AGRICULTURAL REFORM SETTLEMENTS: SPACES OF RESISTANCE OF CEARENSE PEASANTIES

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the Agrarian Reform Settlements, fruits of the struggle for land and how they constitute themselves as a territory of peasant resistance. The struggle for land is not only a way of exposing the situation of peasant exclusion, but a way of resisting the processes of expropriation and exclusion of access to land. It is evident that just conquering land is not enough, but peasants can use it as the basis of a struggle that will dismantle capitalist accumulation, reflected in land concentration itself. The conquest of the land, in the installation of the settlement, means the continuity of the struggle, because with its conquest the struggles do not end, they unfold in others. We can say that the settlements are spaces of resistance, where the territory for the expansion of peasant agriculture is organized, based on family work. In them, the peasant utopia is being sown, access to land, freedom to work, as well as the need for family reproduction, which boils down to the conquest of land. This is a peculiarity of the peasant as an identity: for him, one cannot think about the land without thinking about family and work. Work, family and land are values ​​that refer to a morality and, at the same time, are inseparable categories.