Comunidade Negra Rural da Mutuca : conflito de memórias e a disputa pela “terra dos ancestrais” – 1883/2015

Abstract

The present thesis has as its central axis the analysis of the historical / sociological conditions that led the members of the Associação da Mutuca to assume a different position in relation to the other associations that compose the Complexo do Mata Cavalo, of which it forms part. Historically, this community has disputed with landowners in the region, in a land dispute that has remained for more than a century, the right to own their land area that by virtue of Law belongs to it. Beginning in the 1960s, families of other associations, who had been expelled in the earlier period, began to return to the lands of their ancestors. This reoccupation assumed a legitimizing character with the premises of the quilombola assumption present in Article 68 of the Federal Constitution of 1988. As the community of Mutuca was the only one that remained on their lands, their representatives more often use their own memory regarding the occupation of that historically constituted territory. Some representatives of the other associations, in turn, began to sell the ownership rights of part of the land occupied. The tension climate was definitely installed between the divergent groups, in view of the conflict of interests, and by extension of memories, referred to herein. This delicate political framework led this community to reconsider its own positioning in the interstices of the social fabric that permeates the life and history of the black peasants of the Associação da Mutuca. Through theories related to Memory, Oral History and Agrarian Sociology, as well as from oral testimonies accessed in field works, it was possible to reconstitute in the field of historical narrative the genealogy of said conflict of memories that, according to the final results of our research, puts in suspicion the very integrity of the quilombola complex of Mata Cavalo.