Rural workers resistance and self-organization in Rio de Janeiro outback
Resistance, insurgency, peasants
This thesis aims to understand the peasant insurgency in Rio de Janeiro, in pre-1964, of its forms of resistance and self-organization of rural workers. The analysis focused on the existence of everyday forms of resistance, public resistance and also the use of military violence, present in the armed uprisings that began in 1961. To this end, we analyzed material sources regarding three insurrectional processes that occurred in the sertão of Rio de Janeiro: São José da Boa Morte, in Cachoeiras de Macacu, at Núcleo Colonial de Santa Alice, in Itaguaí and Pedra Lisa, in the city of Nova Iguaçu. In more detail, we also analyzed the resistance and self-organization of the farm workers of Xerém, in Duque de Caxias, an area that stood out for the large number of peasant uprisings during the early 1960s. The peasant insurgency appears in the sertão of Rio de Janeiro from a context of expropriation of lands, caused by public and private institutions, political figures, and other players, which led to the establishment of formal and informal peasant organizations and different ways of claiming the dispossession of lands, and this process of struggles was interrupted with the civil-military coup of 1964.