Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil

Constellations of Inequality

Map of Alcântara and Brazil

The area marked Recognized Quilombo Territory is the 78,100 hectares recognized as quilombo territory by Brazil’s federal government since 2008 (INCRA 2008b)—although residents have not been given the promised title to the land. The area overlaps with the 62,000 hectares marked Claimed for Spaceport, which was claimed by federal and state decrees. Representatives of Alcântara’s communities have also made a claim to the 8,713 hectares pictured as Expropriated for spaceport (Nova Cartografia Social da Amazônia 2015).

Constellations of Inequality

Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil

Sean T. Mitchell

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49912-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49926-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49943-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226499437.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mitchell, Sean T., author.

Title: Constellations of inequality : space, race, and utopia in Brazil / Sean T. Mitchell.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017019616 | ISBN 9780226499123 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226499260 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226499437 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Quilombos—Brazil—Alcântara—Government relations. | Centro de Lançamento de Alcântara. | Economic development projects—Political aspects—Brazil—Alcântara. | Launch complexes (Astronautics)—Brazil—Alcântara. | Alcântara (Brazil)—Race relations. | Alcântara (Brazil)—Social conditions. | Blacks—Land tenure—Brazil—Alcântara. | Equality—Brazil—Alcântara.

Classification: LCC F2651.A34 M583 2017 | DDC 305.800981/21—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019616

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Saya and Aya

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Relaunching Alcântara

1  Mimetic Convergence and Complementary Hierarchy

2  Alcântara in Space and Time

3  Interpreting an Explosion

4  Expertise and Inequality

5  Racialization and Race-Based Law

6  The Making of Race and Class

7  Space at the Edge of the Amazon

Conclusion: Space and Utopia

Chronology

Abbreviations

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

To begin these acknowledgments, I affirm the cliché that many people contributed to this work, but its flaws belong only to me. Yet, despite the efforts of many people who have helped me develop this book, over the very long period I have taken to write it, I have gone through many solitary and ornery periods and had long, difficult periods of travel. So, my first thanks go to those who have supported me and put up with me during lengthy research, writing, and revision: my wife, Saya Woolfalk, and my daughter, Aya Woolfalk Mitchell, born in 2011 as this research was ongoing.

Many scholars have commented on the work here and helped me in different ways. I ask them to forgive this impersonal list, which cannot do justice to the profound help each has given me. I begin with some of those scholars and friends whom I worked with principally outside of Brazil: Greg Beckett, Merle Bowen, Brian Brazeal, Kim Butler, Jeremy Campbell, Lucia Cantero, Celso Castilho, Nicole Castor, Marina Cavalcanti, Mike Cepek, Beth Conklin, Aimee Meredith Cox, Alex Dent, Jonathan Devore, James Ferguson, Nicole Fleetwood, John French, João Gonçalves, Sid Greenfield, Joe Hankins, Elina Hartikainen, Angie Heo, Jan Hoffman French, Bea Jauregui, Ben Junge, Don Kalb, Charles Klein, Micaela Kramer, Rocio Magana, Kathleen Millar, Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, Marko Monteiro, Mihir Pandya, Vânia Penha-Lopes, Patricia Pinho, Erika Robb-Larkins, Stuart Rockefeller, Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Stephen Scott, Jesse Shipley, Irene Silverblatt, Lisa Simeone, LaShandra Sullivan, Karen Sykes, and Jeremy Walton. There are many more, and I apologize for their absence here.

My friend Aaron Ansell deserves special mention because we have had so many enriching conversations (and disagreements) about anthropology and Brazil that have shaped this book deeply. John Collins (who gave up his anonymity) and another anonymous reviewer engaged by the University of Chicago Press each made brilliant and extensive comments on the entire manuscript. Cassie Fennel and Sarah Muir, each of whom is a great friend and generous reader of drafts, helped me brainstorm for a title when I was working with such less-than-satisfying alternatives as Space and Race and Contradictions of Convergence. I was on the verge of giving up when Cassie hit upon the far superior Constellations of Inequality.

At Rutgers-Newark, I have benefited from wonderful colleagues. I thank Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield, Aldo Civico, Ira Cohen, Christopher Duncan, R. Brian Ferguson, Clayton Hartjen, Carol E. Henderson, Alex Hinton, Nicole M. Butkovich Kraus, Jamie Lew, Jan Lewis, S. Priyadarsini, Isaias Rojas-Perez, Gary Roth, Kurt Schock, Genese Sodikoff, and Dawn Wilson. Diana Catarino at Rutgers-Newark transcribed interviews for the book.

