Territory and common use among Pajeú Afro-Brazilians

Território e uso comum entre os negros do Pajeú

Abstract:

This article examines the concept of ‘lands of common use ‘ - a term from the Brazilian land tenure lexicon associated with ‘remanescentes de quilombo’ (‘Quilombo remnant community’) and ‘populações tradicionais’ (‘traditional populations’) - by looking at the experiences of Quilombola communities in the municipality of Floresta (Pernambuco, Brazil). This case study reveals how the legal framework separates ‘territory’ and ‘culture’ in the recognition of the rights of these groups. Having lived on land owned by their former patrons for generations, individuals who now self-declare as Quilombolas have come to view their own culture in accordance with a particular state-sanctioned grammar. However, they have thus far renounced the principal right to which they are entitled: the formal titling of a collective territory. At the same time, access to housing through federal government programmes has become the primary goal of groups organised under the Quilombola identity. Yet, the obstacles they face in securing homes expose the limits of translating Quilombola territory and culture into patrimonial terms. The ways they inhabit and live on the land are inseparable from their lived experiences and aspirations.

Keywords:
Quilombos; Backlands of Pernambuco; Territory; House; Culture

Resumo:

O artigo analisa a noção de “terras de uso comum” - categoria do léxico fundiário brasileiro associada aos “remanescentes de quilombos” e às “populações tradicionais” - a partir da experiência de quilombolas no município de Floresta (PE), cuja especificidade evidencia o modo como o ordenamento jurídico brasileiro separa “território” e “cultura” na efetivação dos direitos reconhecidos a esses grupos. Moradoras nas terras de seus patrões por gerações, as pessoas hoje autodeclaradas quilombolas objetificam sua própria cultura, em conformidade a certa gramática de Estado, ao passo que renunciam, até o presente, ao principal direito a que fazem jus: a titulação de um território coletivo. Ao mesmo tempo, a conquista de moradia no âmbito de programas habitacionais do governo federal é o principal objetivo dos grupos organizados enquanto quilombolas. Os impasses enfrentados na demanda por moradia revelam como as casas escapam à transfiguração político-cartorial dos modos de estar e viver na terra nos termos patrimoniais de um território e de uma cultura quilombolas.

Palavras-chave:
quilombos; sertão de Pernambuco; território; casa; cultura

During the mid-2010’s, in the municipality of Floresta, in the backlands of the Brazilian State of Pernambuco,¹ hundreds of people began to formally organize as a ‘comunidade remanescente de quilombo’ (lit. ‘Quilombo remnant community’ or Black rural community). These Quilombolas, as Maroons are called in Brazil, make up a kinship network of three main family branches resulting from interlinkages along five or six generations among local inhabitants and outsiders from other parts of Pernambuco or neighbouring states The oldest ancestors that they recall were born around the time of the abolition of slavery (1888).

The places where the domestic groups that make up this kinship network are always remembered in association with farms in the region. Prolonged habitation in the municipality has not rendered these families fixed or immobile. In fact, ties between them gradually become warped at the crossroads of their trajectories. Locales serve as benchmarks in personal and family memories, since Quilombolas narrate their life histories as an account of itineraries. Thus, Dona Maria de Fátima tells of how her grandmother was raised by the owner of the Santa Paula Farm, though she grew up in the Cachoeira Farm, coming to live in the Boqueirão Farm after she married:

I was born at the Pedra Farm. There, near the dam - isn’t there a dam up there? A little this way. Maria de Lourdes was also born in the Pedra Farm (...). My parents came this way, to Melancia [farm] and stayed living there for a long time (...). Then they had Francisco, at Melancia. Then: Francisco, João Bosco and Paulo Fernando and Maria Isabel. They’re from Melancia. Then we left Melancia and went to Cachoeira [farm]. We spent a lot of time there. Then Damião João was born in Cachoeira (...). Then, there at Cachoeira, we spent so much time. I brought two sons from Cachoeira. I married there (...). Lived there. And had two sons there… Three. Then to Boqueirão [farm]... 35 years I stayed! (Interview to Ana Claudia Marques, 28^th of June 2024).

The same narrative device structures Dona Inês’ account, recorded roughly one year prior:

We used to live in a farm next to Melancia, it was called Recanto Farm. That’s where I was born. Then we went to Cachoeira, and there we lived, but not for very long, no (...). Then we went back to Lagamar (...). From there we then went to rua (lit. street, meaning the town of Floresta), from rua we went to Recife. Then we came back and we went to Serra. From Serra I went to the rua again, I married, came to live in Melancia. Then a lot of time passed, had every one of my kids, except for Tayná (...). I would come to Melancia, then back to rua. Then, I think this was in [19]87, I started to spend more time on the rua than in Melancia. We would come, plant our gardens, come, work. But weekends - they were studying - weekends I would come and stay with José in Melancia, planting our gardens.²

Dona Maria de Fátima, Dona Inês and their husbands are some of the eldest people who self-declare as Quilombolas. Almost all the toponyms that they refer to are farms belonging to different landowners. Dona Maria de Fátima registers directional progression and intervals by order and place of her birth, that of her siblings, and then that of her children. The life cycle also orders Dona Inês’ statement, including a greater number of places inhabited. A comparison of these two extracts reveals an emphasis on places of prolonged residence. Lacking an origin or a primordial quality, these farms are recurring stopovers in Quilombola trajectories, which take on meaning in composition with other places. In Dona Inês’ narrative, Recife (the capital of the state of Pernambuco) and rua (a reference to the urban area of the municipality, as seen from the vantage of point of the mato (countryside)) extend this constellation to urban landscapes. In contrast, in Serra [do Arapuá], currently situated in the municipality of Carnabueira da Penha, a parcel of the Quilombolas spent some of their lives in close connection with Pankarará kindreds³ (Reani 2019; Mendonça 2003), in lands which are now part of the Pankarará Indigenous Land. Indigenous and afro-descendent people settled in the limits of lands belonging to the Novaes, Carvalho and Ferraz families, sometimes partially living off their own gardens, at other times working in the farms of these families, who are considered to be the founders of Floresta. (Map 1 & Map 2)

Map 1
Floresta Municipality. Source: Municipal Administration of Floresta (2002).

