Quilombo Botafogo: building a plantation made of concrete
Quilombo Botafogo; Real Estate speculation; Tourism; Região dos Lagos; Plantation
The central issue of this work is understanding how property speculation in Cabo Frio (RJ) impacts the quilombola community of Botafogo.
The territory that exists today is the result of the struggles of its residents, descendants of enslaved people, who, under the banner of land reform in the 1960s, organised themselves as squatters, resisting attempts to expel land grabbers who wanted to subdivide and sell the land of the former Fazenda Campos Novos.
The community is located in the rural area of the Lakes Region, a group of municipalities known as the 'Brazilian Caribbean' due to beach tourism.
Due to property interests, Quilombo Botafogo has been going through a peculiar process of losing territory. This is not a case of property speculation imposing significant developments such as resorts and luxury gated communities but of a daily and diffuse dispossession of the land. The subdivision of the territory fragments it and makes it difficult to maintain.
Theoretical inspirations about reflexivity and the notion of the invention of culture dialogue with the concept of the crossroads are the foundation of this work. The rapprochement between the periphery and the quilombos, pointed out by Beatriz Nascimento and Antônio Bispo, is also crucial to the argument, as are Sylvia Wynter's reflections on the uprising against plantation through what Borges calls composition-land.
The first chapter of the dissertation recounts the history of the Quilombo. The second deals with property speculation for holiday tourism in quilombola territory. The third presents questions about being a black researcher and the parallels between the history of the community and that of my family.
This work seeks to reduce academic hierarchies, offering an honest reading through an autoethnography that presents the community's historicity and the anthropologist's origin and identity.