Mulheres negras e seus universos: comunidade de Vila Bela, terra, conflitos e memórias nos (des)caminhos da identidade étnica: (1960-2018)

Abstract

This research moves to give visibility to the struggle to maintain the spaces, knowledge, and practices of an Afronative community, whose border territory is an area of conflict involving the ethnic-racial issues triggered, especially, by the expansion of the agricultural frontier in the Midwest region driven by national integration policies. Established as the headquarters of the Capitania of Mato Grosso, Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade becomes a space for Blacks and Natives after the transfer of capital and departure of the elite to Cuiabá in the nineteenth century. With this change, the population that remained in the place constituted new relations and changes in the landscape. Given the return of White people (the “other”) to the city in the 1960s, transformations in the use of the territory and the way of life of residents redefine ethnic and symbolic boundaries, as well as resignification with the spaces. Considering that identity is reconstituted from differences, as fluid and fragmented, the Black women of Vila Bela fraternize with the Chiquitanas, appropriating the legacies left by their ancestors, and constitute the Afrochiquitania to resist the “other” who expropriated their lands and tries to occupy their spaces. In this context of conflicts, oppression, (re)constructions that this research intends to take, to try to understand the dynamics of overcoming the differences and inequalities experienced since the quilombola resistance of Tereza de Benguela, in the eighteenth century, until the contemporaneity in the daily anonymity experienced by the women of Vila Bela. Walking in the female “universe” with their stories and memories seeks to analyze what mechanisms these women use to ensure belonging to the place and reaffirm their ethnic identity.