Map 2
Details of the Floresta Municipality showing the regions occupied by Quilombolas, in the vicinity of the Pajeú River. Source: Municipal Administration of Floresta (2002).

The two women interrupted their life cycle narratives without any reference to the place where they live at present, in the urban area of Floresta. Both still yearn for a life no mato (in the countryside), but in houses of their own, on their own land, rather than in the lands of others, belonging to others, an aspiration that they share with their numerous kinspeople. This is a possibility that became available to them only recently, and then only gradually, as they came to understand⁴ what it means to be a Quilombola and to belong to a “Quilombo remnant community”; that they could declare themselves to be in this category, and thereby gain access to rights available to those who thus self-declare. However, the Quilombolas of Floresta have, for now, relinquished the central right available to Quilombolas: title to a shared territory.

From a legal point of view, the contemporary existence of “Quilombos remnant communities” is recognized by Article 68 of the Transitory Constitutional Dispositions Act (Ato das Disposições Constitucionais Transitórias, ADCT) of the 1988 Federal Constitution of Brazil. It states the following: “To the remnant members of the Quilombo communities who are occupying their lands, definitive ownership is hereby recognized, and the State shall issue to them the respective titles.” Within this instituted circularity, however, Quilombo communities and lands cannot prescind other illocutionary acts that institute them as such, as the empirical attributes that render them recognizable by the State are not given nor mutually agreed beforehand.

The debates which preceded the drafting of Article 68 were shot through with the opposing criteria that would prevail: on the one hand, there was a perspective based on land tenure, in alignment with aspirations for future land reform; on the other, an ethnical-cultural perspective corresponding to struggles for the recognition of an identity (cf. Arruti 2006). Decree 4887/2003, which regulates this Constitutional disposition, is a product of these debates. It requires that the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (Incra)) ensure rights to land, and defines Quilombolas as “ethnical-racial groups, according to criteria of self-attribution, with a proper historical trajectory, endowed with specific territorial relations, who share the presumption of Black ancestrality linked to resistance to historical oppression endured”, a definition which meets the directives of the National Coordination of the Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (Coordenação Nacional de Articulação das Comunidades Negras Rurais Quilombolas (Conaq)). Ethnicity, history, and territory are thus three elements that, in unison, lay the foundation for a definition of contemporary Quilombola groups and make them recognizable to the State. In the same decree, territory emerges in connection with culture, insofar as the former should ensure not only, evidently, the physical and economic dimensions of the group’s livelihood, but also, crucially, its cultural reproduction. Finally, titles to land should be collective, according to the assumption that Quilombola lands are of “common use”.⁵

Kinship, ethnical-racial, and historical criteria corroborate the identity claims of the Quilombolas of Floresta. Yet, since they descend from families of moradores (lit. dwellers) - people who live and work on their patrons’ lands - generation succeeding generation, family nuclei are dispersed, in some cases with parcels living at great distance from one another, although always in farms located within a specific area and traversed by the Pajeú River (see fig. 1). The vicinity of this area also contains the few lots that were acquired by purchase or donation, but the majority of the self-declared Quilombolas are not proprietors of their homes or plots. This article is prompted by this disquiet: how are we to conceive the territorial counterpart to these communities? More specifically, how can this territoriality, produced through dispersion and relations of morada (lit. habitation), be characterized considering the notion of “lands of common use” that conceptually anchors the very definition of “Quilombos remnants communities”

This article foregrounds the separation of ‘territory’ and ‘culture’ that is constitutive of the juridical-administrative rationality determining rights and policies geared towards comunidades remanescentes de quilombos and populações tradicionais in Brazil. Ethnographically, this fracture will be revealed by the impasses that the Quilombo “remnants” of Floresta must deal with when they apply for housing through the Minha Casa Minha Vida - Rural (MCMV-R, My House, My Life - Rural) programme, which gives priority to proposals submitted by Quilombola communities.⁶ We argue that, although they are moradores in the lands that, generation after generation, their patrons have denied them, the Quilombolas did create a community and constitute a specific territoriality, throughout their successive changes of address. We rely on a renewed understanding of the ‘house’ as a concept - articulated to territory - and an object. It is apprehended, at once, in material and immaterial terms, as locus and agency, necessarily presuming the existence of other houses, which are thus taken in their distinct dimensions. We can hence attest that it is through and among houses that the inseparability between culture and territory is forged, as is community, and that this synthesis demands the support of public policies tailored for “traditional populations”.

We begin with the pattern that has emerged from the institutional design of Quilombola communities by the Brazilian State. From this state of affairs, we draw the hypothesis of a separation between territory and culture that guides the juridical-notarial transfigurations (Villela, 2020) that impact communities defined as ‘Quilombola’. In what follows we focus on some of the difficulties encountered by the Floresta Quilombolas as they try to be contemplated by the government’s housing programme. In this context, we stress how Quilombola struggles for their rights stretch the limits of institutional assumptions of a correspondence between a given community and its respective territory, while, at the same time, objectifying them as separate and distinct entities.

An understanding of the specific territoriality of these Quilombolas leads us to an examination of the relations of morada in this region, which are usually framed in terms of dependence or patronage. These relations also reveal to us a specific form of “resistance to historical oppression endured” (Decree 4887/2003) across the generations. Following the itineraries of the Quilombolas, we glimpse the conformation of the common and unique in tune with the reproduction of relations foreign to the community, as well as the power asymmetries historically constituted.

Quilombola territory and culture

In Brazil, the recognition of Quilombola communities’ rights to territory is shared between two institutions, the Palmares Cultural Foundation (Fundação Cultural Palmares, FCP) and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, Incra). This partition reflects the debates that are at the heart of Article 68 of the ADCT: an understanding of the Quilombo as both cultural heritage and rights to land and its usufruct. This shared role is fundamental to all aspects of the public debate on the Quilombola issue in Brazil, as studied by Arruti (2006) and Comin de Carvalho (2016) - and, likewise, by Oliveira Filho (2018) for the case of Indigenous peoples. We will not rehearse this debate here. However, we would like to draw attention to the fact that the ensuing impasse makes evident understandings of culture and territory by the Brazilian State, which leads to difficulties in establishing the right to land via a wider notion of culture, one not restricted by its patrimonial dimension.