Michael Siegel, the staff cartographer at Rutgers, did a fantastic job of designing the map that serves as the frontispiece.

The woodblock print on the cover is titled Vôo de Alcântara and was created by the wonderful Maranhense artist Airton Marinho. I thank him for allowing me to use the image.

The project first took form when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where I was advised by the brilliant Jean Comaroff, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, John D. Kelly, Joseph Masco, and Dain Borges. The mentoring by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, John Comaroff, Michael Silverstein, George Stocking, and Kesha Fikes was also an essential part of my intellectual development at Chicago. Ana Maria Lima taught me Portuguese—in which I became very confident—and, in her laugh-a-minute Portuguese classes, made my early graduate school years not only bearable but fun. I also dearly thank Anne Ch’ien, in Chicago’s anthropology department, for her enormous support.

In Brazil, Carlos Fausto, my advisor when I was based at the Museu Nacional, was an extraordinary mentor and friend. I benefited there from conversations with Lygia Sigaud, Federico Neiburg, and João Pacheco de Oliveira. Antônio Sérgio Guimarães has also been generous with comments on some of my work. Thaddeus Blanchette, Ana Paula da Silva, and Clarice Rios are always generous with their knowledge of Brazil and their hospitality in Rio de Janeiro. In Rio, I have also benefited greatly from working with Bruno Pacheco, Janine Targino, and Adalberto Cardoso. Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, with his brilliance, knowledge of Maranhão and the Amazon, and political commitment, has been a model of scholarship and social action. I have also learned a great deal in conversation with Maristela de Paula de Andrade, Benedito Souza Filho, Carlos Aparecido Fernandes, José Maurício Arruti, and Cynthia Carvalho Martins. Patricia de Menezes Cardoso and Leticia Osorio helped me understand networks of NGOs in Brazil. Colonel Muniz Costa was generous in his comments and critiques of a very early version of what became parts of chapters 3 and 4, helping make my understanding of the Brazilian military much subtler.

In São Luís, I have been fortunate to enjoy the hospitality and camaraderie of Rosenilde Rodrigues Ferreira. Jô Brandão is another great friend in São Luís, with a vast knowledge of Brazil’s social movements. Patrícia Portela Nunes, a close friend and intellectual partner, has helped me both understand and enjoy Maranhão. Brian Mier was often the first person I called when I arrived from the interior in São Luís, and he made the city a lot more fun. Neither of us lives in Maranhão anymore, but he remains one of my most knowledgeable and insightful sources about Brazilian politics. Zé Maria Medeiros, Jose Domingos Moreira Ferrao, Helénio Martins, Franz Gistelinck, Maria Ribamar Martins, and João Tavares all gave support and friendship in São Luís.

In São Luís and Alcântara, MABE, STTR, MOMTRA, ACONERUQ, and CONAQ all provided invaluable information and institutional support.

I owe enormous thanks to so many people in the town of Alcântara: Servulo de Jesus Moraes Borges is and, I hope, will remain a close friend. His wife, Eliete Cavalcanti, is a trusted friend who transcribed many of my interviews. Francinete Pereira da Cruz also transcribed many interviews and has consistently kept me informed about goings-on in Alcântara. Nildo Araújo, Milena da Cruz, Ana Benedita Ferreira, Dionaldo Ferreira, Samuel Moraes, Cerliangela de Fátima Oliveira, Edivan Ferreira Oliveira, Jucelina Ferreira Oliveira, Aniceto Araújo Pereira, Maria Ribamar Silva Pereira, Elis Leia Regina, Vicente Amaral Rodrigues, Naires Ramos Rodriguez, Vilsom Araújo Serejo, and Wilson all provided support, friendship, and knowledge in Alcântara.

I was received warmly throughout the villages of Alcântara’s interior. I owe great thanks to people in the villages of Mamuna, Samucangaua, Baracatatiua, Aguas Belas, Brito, Canelatiua, Castelo, Espera, Itamatatiua, Itapera, Maruda, Pepital, Peru, Prainha, Manival, Rio Grande, Santa Maria, São Mauricio, Só Assim, and others. I wish, in particular, to thank Tátila Cristina Silva Diniz, Inalado Faustino Silva Diniz, Inácio Silva Diniz, Luzia Silva Diniz, Danilo Serejo Lopes, Valdirene Ferreira Mendonça, Dorinete de Moraes, Ana Lourdes Diniz Pereira, Walmir Gomes Rabelo, José Werbert Ramos Ribeiro, Lúcia Rodrigues, Eulina Pinho Silva, Leandra de Jesus Silveira, and Maria de Loudes Siva.

