Where you can dream of something! : landless Brazilians of Goiás, Central East creating a place to live and make a living

Abstract

The focal area of the current work is a pre-settlement in the Brazilian land-reform program. The status of pre-settlement implies that the area is not anymore an encampment of persons occupying the fazenda, (big farm), where it is located but also yet not a recognized settlement with the rights it implies according to national standards. Negotiations about the status of the area were still going on when the fieldwork on which the current text is based was carried out in 2001. Canudos, as it is called, is organised by the Landless Rural Workers´ Movement, MST and located in the state of Goiás, Central East. Although it is a rural area with agricultural production as the main economic activity it has a quite central location which implies that close relations to nearby- cities, in particular Goiánia, the capital of Goiás, are maintained. People in Canudos try to create a place according to their visions. Their visions are related to experienced past and vary between individuals and groups, as do their available means for realisation. Place, here considered a " meaningful portion of geographical space" (Berdoulay1989: 125), is created in a process that relates both to past experiences and imagined future. A relevant element in the experienced past of most of the people living here is life on the margins of the city and difficulties caused by unemployment or the lack of sufficient income to rent or own a house. Many have been working as day-workers in agriculture and/or housemaids in other households. Canudos is considered a place "where you can dream of something" in contrast to the realities of the city where "you don´t manage". Caudos is continually becoming place in a process of "social production" and "social construction" (Low 1996: 861). 'Social production' refers to the processes where sociopolitical and economic forces produce the material setting. 'Social construction' is the social actors` creation of place through activity and ascription of meaning. These are interdependent processes. What occurs in Canudos is an example of human struggle and creativity. How are the relations between social construction and social production? In other words; how do micro relate to macro and macro to micro? The basic question concerns us as social beings. It is the eternal one about our ability to influence the basic conditions under which we live.