During the 1990s, Quilombo land titling took place through state land institutes or by the federal government by way of pre-established juridical artifices, such as the Reserva Extrativista (Resex),⁷ or through the creation of the Quilombola Special Project by Incra. As early as 1999, norms were drafted which attributed the task of titling ‘territórios quilombolas’ (Quilombolas’territory) to the Palmares Foundation, a public institution founded in 1988, the same year in which the Constitution was ratified and when the territorial rights of Quilombolas were recognized. Linked to the Ministry of Culture, the FCP was created in the context of the listing of the Serra da Barriga, the site of the ancient Quilombo of Palmares. During the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), the FCP expedited land titles without the accompanying removal or relocation of homesteaders, since this is a role which exceeded its legal competence. As a result, conflicts between titled communities and prior landholders intensified (Cf. Comissão Pró-Índio de São Paulo 2007). In the first year of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency (2003), the right to titling territories was taken from FCP and transferred, in its entirety, to Incra, the autarky tasked with ordering land distribution in Brazil.

The FCP retained the role of emitting certificates for communities that self-declared as Quilombola, and they were thus entrusted with recognizing the ethnic-cultural identity of the group. While observing the right to self-identity, as established by Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the certificates granted access to specific government social programmes tailored to Quilombolas.⁸ The transfiguration of self-declaring people into right-bearing subjects does not excludes external endorsement,⁹ or, as it were, the recognition of self-recognition, formalized through the issuance of a document by an authority within the cultural sphere.

The delimitation of a territory is not a necessary condition for a community to obtain a Quilombola Certificate. The FCP advises those who seek recognition to elaborate “reports of Quilombola ancestrality” which contain “(...) the history of the community [with] information on how the community was formed, the first families, how they lived, what became traditional for the community (festivities, productive activities, celebrations, cultural manifestations, etc.)”.¹⁰ The territorial dimension, however, remains implicit in the reports that support this recognition. Although dealt with by different government agencies, each with its own historical, normative and semantic repertoires, the ethnic-cultural and territorial double-parameter for defining communities of Quilombola descendants in Brazil reflects and reproduces an epistemic fission between land and culture. In this sense, when the Black people of Floresta, pulverized in various rural properties, claim ethnic recognition, they foreground this particularity of the Brazilian State. Lacking an exclusive, permanent, and circumscribed territorial dominion, it is as if their identity as Quilombolas were deprived of its foundation and reduced only to the ethnic dimension of this category, which must be rendered in terms of culture as heritage.

About the houses

In July 2023, during an assembly of the Quilombola Black Roots of the Pajeú Association (Associação Quilombola Raízes Negros do Pajeú, AQRNP), the community formally presented itself to the anthropologist Ana Claudia Marques, who asked for their permission to carry out fieldwork. But that gathering had another aim: to revise their report for obtaining a new “certificate from the Palmares Foundation”. Those people gathered at the assembly that day had splintered from the Sons of Pajeú Quilombola Association (AQFP) in 2015. For hours, we went through a long list of descriptions of what they planted, hunted, fished, and ate; what types of houses they built and what clothes they wore; what rituals they practiced and what traditional knowledge they shared; their songs, dances, and handicraft. In brief, all those things that constitute the community’s “culture”.

For brevity, we will refer to the two associations as ‘Roots’ and ‘Sons of Pajeú’. The former is a dissidence of the latter, but both are made up of people belonging to the same dispersed kindred that has inhabited the municipality of Floresta for at least 150 years. Members of the Roots Association (created in 2016) were originally included in the FCP certification, issued for the Sons of Pajeú in 2011. With the resumption of public policies specifically geared towards Quilombolas in 2023, after an openly hostile federal government, a new self-declaration document became necessary so that they could access the government’s housing programme. The aim of the call for submissions matched a long-standing desire of the Quilombolas: the replacement of their rammed earth houses for houses made of brick, as well as the construction of new housing for their adult sons and daughters. Most of them receive some form of government assistance, through the Bolsa Família cash-transfer programme, and they then rent houses in town, even though they wish to live in their own houses in the countryside.

Slenes (2011) identified certain architectural preferences and building materials, alongside domestic habits, as symbolic expressions of the African roots of enslaved families in Brazil. Ethnographic fieldwork carried out among Quilombola groups reveal the deep meaning of houses - and particularly of kitchens - in these communities (Alves 2018a; 2018b; Carneiro 2015; Carneiro et al. 2024; Comerford et al. 2022; Marcelin 1996; Perutti 2022;). More than mere places, anthropologists have consistently shown inextricable continuities between houses, bodies and its inhabitants, and the land that they dwell on, all actively produced, while, at the same time, proper markers of Quilombola lifeways and worldviews. Itamar Vieira Júnior, for example, in his thesis on the Quilombolas of Iuna, who live in the state of Bahia, narrates the movement of wattle-and-daub houses, built and dissolved through time. As patrons and landowners restricted access to land, “the house, as a means to further permanence on land, should be built primarily with fragile materials that do not denote a permanent tie of families to the farm”. (Vieira Júnior 2017: 57-58).

In different contexts, we see that a piece of land becomes the means through which communities constitute themselves as such. At the same time, this process, that takes place within and between houses, exceeds culture in its heritage dimension and surpasses the status of property. In this perspective, we envisage a subtle but unequivocal dimension to the Quilombolas’ steadfast interests and concerns in this government housing programme.