In the village of Mamuna, there are a number of people to whom I owe particular thanks. Sergio Augusto Diniz, Joana Batista Barbosa Diniz, Cipriano Pio Diniz, Cloris Nila Gabriela Diniz, and Antonio Sabino Ferreira Silva were generous with their friendship and with their knowledge. The family of Maria de Fátima Ferreira, in particular, took me in with great warmth. Writing these words in the seemingly vastly different world of New York City, I can’t think of a place that I’d rather be than her family’s house; thanks to Fátima herself, and to Tenorio dos Anjos Pereira, Idenildo Ferreira Pereira, and Tatiana Ferreira Pereira.

This work was, at different times, made possible by funding from Fulbright-Hays, the National Science Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Center for Latin American Studies and Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, the Rutgers Centers for Global Advancement and International Affairs, and the Rutgers Center for Latin American Studies. My writing and thinking were aided by support from the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame; the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis; and the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women; and by a residency at the Wertheim Study of the New York Public Library.

I am grateful to the University of Chicago Press, which has been extremely supportive in this project. I have had the good fortune to have two wonderful editors there. I first submitted this manuscript to T. David Brent, who retired in December 2016 but still gave me many insightful comments. The project was taken over by Priya Nelson, who is a brilliant reader and interlocutor. Dylan J. Montanari, Kristen Raddatz, and Christine Schwab have also been highly supportive. Robert McCarthy did a fantastically careful copyedit of the book.

A version of chapter 3 was previously published in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology; chapter 4 in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies Working Paper Series; and chapter 6 in Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. I thank those publications for allowing me to edit and use those materials. I also thank the Estado do Maranhão newspaper for allowing me to reproduce an image from that newspaper.

My in-laws, Harold and Shigeko Woolfalk, have also given me constant support, as have my brother and sister-in-law, Nick and Lauren Mitchell, and their two children, Lila and Ben.

In so many ways (more than just the obvious ones), this work would have been impossible without my mother and father. My father, William P. Mitchell, a colleague anthropologist, is by far my best interlocutor and critic, and his influence is evident throughout these pages. His partner, Barbara Jaye, has also been a crucial source of support for me. I can’t imagine a more sharp-eyed proofreader than my mother, Daphna Mitchell; any errors and clumsy prose in this book were, I assure you, inserted after she looked at it or against her urging.

1. Porto do Jacaré

Fishing vessels docked at the Porto do Jacaré, Alcântara’s principal entry point. In the background stand eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses, remnants of Alcântara’s brief period of slave-labor-fueled opulence.

Introduction: Relaunching Alcântara

Inequality never stands merely as fact, as the way things are or the way things are done: it requires moral reinforcement in collective beliefs. What beliefs and of what sort depends on place and history.

KAREN E. FIELDS AND BARBARA J. FIELDS, RACECRAFT: THE SOUL OF INEQUALITY IN AMERICAN LIFE

A Space Cavalry

In 1982, a Brazilian air force team arrived on a mangrove-lined stretch of coast where Brazil’s dry northeast finally gives way to Amazon forest, carrying with them plans to build Brazil’s satellite launch base. The ruling military regime would give up power just a few years later, in 1985. However, when the team arrived, the nation’s military-industrial base was surging with an export boom that continued until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.¹

The peninsula of Alcântara, the site of the proposed spaceport, was once a wealth-generating hub in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cotton economy that imported enslaved people from Africa and exported raw material to England’s industrializing mills. Over a long period, after global demand for its cotton plummeted during the 1820s, however, it became one of Brazil’s poorest regions. Reports from the period when the air force arrived give a sense of how the place was viewed by those in charge of the air force team. With its garden plots and fruit trees growing from faded but regal stone plazas; its shoeless children playing on the worn cobblestone built from centuries-old Portuguese ballast; its countryside of villagers living in wattle-and-daub homes, subsisting on fishing, gathering, and swidden horticulture; and, in the words of the director of the air force’s technical team, tribal rituals² coexisting with battery-powered FM radios, to these newcomers, Alcântara seemed to possess a way of life . . . already on the verge of collapse (Lopes 1986).

