between fences, games and spells: conflicts and appropriations of the territory by children and young quilombolas

Abstract

brazil has gone through a long process of colonization that still leaves violent marks in the ways of relating to quilombola communities, producing the devaluation of their cultures and knowledge. Through colonization, the lives of quilombola children and young people have become invisible in the face of scientific knowledge that uses European authors as a reference and the urban middle classes as a model. In this text, we present the results of an interventional research carried out between 2017 and 2019, with about 30 children and young people living in a quilombola community in Cafuringa, in Campos dos Goytacazes-RJ. We seek to understand how the experiences of childhood and youth are constituted from the relationships that children and young people establish with the territory, their uses and appropriations, and the modes of subjectification in the face of conflicts experienced in the community. Children take ownership of the territory through collective games held outdoors, in which they explore community spaces, and interact with the land, animals, plants and trees. For these children, these spaces can be "bewitched", "haunted", "sacred", and while fascinating, also generate fear. These ways of relating to the territory are in conflict with the agricultural produce and horse breeding farms, which consider the land as a business, and animals and plants as goods. The children's estrangement in encountering of the electric fence placed by the farm, which symbolizes the private use of the land, social inequalities, and the racial discrimination experienced in their daily lives, leads us to question the project of the overall “civilizing” project built into modernity