This is not the first time that these Quilombolas have applied for government housing. In 2013, the Sons of Pajeú’s proposal was approved, but an impasse laid their plans to waste. Houses were supposed to be built at the Boqueirão Farm, where there were many families of moradores who came to be organized as a Quilombola community. There they built a chapel, a rood and a patio: “We did it to show our culture, which is to honour São João, to dance the mazurca, the forró, and things like that”, they explained. Leaders of the Association claimed that the project had the permission of their patron, who was the owner of the land where the community was established. This permission did not mean actual landownership by the Quilombolas. When the landowner died, and his inheritors intervened, things took a turn for the worse. That housing proposal was abandoned in a context of great sorrow, effrontery, threats, and disagreements among members of the Association. Quilombola families left Boqueirão and lost everything they had gained there. Dona Maria de Fátima, the president of the Sons of Pajeú at the time, recalls her conversations with the grandson of their former patron:

And if don’t have the power to ask for the land, [for] us it’s easy to settle. You keep the land and we leave. And then he said; “no, don’t do this, no. There is no defeat here.” No defeat [she replies]. There is no defeat, because I neither report, nor will I file a complaint against my son anywhere. We spent 35 years here. The man who put us here is no longer with us.

Dona Maria de Fátima left the land where she had lived for decades without any sort of compensation (without reporting or filing a complaint against her patrons in the labour courts or Incra). As for the chapel, her father had determined before his death that it should be handed over to this same man, whom she calls “my son”, because both the morador and thremaie grandson of the patron “who put us here” shared a birthday in the month of São João, to whom novenas were dedicated in the small chapel. In brief, all the Quilombolas - and only the Quilombolas - fulfilled what had been promised, and paid the high price of what had been agreed.

More than a decade later, the brick houses remain a project for most of the Floresta Quilombolas. Now that government housing programmes have been resumed, they have accumulated some experience of the bureaucratic process, as well as of the difficulties, misunderstandings, frustrations, and threats that can come with it. They are also keenly aware of the original and more fundamental problem of the lack of properties within which they can erect the number of houses they need. Nonetheless, both associations were preparing applications for the 2023 call for proposals. However, each adopted a distinct strategy.

Roots needed first to address its status with the FCP. Despite being assembled in the new association, its members demanded three separate certificates, corresponding to the three rural clusters in which they lived. These territories took form independently, through the acquisition of individual plots which were either bought or donated by their former owners. Other nuclear families became established in their vicinities, as new plots went up for sale and those who were interested raised the funds, often at great personal cost. The territorial counterpart of the Quilombola community is thus, at present, made up of clusters of private properties, dispersed across the Melancia, Bezerra, and Folha Miúda farms. For each one of these, a distinct certificate was to be demanded from the FCP to allow people to apply for three different proposals.

The houses which were to be built via these projects were to be allotted according to the wishes of the owners of the small plots that made up the Quilombola clusters in each farm. With this strategy, the owners sought to mitigate a predictable conflict of interests within the community. Since the sparse land available was private property, control over it could be challenged by the future owners of the new houses. The members of the association would hence be distributed among the lands of their closest family, and the owners of these plots would allow the houses to be built on their land. The possibility of converting these plots into collective property (“lands of common use”) was explicitly rejected in meetings of the assembly: No way anyone accept collective land!

The Sons of Pajeú took a different tack. One of the members of the association inherited, from his foster parents, a reasonably large area of land in the Folha Miúda Farm. He agreed to sell a part of this land to the association. Certified as a Quilombola community since 2011, and now holding a collective property, the Sons of Pajeú were in a much more favourable position than Roots. Indeed, they received 48 houses from the MCMV-R.

Folha Miúda Farm, where the Sons of Pajeú hope to once more establish their community, is also situated on the margins of the Pajeú River, neighbouring Melancia, Bezerra, and other farms where Quilombola families have established themselves over the years. In this place, the Blacks of Floresta have come to conform a Quilombola community with no collective title, through the gradual acquisition of plots, in an area which is not exclusively inhabited by them. In one of the banks of the Pajeú, which crosses the length of the farm, residents are members of the Roots Association; on the opposite bank, the main leaders of the Sons of Pajeú hope to take up residence. In the proximity of these two clusters, other kinspeople have acquired small plots, regardless of which association they are members, alongside other non-Quilombola neighbours. In this manner, the associations agglomerate on opposites banks of the Pajeú. But the Pajeú is constantly traversed in both directions, since residents are, first and foremost, a community of relatives and neighbours.

Quilombola territoriality, asymmetrical connections, and the Pajeú River

In contrast to other Quilombola communities throughout Brazil, developed at the fringes of large private properties, the Blacks of Floresta have been moradores throughout their lives, going back successive generations, in farms belonging to their old patrons. Although invisible in the official histories of the municipality, their presence has left recognizable marks, including the settlement’s first church, probably built out of the labour of enslaved people. Inaugurated in 1792, in honour of Bom Jesus dos Aflitos, the church has been dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary since 1897. It was also in honour of Our Lady of the Rosary that the first Brotherhood of Black Men of Floresta - Confraria do Rosário - was established, at an uncertain date during the first one hundred years of the church, according to oral histories.

Floresta’s land tenure pattern reflects the history of the occupation of a vast territory and goes back to the last decade of the 17^th Century. According to Álvaro Ferraz (2003: 81), a local physician, the Casa da Torre’s¹¹ ownership of the Pajeú basin dates back to the end of the Indigenous reductions run by missionaries, through an alliance established between the heir of the entailed estate, Francisco Dias D’Ávila (namesake and successor to his father) with the sertanistas Domingos Afonso Sertão and Domingos Jorge Velho, between 1678 and 1699. During this time, tenants of the Casa da Torre founded the first cattle farms at the headwaters of the Pajeú. Local historians have unearthed clues to the pattern of land use which followed in the inventories and documents that register the earliest donations in the second half of the 18^th Century. As Sampaio Silva (2015, manuscript) noted, a specific structure of land distribution in the backlands of the Pajeú resulted in the fragmentation of large land holdings into parcels that were either inherited or sold. On the one hand, farms comprise a mosaic of individual private properties (whether these are formalized or not); on the other, large holdings are made up by the addition of parcels in different farms which may or may not be contiguous to one another. Under the pattern of this pulverization of land ownership, however, the nominal and territorial unity of the great families of the backlands is preserved.