The air force would help it collapse and would, they promised, build something better. The team and later representatives spoke of a new era of riches, progress, and development, sparking great local excitement, but also some resistance. In 1982, Alcântara’s only electricity was provided by a generator that ran in the evenings and did not extend beyond the peninsula’s small town center. Alcântara’s interior possessed no telephones, and many villages were inaccessible to the area’s few automobiles. Many on and off the peninsula envisioned progress in the expansion of these amenities. But it was principally by foot, by sea, and by battery-powered radio that news quickly spread throughout the peninsula that the air force would hire a number of young men. As one of those recruits told me thirty-two years later, everyone wanted to be part of the new project; for a kid like me with no expectations of education or travel, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Thirty young men were flown some nineteen hundred miles south to São José dos Campos, the heart of Brazil’s military- and high-tech-industrial complex, and trained to travel Alcântara’s densely forested terrain on horseback to prepare villages for a land expropriation that would reshape life in the region and clear the ground for Brazil’s spaceport. Those young men were, as the colonel in charge exulted to the Folha de São Paulo newspaper in 1986, the first space cavalry in history (cited in C. A. Fernandes 1998, 47).

During 1986 and 1987, the air force and its space cavalry of local young men moved some fifteen hundred villagers to air-force-built agricultural villages (agrovilas), with individual household land plots to substitute for collective swidden fields, enabling the initial construction of the base that was completed in 1990. In the decades since 1982, however, these promises and utopian visions have blurred into complex and harsh reality, setting in motion land conflicts, ethnoracial transformations, competing Brazilian space programs, suborbital-launch success, deadly satellite launch failure, suspicions of sabotage, international intrigue, and, always—in this famously unequal country with long-standing ambitions to international power—conflicts over inequality.

I cover a lot of ground in this introduction and book. So, before I proceed, I lay out a few signposts to make what follows as clear as possible. The land expropriation for the spaceport did not eliminate local poverty; it exacerbated it. Mostly self-sufficient coastal villagers were resettled in inland agrovilas, with insufficient resources and support, so that they became dependent on meager and sporadic wage labor. Since the construction of the base, other villages have been slated for expropriation but, through political struggle, have held on to their land. A complex land conflict continues to simmer in Alcântara. But conflicts there have changed. Once principally represented by a Rural Workers’ Union emphasizing class, politicized residents of Alcântara have come to mobilize around a clause in Brazil’s 1988 constitution that requires that the state grant land rights to quilombo (escaped-slave) descended communities, emphasizing ethnoracial history and identity. One of the major topics of this book is the transformation in local conceptions of race, ethnicity, and inequality that have accompanied this change in political strategy and representation. Additionally, when the spaceport was built, it was part of a nationalist project to make Brazil a world power. But the military space program in Alcântara has had limited success, and has come to compete with profit-seeking and internationally focused space projects, generating a significant nationalist backlash. These different projects for space travel put the site at the center of conflicts about the development of the Brazilian nation-state in an unequal international context, another topic of this book. The struggles of villagers and the spaceport are situated side by side in space and time. But beyond this empirical proximity, through analysis of these different conflicts, this book offers an analysis of Brazil’s politics of inequality at multiple scales: local, national, and global.

These inequalities at different scales—and the ways they are conceptualized—have changed over time. How and why they have changed is the unifying thread in the pages that follow. The ethnography and analysis in this book reveal how Brazil’s politics of inequality have transformed since the spaceport was conceived and demonstrate the utility of an ethnographic approach to understanding the relationships between inequality and politics. This book also shows how the political forms that material inequality takes—the solidarities, utopias, and forms of consciousness that it can generate—are historically and culturally variable. Economic analysis, though crucial to understanding inequality, is not enough to understand how inequalities are rendered political. For that, we need ethnographic and historical analysis.

Economic analysis is not enough because inequalities are never simply economic facts. All human inequalities generate both structures of legitimation and utopias of redress: historically specific patterns that maintain and reproduce forms of subordination and others through which challenges to subordination can be imagined and enacted. This book is about inequality and its reproduction, but it is also about the fate of various ways in which inequality’s challenge has been imagined and put into place. Alcântara’s conflicts offer a wide vantage on how structures of legitimation and utopias of redress have changed in the recent history of a nation so well-known for economic disparity that Brazilification is often used as a global shorthand for widening inequality (Mitchell, Blanchette, and Silva, n.d.).

