Movimentos sociais e as experiências dos trabalhadores da comunidade quilombola Colônia do Paiol

Abstract

The present research goes from the aim of analyzing, from the experiences of the individual and collective subjects from the quilombola community ‘Colônia do Paiol’, how the organization, confrontation and collective fight for the territory is constructed. Located in the rural area of the Bias Fortes city, Zona da Mata region, state of Minas Gerais, the community ‘Colônia do Paiol’ received its certification from the Cultural Foundation Palmares in the year of 2005, fact that represented a historical conquest, since the formation of the community dates to the end of the 19 th century. However, numerous challenges are still put for the ‘Colônia do Paiol’, which manifest in the dimensions between land, territory, work, and education, which has been leading to the mobilization and organization of the collective subjects around the ‘Quilombola Association Colônia do Paiol’ (AQUIPAIOL). This association was created in 2007 with the objective of representing the residents in the search for public policies, besides promoting cultural actions to affirm the quilombola identity. Such collective experiences, build by men and women, make us question what the political place occupied by the quilombola social movement is in the Brazilian’s reality, which means, what strategies are being conducted by the quilombos to overcome the processes of oppression, exploration, and symbolic-material expropriation in their territories. In this sense, this research investigates how the formation of the AQUIPAIOL happened, its demands and articulations with other social movements, registering the experiences of practices, knowledge and doings that reflect on the political and educational character of the association. Concurrently, it seeks to insert such experiences in the set of the Brazilian reality and totality, tracing the historical-social and political-economic processes of the quilombola communities’ formation, the conflicts and contradictions of the Brazilian agrarian structure, and the importance of the social movements and the popular fights in the sociopolitical debate and dispute, which emerge and are built in the civil society. This is a qualitative, bibliographic research, using the procedures of documental analysis, and open and semi-structured interviews for data collection. The theoretical-methodological framework is supported by authors who insert popular social movements in the relationship between the State and civil society, bringing the dimensions and political and educational tasks of popular organizations, fundamental for the emancipation and overcoming of capitalism. One of these authors is Antonio Gramsci, especially in his contribution about the topics that concern to the construction of the working-class hegemony, the matter of subalternity, the place of the peasantry in the revolutionary process, and of the organic intellectuals for the formation and elevation of the critical consciousness of the popular masses. Thus, it is expected that this research will be able to contribute to the necessity of evidencing and valuing the experiences built by the quilombola communities in relation to their ways of organization and collective fight for the territory, while reflecting and constructing new lexicons for the comprehension of the role of popular social movements in the processes and social and power relations in the Brazilian contemporaneity.