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Abstract
This dissertation traces the historical trajectory of contemporary land rights movements in the cacao lands of Bahia, Brazil. These social movements are examined as one moment in the ongoing, multigenerational struggle to realize the promise of emancipation among descendants of former slaves and other members of the rural poor. The dissertation is based on over three years of ethnographic and ethnohistorical research in several squatter communities in the region, with families that are seeking to build new lives apart from the region's cacao and rubber plantations. The dissertation examines the relationship between oral narratives and the historically emergent notions of justice and the good that inform these families' efforts to create meaningful forms of social life. As this research focuses on the transformation of deeply rooted inequalities, the dissertation draws on a mixed methodology that affords greater historical purchase on contemporary social struggles. These methods include participant-observation; analysis of oral histories; household and farm surveys; and research into locally available historical documents. The historical arc of the research ranges from the post-emancipation lifeworld in the region's hills, where freed slaves and other members of the rural poor had migrated to build new agrarian communities. It continues by exploring experiences of dispossession and a forced return to plantation life, as the world these families had created was destroyed in a series of land grabs that occurred as a new wave of cacao and rubber plantations overtook the region between the 1950s and 1970s. Finally, the dissertation examines a period in the late 1980s and 1990s when these plantations entered a period of decline, opening the door for new squatter and land rights movements that began to occupy and cultivate former plantation lands. These squatters' orientation toward this long history not only informs their sense of justice in relation to regional elites, but also political struggles that have emerged internal to these social movements where some dimensions of domination and hierarchy threatened to recur. This investigation of these various periods of transgression, protest, and renewal simultaneously traces transformations in people's sense of self, community, and the value of their land and labor.
