Contextures of land: Family, Labor and Political Organization in the Iguape Valley (1871-1963)
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Vale do Iguape; Black Families; Land Struggles; Black Political Culture.
The present study aims at apprehending the various tactics of access to and permanence on the land used by the black population of the Vale do Iguape in the Recôncavo da Bahia, in the context of emancipation and post-abolition. The territory privileged by this approach was marked by the great concentration of land in the hands of the landlord elite, owners of the sugar mills and farms. Nowadays it is the locus of quilombola communities that are in the process of become the title (of Quilombola community). In view of the territorial structure of the region, the plots involving the struggles for land in the Vale do Iguape were investigated in this thesis from the perspective of long term, the time frame contemplates from the last two decades of slavery time to the period preceding the civil-military coup (1871-1963). However, the periodizations don’t appear throughout the study in a pre- established way, but based on the experiences of the subjects how ware studied here and their relation to the broader processes in society. This dialogue between times had as a guiding thread the experiences of five generations of the Almeida Costa family. Through this family nucleus and its solidarity networks, it was possible to comprehend how the slaveholding society and the invention of freedom were mobilized by ordinary subjects. The hypothesis that guides this thesis is that in the midst of the struggles for citizenship, especially in relation to access to land, the black population of Vale do Iguape activated different identity categories: tenant farmers, peasants, squatters, quilombolas, creating a black political culture.