This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil

by Wendy Wolford

In This Land Is Ours Now , Wendy Wolford presents an original framework for understanding social mobilization. She argues that social movements are not the politically coherent, bounded entities often portrayed by scholars, the press, and movement leaders. Instead, they are constantly changing mediations between localized moral economies and official movement ideologies. Wolford develops her argument by analyzing how a particular social movement Brazil’s Rural Landless Workers’ Movement, known as the Movimento Sem Terra (MST). Founded in the southernmost states of Brazil in the mid-1980s, this extraordinary grassroots agrarian movement grew dramatically in the ensuing years. By the late 1990s it was the most dynamic, well-organized social movement in Brazilian history. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wolford compares the development of the movement in Brazil’s southern state of Santa Catarina and its northeastern state of Pernambuco. As she explains, in the south, most of the movement’s members were sons and daughters of small peasant farmers; in the northeast, they were almost all former plantation workers, who related awkwardly to the movement’s agenda of accessing “land for those who work it.” The MST became an effective presence in Pernambuco only after the local sugarcane economy had collapsed. Worldwide sugarcane prices dropped throughout the 1990s, and by 1999 the MST was a prominent political organizer in the northeastern plantation region. Yet fewer than four years later, most of the region’s workers had dropped out of the movement. By delving into the northeastern workers’ motivations for joining and then leaving the MST, Wolford adds nuance and depth to accounts of a celebrated grassroots social movement, and she highlights the contingent nature of social movements and political identities more broadly.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Wendy Wolford is Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University, USA. Her research interests include the political economy of development, social movements, land distribution, agricultural knowledge and the politics of land management. She is a founding member and co-convenor of the Land Deal Politics Initiative and a member of the editorial collective of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Reviews

[Alessandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

presents interesting social movement theory
looks into the MST, breaking with the common romanticization of the movement to examine the nuances of counterhegemonic membership and the MST's differing impacts at local, national, and transnational scales
*incomplete review

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An in-depth look at the inner nuance of social movements and the factors (non-)participation of involved community members. Breaks with the romanticization of the MST and other movements through fair and constructive criticism.