Mulheres quilombolas: memórias, territorialidades e encantos na Baixada Maranhense

Abstract

The thesis presented here is an encounter where ethnography, writing and autoethnography weave together the narratives of black quilombola women in order to broaden our (re)knowledge of them in the context of the forms of black resistance that provide the conditions for the configuration and defense of collective territories. The thesis is an intersection of routes, an insurgent platform for the production of embodied knowledge, of shared experience, breaking silences, interdictions and other effects of the forms of subalternization prescribed by colonial and post-colonial violence to those classified as “Others”. The narratives presented focus on the trajectories of quilombola women who contribute to the construction of specific territorialities based on female references. The “foundation” of the quilombo, through the “escape” of Pruquera Viveiros, has repercussions in the Camaputiua territory where quilombola women are the “guardians” of memory. The re-creation of memory lies in the practices transmitted in everyday life; in the relationships with “caboclos, encantados” and Catholic saints who provide meanings and instruments for protecting life and the common territory. The research was carried out in the Quilombola territory of Camaputiua, more precisely in the Camaputiua quilombola community, located in the municipality of Cajari, in the north of the state of Maranhão, in a “region’ geographically called the ‘Baixada Maranhense”. The thesis concluded that repositioning quilombola women in the struggle for access to land means providing other interpretations of the meaning of quilombo, combining possibilities for dialogues that intersect race, gender, ethnicity and class. Increasing the visibility of quilombola women's forms of resistance in accessing land ownership, based on the formation of quilombos, the construction of specific territorialities, the recreation of memory, as well as providing elements to guarantee the definitive titling of the collective territory, is a crucial condition for contributions such as: the elaboration of other propositions and guarantees of civil and political rights, which ensure quilombola women their integrity in the face of confronting agrarian violence, and, above all, the potentiation of the debate on quilombola feminism, considering emancipatory practices recreated through the link with memory and ancestry