Discernindo invasões: apagamentos, desvinculações e reencontros em uma comunidade quilombola no extremo norte capixaba

Abstract

This thesis aims to discuss some of the transformations taking place among the lives of residents of a contested land, an area surrounded by large eucalyptus plantations in the far Northern region of Espírito Santo, Brazil. The investigation is largely based on the author’s ethnographic incursion in 2024 to one among many Quilombola communities located in this region (in this case, in Conceição da Barra, Sapê do Norte) and looks at the changing nature of territorial configurations, its effects and the different actors involved. In order to do this, the study relied upon native notions such as imprensamento, projects, pesquisas (research), bichos (loosely translated as animals), inundações (floods), invasões (invasions) and invasores (invaders). The local presence of different industry ventures for up to at least seven decades is of particular relevance to the analysis, especially the impacts of the so-called “green desert” landscape, created by eucalyptus monocultures for the purposes of pulp and paper production. The study thus looks at the different interferences on people’s lives caused by such “invasions” and witnessed by the researcher while on the field, and purpuses to do so from different angles: be it that of the ruins left by a less recent past, both on the land itself and in people’s memory; that of a “conflict” between locals and newly-arrived non-Quilombola associations; through the lens of some of the ways the community and its elders make people (gente) and seek to interfere in the relationships and displacements that are always redefining who is or is not “from [t]here” and what it means to “stay” or “leave”; finally, some generational tensions and remembrances embodied in the religious “mission” of three women.