In Floresta, people associate family names with portions of territory (Marques 2013). One of the most prosperous of the original estates of Floresta, the Misericórdia Farm, was dismembered into others (Tapuio, Boqueirão, Lagamar, Cabeça da Vaca) through partition, just as others became connected to it through purchases or incorporation via in-marrying wives (often consanguineally related to their husbands), now making up the lands of the Novaes family. These vast domains extend along the banks of the Pajeú River, stretching to the northeast along the Angico and São Gonçalo streams, then reaching the Arapuá Hills to the northwest. This pattern of land ownership strictly mirrors the successional processes by means of which properties are individualized and become a sort of attribute of their owners.¹²

The communities which today self-declare as Quilombolas became attached to this socio-territorial regime as moradores in the farms of the many heirs of a family and its lands. The Cachoeira Farm is one of the most significant examples of the interrelationship of the Quilombolas of Pajeú with the families who founded Floresta although it is by no means exceptional.

The eldest Quilombolas vividly recall José Alves da Luz Novaes (1898-1985), called Velho da Cachoeira (lit. Old Man of the Cachoeira). Although officially single, the Genealogia Pernambucana website records that he lived “in the company of Gertrudes (Afro-descendant), with whom he had no children”. A locus of the life and memory of generations of moradores who have wandered through it and buried their ancestors in its ground, the Cachoeira farm took form along with its inhabitants, who came from the Arapuá Hills, from the banks of the São Francisco River, or from neighbouring farms. Juliana, a young leader of the Roots, estimates that some two hundred people lived there. Velho da Cachoeira gave his moradores permission to plant fields without having to pay him any rent. According to local custom, in return for taking care of the landowner’s cattle, they received a share of the calves. Under such conditions, some families lived at Cachoeira for decades, while others left for farms that, in general, belong to relatives of the Velho da Cachoeira, spending there some time. This community of moradores extends beyond the farm limits but without bypassing the sphere of influence of one of the most powerful families in the municipality.

Despite this long and deep connection between patrons and moradores, the latter rarely achieved any sort of emancipation through the former. There is a notable exception though. A former patron who owned a parcel at the limits of Melancia Farm, Alberto, ensured that his faithful moradores would be left with 90 fathoms of land - probably because he was a single man with no children. These moradores were a group of brothers who set up houses there in the 1970s. By contrast, in Cachoeira the arrangement was the same as in Boqueirão: the moradores left the property during its partition. Even if these moradores had the means to buy a plot of land there, the heirs usually prefer to sell their parcels to relatives, so that the lands continue to be part of a family’s heritage.

In this context, we can take another look at the small lots acquired by the Quilombolas in Folha Miúda. This farm was contiguous to the properties of their patrons and under the sphere of influence of that family. The Quilombolas had never been moradores of the farm, but they used to pass through it regularly to go to school, to tend to livestock, on their way to the weekly market in town, during visits and commemorations. We venture to say that it is no accident that it was precisely there that the Quilombolas found a way to create an autonomous community.

Understanding land heritage as a constitutive element of the great founding families of these backlands implies a conception of land as an attribute that is irreducible to private property. Within this framework, certain specificities of inter-racial relations in the region should also be considered. Bastard branches born of Black women and white men were perpetuated within dominant families. Quilombolas, for their part, claim that they are “mixed”, because they know that their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had children with white men. Even when this genealogy is recognized, the sons of these unions are rarely heirs to their fathers, nor do they bear their father’s surname. Thus, the reciprocally constitutive relation between family and land, which in the past was woven by endogamous marriages - endogamous not only in terms of kinship, but also in terms of race - persists into the present in this land ownership regime which remains, as it were, endogenous. The symbolic frontiers and distances between people who live so close together is hence sometimes fluid, sometimes insurmountable. The tract of territory along which the Quilombolas of Pajeú have spread out is almost exactly coterminous with the extent of the land owned by the founding family that has been established in this portion of the municipality’s territory since colonial times. Yet despite the close ties between patrons and moradores, one is never taken for the other.

The genealogies that proliferate in this region are emblematic artefacts of the social and political prestige of the dominant families (Marques 2015; Marques and Villela 2016). Going back to a founding ancestor, these artefacts reflect an old segregation, insofar as they exclude or interrupt illegitimate successions - as genealogies, indeed, are inclined to do. In turn, the genealogical data collected among the Quilombolas, while still containing lacunae, unequivocally point to a rather restricted matrimonial universe. Furthermore, instead of an apical ancestor, we find a familiarisation that results from communal experiences of living together in the lands of the heirs to the same dominant family. Moradores “mix” themselves through marriage, establishing families and kindreds that are identified not by a common surname harking back to an origin point, but by nicknames that emerge as communities are taking shape. Although they are equally constituted by ties of consanguinity and affinity, the genealogical networks of both patrons and moradores are laid out in distinct ways. The arborescent and vertically oriented genealogies of the former contrasts with the rhizomatic connections of the latter (Deleuze and Guattari 1995). These images are replicated in the territorial counterparts to both: in the farms which are dismembered and annexed; and in the moveable and intermittent permanence of the moradores.

The slave-owning patterns in the backlands of the Northeast region of Brazil were different from those of the coast and from the Southeast, where a large influx of enslaved people were grouped together in plantations (Slenes 2011: 53) or in areas of mineral extraction, for longer or shorter periods. But in the backlands, a pastoral economy relied on a small number of enslaved people hailing from various parts of the country. Among them, crioulos (those born in Brazil) outnumbered Africans (Falci 1995). Based on this pattern, communities of people who had broken free from slavery were usually attached to the more prosperous farms. This is the case with the old Misericórdia Farm, which was dismembered into smaller properties where Black families who currently self-declare as Quilombolas are (or were) moradores.¹³ Multiple lives, with their various itineraries, met at that crossroads for a long enough period to create extensive families and communal ties with their own traditions.