By utopias of redress, I do not mean to imply that the projects I describe here are necessarily unachievable—part of the no-place implicit in the term utopia’s etymology.³ Like all political and technological projects, those arrayed in Alcântara contain a utopian element—whether their protagonists acknowledge so or not—because they presume a vision of the good, of the desirable. Particular utopian visions may or may not be reachable, but they are inevitably premises and goals—even if unarticulated ones—of political and technological projects.⁴ Such projects may be petty, self-interested, and enacted without much thought to any conception of the common good. However, even the pettiest political or technological project presumes, to some degree, a utopian kernel: a vision of how social and material relations ought to be structured.

Dating from 1961, Brazil’s space program was conceived as a project of First World catch-up, imagined to contest global inequalities in the Cold War era of Sputnik and Apollo, when inequalities between states were measured at that most utopian and far-reaching scale of extraterrestrial conquest. In the 1990s, however, this project of nationalist convergence with the First World encountered a neoliberal civilian competitor that emphasizes profit-seeking projects at the spaceport. Neoliberalism, as I argue in chapter 3, is a political ideology that presents itself as quintessentially anti-utopian—interested not in the desirable but only in the possible, hemmed in by the supposedly unchangeable constraints of economic law and human nature. But this simply obscures neoliberalism’s utopianism, its vision of the good.⁵ The establishment of the spaceport in Alcântara was also conceived as a utopian plan to modernize and improve local life there.⁶ And in the years since that implantation, in the face of the failure of the agrovila utopia, many locals have come to embrace Afro-Brazilian history and identity as the cornerstone of their claims for rights of well-being and citizenship, a utopian bid for justice in a society of monstrous inequality.

The major research for this book took place during good years for Brazil. Under the 2003–2016 leadership of a once-socialist political party—the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, Workers’ Party)—and as an economic boom, social programs, and rising wages made a major dent in poverty and raised Brazil’s international profile, the nation was extolled around the world as demonstrating the possibility of the convergence of global rich and poor without major social upheaval (Cohen 2011).

This idea of convergence plays an important role in this book. The utopia of convergence of rich and poor through state-led development was the promise of both socialist and capitalist states during the Cold War (Ferguson 2006, 177) and of the undertaking of the Alcântara spaceport. Although this promise of global convergence fell from international prominence after the Cold War (Coronil 1997, 385; Ferguson 2006), it made a brief early twenty-first-century reappearance in many foreign accounts of Brazil’s successes. Another iteration of convergence underlies the once-dominant development strategy in Brazil (and elsewhere in Latin America) of whitening the nation through immigration and mixture (Andrews 2004; Borges 1993; M. C. da Cunha 1985; Dávila 2003; Guimarães 2012; Hanchard 1994; Schwarcz 1999; Skidmore 1993b). But, for reasons I analyze in this book, this racist version of convergence has also become significantly weakened in twenty-first-century Alcântara and Brazil.

None of these forms of convergence was in the cards; major social upheaval was. Amid an economic downturn, Brazil’s long-simmering conflicts over inequality exploded nationally with massive protests in Brazil’s cities in 2013 and the eventual coup d’état–like removal of the PT from power by right-wing forces in 2016 (Jinkings, Cleto, and Doria 2016). This book shows how Brazil has been riven by conflicts over inequality, even as these conflicts were briefly obscured during the economic boom years of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Inequality at Multiple Scales

The seeds of the region’s contemporary politics were planted when free Afro-Brazilian and mixed-race villages began to form throughout Alcântara after around 1818 (Almeida 2006a, 2006b; Furtado 1959), as the region’s slave-based cotton economy declined. This was long before slavery’s abolition in 1888. Some of those pioneering villagers were quilombolas, living in quilombos. Historically, a quilombo was a community of people who had escaped slavery in Brazil, although the meaning of the term has changed in ways this book explores. As a noun, the word quilombola refers to people who are members of a quilombo. Quilombola can also be used adjectivally, as to describe the social movement that has become central to Alcântara’s politics, Movimento Quilombola (Quilombo Movement).⁷

Following abolition, the residents of the region developed a rural society rooted in collective swidden horticulture, fishing, and commercial and kin ties across the bay, in the state capital, São Luís. During this period, the region was of little interest to national elites, except as an equatorial historic outpost with a small tourist industry.

