry. Should academics be engaged in "banalizing" progressive social movements when those movements are fighting for causes with which we very much agree? What are the ethical bases of turning social movements inside out (as Annelise Riles did in her insightful 2000 study of international women's networks)? The answers to these questions have considerable ethical and epistemological significance, and they are the reason why the book came out the way it did.
Ultimately I argue that understanding social mobilization within movements like the MST is necessary for both political work and political theory. Social movements are constantly reminding us-and enabling us-to keep our academic theories up with the times: as academics, we translate the creativity of social movements back into theory, just as capitalism translates the creativity of the people into profit, rather than the other way around. As Nancy Fraser (1989) said in her influential analysis of power and theory, "Historically specific, conjunctural struggles [are] the agenda setters for critical theory" (2). So what can a study of the MST tell us about the current moment, about the "conditions of possibility" for both political work and critical theory? I think there are four key lessons, which I will outline here and return to throughout the book.
First, claims for justice are often central to social movements, but, as Susan Eckstein and Timothy Wickham-Crowley (2003) point out in their overview of postauthoritarian social movements in Latin America, there are many different definitions of justice. These definitions-the subjective meanings of justice/injustice-"vary over time and among groups" (xi). This may seem like an obvious point but it is easily forgotten, ironically even in analyses of movements that seek "unity in diversity" by bringing together many different groups of people-urban dwellers, landless farmers, agricultural workers, and so on. We tend to recognize the different initial subject positions of these mobilized actors but then romantically imagine that these differences fall away once a movement is formed: after a critical genesis moment, it is assumed that social movement members fight for the common good. In the case of the MST, it is true that participants in the movement are fighting for very similar material goods, but what these goods mean to them-what constitutes their just appropriation and what does not-varies widely. This on-the-ground diversity often goes unrecognized but forms the basis of hegemonic and counterhegemonic positions within movements. Which positions come to dominate at any given time has very real implications for the path of social mobilization and the possibilities of progressive change within and through movements.
Second, the above point highlights the importance of customs, culture, and context-or, what I refer to throughout the book as "moral economies." In this case, "moral" is not a normative term; it is a reference to the work of the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. In his seminal work of 1971, Thompson argued that resistance-in his case, food riots-were rarely spontaneous outbursts of psychological or physical pain. Rather, protests were an indictment of changes that violated (or allowed certain groups of people to violate) traditional norms guiding the social and economic conditions and relations of production (Thompson 1971, 1993). Attention to norms and tradition means that history is important: histories of land use and labor allocation help to explain how and why people organize in the present. In the case of the MST, it would be impossible to understand the movement without understanding the diverse forms of agrarian economy throughout the country. Political cultures differ greatly in the two regions upon which this book focuses: the South and the Northeast of Brazil. And these differences shape social mobilization both within the MST and between the movement and external political actors.
The third lesson we should take away from a study of mobilization within the MST is the importance of political scale. Not only is the MST different things to different people, it is different things at different political scales. The MST has a vocal and visible presence at the transnational scale, where it is the biggest social movement member of the Via Campesina, the umbrella organization for small farmer and rural worker movements around the world. The MST is also a powerful player at the national level in domestic politics where its ability to represent the rural poor throughout the country has brought the movement considerable institutional legitimacy. This claim to representation depends on what I-following others, such as David Harvey-call strategic essentialisms: intentional simplifications of an otherwise complex subject for the purposes of democratic engagement. MST leaders are masters of political negotiation at the national and transnational scales, and this has helped movement members win both resources and respect, but the essentialisms the leaders are forced to employ for political purposes have material and discursive effects on the ground. My analysis of the MST-from the inside out-suggests that we need to understand both the importance and the danger of such strategic essentialisms (rather than accepting them at face value or dismissing them as essentialist).
Fourth and finally, I think that a study of the MST reminds us of the importance of conjuncture, which Lawrence Grossberg (2006) defines as a "specific articulation of the social formation as a context" (13). As Karl Marx rightly said of men, social movements can make history but not under circumstances of their own choosing. Placing the MST's work within the conditions of the contemporary moment sheds new light on the apparent mobilization "booms" and "busts" of which social movement theorists write so often (see Alvarez 1998 for a summary). In the traditional analysis, movements are thought to have formed when they mobilize a certain number of members or carry out noteworthy oppositional actions, and they are thought to generally disappear after "maturing" or "professionalizing" (McCarthy and Zald 1973), when their claims have been satisfied or they are no longer politically relevant.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This Land Is Ours Now by Wendy Wolford Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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