Orbiting their patrons and in the pathways between their properties, the Blacks of Pajeú produced their own territoriality as a rhizomatic overcoding of the kinship of the landlords. They engage with the patrons in order to manage their own movements, but as moradores these people constitute, through time, their own moral, familiar and ethnic community. Asymmetry is inherent of the relationship of morada and cannot be relativized; for this reason, it is necessary to pay attention to what follows from it rather than to the terms in which it is defined. The very conditions of morada are a vector of engagement with the outside the community. Moacir Palmeira (2009; 2014) has shown the complexities and subtleties of this singular conjunction of home and work in the context of sugar plantations (see also Garcia Jr. 1989), in contrast to the hasty and customary conceptual reduction in terms of workers’ dependence and patronage - however present these might be.

It is worth taking note of the particularities of morada. This is a dispositif to immobilize the labour force in a predominantly pastoral economy based on extensive grazing. According to some representatives of Black intellectuals in Floresta, as far back as the slaveholding period, the violence of captivity was based less on the use of force than on the establishment of material and affective dependency. We do not find in Floresta, as they point out, the remains of slave quarters or whipping-posts. The pastoral regime and the vastness of the backlands made it easier for enslaved people to escape. In fact, the prestigious role of the vaqueiro [cowboy] implies loyalty and trust, qualities rewarded in the system of sorte or quarteação, and which rested on the hopes of one day becoming the owner of a part of the land or having cattle of one’s own (Andrade 1963; Barroso 1930; Pereira 2023).¹⁴ However, there are not many people who in fact embodied this iconic backlands figure. The majority of moradores worked in the fields, the products of which were divided na meia (in half)¹⁵ if not offered in gratitude or otherwise simply appropriated by patrons, depending on prior deals and the whims of those involved. The large landowners handled - and still handle - an abundance of land, but productivity is always in peril because of the scarcity and unpredictability of rainfall as well as shortage of labour in the Brazilian semiarid region. The access to water sources and moradores is much more relevant factors in the imbalance of inheritance shares than the size of the inherited area.

In Quilombola life histories, insofar as they were moradores, we find changes in residence based on negotiations between the families that own the land. A patron may “concede” a family of moradores to a relative, so that they can carry out tasks related to farming and domestic labour. As the statements of Dona Maria de Fátima and Dona Inês attest, marriages are likewise moments of change among the moradores. While the heirs of landowners settle on parcels of land belonging to their own families, the newlywed sons and daughters of the moradores find morada in the properties of their parents’ patrons. These circumstances seem to weaken the bond that links most moradores to the land, since their stay on the land is mediated by the landlords, and eviction is an ever-present risk - actual and fictional accounts of this are widespread in literature. But mobility is not necessarily the result of the impossibility to remain. As Teixeira (2014) has emphasized, mobility among the moradores of the backlands is intrinsic to their territoriality and indissociable from their knowledge practices and their means of making kinship. Changes occur time and again throughout their lives, when children are old enough to attend school, when healthcare is needed, and when opportunities arise or difficulties exacerbate. Whatever their aims, moradores employ both their own networks and the good will of their patrons to forge their singular paths - and the converse is equally true. As they move, they renew and deepen the relations between them.

The common found in difference

The idea that the “common” in the expression “lands of common use” implies the forging of bonds and an engagement with the exterior of the community is certainly not limited to the Quilombolas of Pajeú. As Flávio Gomes (2012) pointed out, we should not look at the quilombos through the lens of escape and isolation, but through the networks of exchange that articulated senzalas (slave quarters), a free peasantry and trade in a plethora of territories and territorializations. Quilombolas persisted thanks to their ways of relating rather than by some essential characteristic. Almeida (2002) also emphasizes how the diversity of ways by which Blacks (enslaved, freed, and runaways) organized themselves in the past, within and away from senzalas, sheds light on the various forms of territorialities of rural communities in the present.

In this sense, Perutti’s (2022) ethnography of the Família Magalhães Quilombo Community, located in the Brazilian state of Goiás, shows how they are made and unmade by their relationship with other lands and other peoples. Their capacity to conjugate difference is a fact that makes the members of the group proud: they define themselves as a “befriender people” or amigueiro. Paying attention to memory and how her interlocutors understand themselves, Perutti refuses any assumption of analytical priority of the collective land - the Lavado Farm - as definitive of the group. She observes how, during studies carried out by Incra to define the extent of their land, these Quilombolas excluded some of the places that they used to inhabit as areas in the future titling of their territory because this would restrict their relations with the non-Quilombola neighbours. It is, precisely, the relationship with neighbours and neighbouring lands that makes the Lavado Farm a proper territory. Furthermore, the territorialization of the Lavado Farm is inseparable from the itinerary of the ancestor whose name the Quilombo bears. João Magalhães left the Kalunga territory and stopped over in the region many times throughout his life, always in the vicinity of the Paranã River. The river conjoins mobility and identity, insofar as being a people of that river is a common element among all Quilombolas in the region.

Concerning Floresta, it is not by chance that both associations mention the Pajeú River in their names. As Quilombolas, they do not want to be identified as the ‘blacks of so-and-so” or of “this-or-that Farm”, as they used to be known. For them, the river is also an element of perseverance, a sort of gravitational force that persists in spite of successive changes of address across different farms, and even different municipalities, over the span of generations.¹⁶ In other words, the Pajeú conserves a sense of home and makes up a landscape that is at once physical, geographical, affective, moral - in brief, familiar. Homelands are places where families are formed both in the sense that children are raised and cared for, and in the sense of social interaction among neighbours, who may be, or become, relatives. Moving houses at different stages in the life cycle marks coming together and drifting apart, whilst reinforcing a sense of place which, in the case of the Quilombolas of Floresta, corresponds to the farms in a stretch of land along the Pajeú river.

We propose, therefore, to reposition the idea of ‘lands of common use’. The Quilombolas of Floresta are constituted as such by a territorial component that singularizes and places them in a landscape and social field in which they participate under certain conditions. A hierarchical and heterogenous social field, shot through by supportive and opposing forces, in such a manner that the very existence of this community of Blacks has always been, and continues to be, conditioned by its coalitions with difference, with exteriority, with that which they are not - including their patrons and other neighbours, both near and far. It is in this perspective of heterogeneity and difference, internal and external relations, that we envisage the Quilombola production of territory.