The region’s fate changed in 1980, when a state governor allied to Brazil’s military regime (1964–1985) claimed much of Alcântara’s coast by decree to construct the principal spaceport of the nation’s fledgling space program. Conceived to make Brazil a world power in an era when major symbolic and material disputes over national prestige and inequality between states were waged through domination of space technology, the project was also supposed to modernize a region understood by planners as mired in the past. Yet no satellite has yet been launched successfully from the site, and the air force’s modernization plan mostly succeeded in exacerbating local poverty and depleting farmland. In 2016, two launchpads stand on the 8,713 hectares that were cleared by the air force. One launchpad, rebuilt after a deadly 2003 explosion, belongs to the air force. The other is civilian and profit-focused, built for Alcântara Cyclone Space, a Ukrainian-Brazilian consortium that disbanded in 2015. Some still plan to use its launch infrastructure for other profit-focused launch projects. Each of these launch projects institutionalizes different visions of the role a Brazilian space program should play in an unequal world, two visions of Brazilian development that compete at many levels in Brazilian society: the first a military-nationalist vision, the second a neoliberal one.

Rural residents of the region, supported by a wide network of allies, have also struggled to create a better position for themselves in a deeply unequal context. In the early years of the conflict, a Rural Workers’ Union was the principal institution representing locals, and a perception of economic exclusion informed the political projects of villagers and their allies. This economic focus has changed as villagers have come to depend on an ethnoracial defense of their rights, a gradual change that began in the late twentieth century. In a clause generally glossed as the Quilombo Clause, the Brazilian constitution of 1988, promulgated after military rule, required that the state grant inalienable land rights (propriedade definitiva) to quilombo-descended communities (remanescentes das comunidades dos quilombos). The national quilombo movement that formed in the years since has become the most important representative of Alcântara’s residents.⁸ Over years of struggle, many in Alcântara have come to embrace and reinterpret quilombo and Afro-Brazilian identities that had not been the key categories of political mobilization during Alcântara’s post-abolition history. Spurred by opportunities opened by the Quilombo Clause, by the work of activists and intellectuals, by the increasing symbolic and juridical power of identity-based politics in the post–Cold War world, and by their changing social and material circumstances, residents of Alcântara have transformed local conceptions and relations of identity and inequality, making race and history key terms of citizenship and belonging. The many changes during this period in Alcântara have also helped to chip away at relations of patronage between villagers and local elites, while building villager alliances with far-flung lawyers, intellectuals, politicians, and activists.

I partially intend this book for those who want to understand the fraught social life of Brazil’s spaceport and the area’s residents, and how Brazil’s politics of race, inequality, and development have changed over recent decades. However, this is not a conventional book about inequality. Recent transformations to Brazil’s political and economic inequality have been the subject of much worthy recent scholarship (e.g., Arretche 2015; Medeiros, Souza, and Castro 2015; Pochmann 2014; Souza and Grillo 2009). My overarching concern here is with the relationship between inequality and political consciousness—or how people come to understand and act upon the unequal conditions in which they find themselves. What people understand inequality to be, how they conceptualize its nature and how it can or cannot be (or should or should not be) transformed are cultural and historical matters as much as material ones. This book demonstrates the profound political consequences of the differing ways in which people conceptualize inequality and its redress, and how these conceptualizations are not merely the predictable result of economic or social indicators. People shape conceptualizations of inequality and its redress through political action as they draw on their understanding of historical knowledge, current realities, and future possibilities.

I draw here on E. P. Thompson’s insight that economic models cannot yield ‘true’ class formation[s] or class consciousness. No actual class formation in history is any truer or more real than any other, and class defines itself as, in fact, it eventuates (1978, 150). Similar conclusions can be drawn about race, ethnicity, gender, or conceptions of national or regional development. All these conceptual categories, used at times to think about inequalities at different scales (i.e., between individuals, groups, and nation-states), are shaped historically through cultural and material processes. How they manifest and are understood by historical actors is never given simply by material conditions but by means of processes that must be uncovered through historical and ethnographic work.

As Barbara and Karen Fields argue in their searing attack on racial common sense in the United States, inequality never stands merely as fact, as the way things are or the way things are done: it requires moral reinforcement in collective beliefs that are always historically specific, although they