Final thoughts

The notarial-juridical ordering of comunidades remanescentes de quilombo objectify their specificities in enumerable items of material and immaterial culture. For instance, the novenas of São João, the coco and marzuca dances, the membership of some of the Quilombolas in the Confraria do Rosário [Rosário Brotherhood], old ceramic potsherds, pestles and other artifacts that have survived the ravages of time. This is a form of cultural patrimonialization, which underscores the recognition of subjects according to the grammar of the State. Quilombolas thus elaborate their culture in the terms of this grammar. From another perspective, the concept of ‘Quilombo’ assumes the definition of a territory, which may create difficulties concerning the correspondences between experience and its normatization.

The division of competences between the FCP and Incra exposes a deep fracture between culture and territory in the recognition of contemporary Quilombos by the State. In the face of this division, mobility, the ephemeral occupation of land, or partial ownership of it raises a series of problems. Much has been written on how ethnogenesis (Indigenous, Quilombola) is based on an abstract operation, so that a group identifies itself as a unit and some correspondence can be established between group and territory. Gallois stresses how the open-ended Indigenous notions of territory are transformed in colonial contexts: “In the transformation of territory into Land, we move from relations of appropriation (which prescind a material dimension) to a new conception of possession or property” (Gallois, 2004:39; see also Oliveira Filho, 1996). Based on her own ethnographic experience with the Wayãpi Indigenous people, Gallois argues that the constitution of a “We, Wayãpi” occurs in tandem with the constitution of “our Land”, in which the Land supports ethnicity and vice-versa. These mental operations and attending practices are the foundation of the legal framework of the State, according to which the land is divided among those who possess it, in opposition to a different social and epistemic regime in which the community distributes itself along indivisible land that constitutes it.¹⁷

At once ancient and contemporary, this dichotomy between culture and territory invites us to reflect on the notion of ‘land’. On the one hand, ‘land’ might be a “network of connections among living beings”, multiple and heterogenous, irreducible to notions of place, space or environment (Souza et al., 2017). On the other, a concept that results from generalizing and homogenizing operations of the State, from which compartmentalized categories of ‘culture’ and ‘territory’ emerge so that, in these terms, can be found anywhere and everywhere. In Brazil, the legal establishment of a Quilombola community presupposes the formalization of community associations, the demand for certification, the fixation of a common narrative of place(s) and histories which construe a substantivized and patrimonialized culture. As far as the territory is concerned, however, its specific characteristics bring to light experiences that challenge the underlying assumptions of our land tenure system, which is centred on private property (Palmeira 1989).

As we have seen, the territoriality of the Quilombolas of Floresta is produced alongside with the establishment of a familiar, moral and ethnic community on the lands of their old patrons, members of the same traditional family whose landowning heritage constitutes it. Thus, the territorial counterpart of a community would be the area where moradores have lived and interacted as neighbours and acquaintances, in daily activities and during ritual events, in engagements with the bush and the waters, in their care of animals and cultivation of fields, in the provision of services and exchanges of knowledge, and in their cooperations and celebrations. Regardless of whether the land is collectively or individually owned and used, and irrespective of whether it is private property, held in possession, or unoccupied land, we propose the concept of “lands of common use” to describe the places where a sociality is produced and reproduced, enabling a given community to be recognized as such.

However, in Floresta, the conformation of a group as remanescente de quilombo occurred in a context of detachment of a community from its territorial base, juxtaposed with the properties of their patrons. Observed through their new positions as subjects, their territory comes to be identified with the Pajeú River, not with this or that family or the farms of their former patrons. These movements do not exclude new territorial anchorings. With a few exceptions, Quilombolas no longer inhabit the lands in which they were moradores, since they were evicted in the very context of their mobilization. The strategies that they adopted to acquire government housing exposed their own personal and communal projects to live among relatives, autonomously, no longer submitted to the will or power of the patrons. More than an abstract ideal, their aspirations lead them to seek out land where they can attain their goals of raising their children, cultivating their fields, rearing their livestock, living with each other in their own way.

Houses (materially and immaterially) are the quintessential places for shaping ways of being, acting, thinking and feeling; in short, for producing the “common”. Houses make culture and territory provided these two concepts are not reducible to heritage and property. The old, rammed earth houses are what needs to be replaced, unless they are to remain as listed buildings serving as the headquarters for associations or museums, thereby fulfilling the requirements for the preservation of cultural memory. The future of the coming generations, freed from the shackles of the past, is what they envisage through the achievement of home ownership. The importance that the demand for homes assumes in the very formation and renewal of the Quilombola associations of Floresta highlights how ways of being and living on the land cannot be separated from the reality of experiences and aspirations.

The impasses faced by applicants for government housing, by contrast, highlight the essentialist assumptions underpinning the frameworks of public policies aimed at safeguarding the rights of Quilombola communities. Inherent to the homes they aspire to is the establishment of a community, in its intrinsic cultural and territorial dimensions. Regimes of individual or collective private property, in themselves, do not respond to such aspirations, nor do they prescribe unequivocal criteria for defining traditional lands and lands of common use. Both result from a process of abstraction that strips culture from those who embody it and underpin the rupture between the land and the living beings who are constituted in, with and by it. The struggle for quilombola rights consists in bridging this fissure.

Acknowledgement

This article is the result of research carried out in the context of the Arts and the Semantics of Memory Project, funded by the São Paulo State Research Council (Fapesp, Process nº 2020/07886-8), with support from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Process nº 304301/2021-3). We thank Camila de Paula, Lucia Miguez, Jesser Ramos, Julia Maria Duarte, Juliana Caruso, Mariana Gregori, Rafael do Nascimento Cesar, Renan Martins, and all members of the Métis Project (https://metis.fflch.usp.br/), for the debates, and their important contributions to an earlier draft of this article. We also thank Fernanda Lucchesi, Bruno Morais, Íris Morais Araújo, Bruno Galeano and Jorge Villela for their precious contributions.

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• 1
  This ongoing research with Quilombos began in July of 2023. Since 1999, this region has been Ana Claudia Marques’ main area of ethnographic research.
• 2
  D. Inês was interviewed by Libânio Neto. The interview is available in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9fHTJ7RGFI&list=PLgIYDhF52FwVo8hiJgKu2My82KOitEjzA&index=62. Accessed on: 19th of March 2025.
• 3
  The Pankará are a “ressurgent” Indigenous people, according to the First Meeting of Indigenous Peoples for the Ethnic and Territorial Recognition, which took place in 2003. For centuries, these inhabitants of the Arapuá Hills were called caboclos, a derogatory reference to Indigenous intermixing.
• 4
  Dates range from 2001 to 2007, but different interlocutors claim that it was during a meeting of the Regional Education Office that they first heard the word “Quilombola” and understood that the concept could apply to them.
• 5
  The expression “lands of common use” gained notoriety with Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida (2009), who provides a flexible definition, seeing it as a constellation of ways of appropriating land which combines diverse individual and collective usages. The author insists, however, that it should not be confused with any abstract idea of the ‘communal’, as a symmetrical inverse of our notion of private property.
• 6
  My House, My Life - Rural is a variant of the My House, My Life Programme, an initiative of the Federal Government aimed at building or improving public housing. According to the website of the Ministry of Cities, “the programme offers subsidies and reduced tax rates so as to make the acquisition of popular housing more accessible, in both urban and rural areas, aiming to tackle the country’s habitational deficit”. Available in: https://www.gov.br/cidades/pt-br/assuntos/noticias-1/conheca-o-programa-minha-casa-minha-vida. Accessed: 26^th Feb. 2025.
• 7
  In 1992, Frechal became the first Quilombola land in Brazil to be titled by the juridical framework of the Resex. It occurred in the wake of the rubber tapper movement which, faced with threats and hurdles, proposed a type of “land of common use” that was legible by the Brazilian state. Mauro Almeida sees the struggle of rubber tappers for the creation of a, Extractive Reservation as a “historically creative [use] of a conjuncture of transition” in relation to environmentalist themes. According to the author, unionized land labourers were converted into rubber tappers, and, thus, a claim for plots of land was transformed into a demand for large tracts of forest land for collective use (Almeida 2021). In this way, the rubber tapper movement inaugurates, in the eyes of the Brazilian State, the idea of land of common use and, at the same time, that of ‘traditional population’.
• 8
  According to Article 4 of Decree no. 4.887, of the 20^th of November 2003
• 9
  We thank Bruno Morais for drawing our attention to this point.
• 10
  Available at: https://www.gov.br/pt-br/servicos/obter-certidao-de-autodefinicao-de-comunidade-remanescente-de-quilombo. Accessed on: 19^th of March 2026.
• 11
  Founded by Garcia D’Avila in the mid-16th century, Casa da Torre grew over the course of nearly three hundred years to become the largest entailed estate of Brazil’s colonial period. From the coast of the state of Bahia, throughout the interior of the Northeast region, its lands were requested and granted by the Crown of Portugal as they were cleared, with Indigenous inhabitants being exterminated by frontiersmen or bandeirantes or reduced in missions. The first settlers in the Pajeú region were tenants of Casa da Torre.
• 12
  Alongside kinship networks and titles to estates, which have been discussed in other studies carried out in the same region, name, territory, and reputation are intrinsic and essential aspects in the constitution of the great backland families (Marques 2002; 2013), in a manner aligned with Lévi-Strauss’ idea of a société à maison (Marques 2020).
• 13
  According to Maupeou (2008), the number of enslaved people in Lieutenant Colonel Seraphim de Souza Ferraz’s roster was 32; in the roster of Lieutenant Colonel José Francisco de Novaes, owner of the Misercórdia Farm, as well as other properties, had a roster fo 27 enslaved people. These inventories are from 1868 and 1850, respectively. According to the author’s research, these were the largest slave-owners in the region. Black communities still live in the lands of the municipality in which these founders established their farms, a theme that warrants in-depth studies.
• 14
  In the sorte or quarteação system, one out of every four calves of a herd would belong to the vaqueiro, as a sort of payment for his services. Falci (1995), writing of colonial Piauí, notes that the head vaqueiro was always a free man. Enslaved people could be vaqueiros, but they were auxiliaries, called fábricas.
• 15
  The meia (half) is an agreement between the landowner and the meeiro (sharecropper) in which the former grants the latter a plot to cultivate or raise animals. The yields are divided in half between them.
• 16
  Araripe (2008) observes that many Quilombos in the state of Pernambuco are constituted around people who travel from place to place, farm to farm, across municipalities. Some of these Quilombola ancestors are said to hail from Floresta or its ancient district, Carnaubeira da Penha. The riverways (Pajeú, Moxotó, São Francisco) appear to be vectors of this mobility.
• 17
  Deleuze e Guattari (2011: 170) call this regime “primitive social machine”, an idea which does not incorporate the notion of progress that is at the heart of Morgan’s (2019) classic contrast between societas and civitas. Morgan, a pioneer of anthropology, is the author of a political-philosophical distinction between two forms of government, one founded on people and collectivities (gens) and another on territory and property, which are, respectively, at the origin of Society and State. Morgan situates the arrival of a people at the state of ‘civilization’ in the attainment of private property and the State, which he sees as intrinsically related. Engels (2019), in his interpretation of Morgan, sees the emergence of private property, as well as of classes and the State, as the end of the ties of the gens with the land, now rendered alienable, and the decline of the community ties of kinship.
• Data Availability Statement
  All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

Edited by

• Editors
  Laura Moutinho (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6479-2711)
  Gisele Fonseca Chagas (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3798-8721)
  Vinicius Kauê Ferreira (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9925-3304)
  Vinícius Venancio (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3245-1204)

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  25 Sept 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  24 June 2025
• Accepted
  21 Jan 2026