In This Land Is Ours Now, Wendy Wolford presents an original framework for understanding social mobilization. She argues that social movements are not the politically coherent, bounded entities often portrayed by scholars, the press, and movement leaders. Instead, they are constantly changing mediations between localized moral economies and official movement ideologies. Wolford develops her argument by analyzing how a particular social movement works: Brazil's Rural Landless Workers' Movement, known as the Movimento Sem Terra (MST). Founded in the southernmost states of Brazil in the mid-1980s, this extraordinary grassroots agrarian movement grew dramatically in the ensuing years. By the late 1990s it was the most dynamic, well-organized social movement in Brazilian history.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wolford compares the development of the movement in Brazil's southern state of Santa Catarina and its northeastern state of Pernambuco. As she explains, in the south, most of the movement's members were sons and daughters of small peasant farmers; in the northeast, they were almost all former plantation workers, who related awkwardly to the movement's agenda of accessing "land for those who work it." The MST became an effective presence in Pernambuco only after the local sugarcane economy had collapsed. Worldwide sugarcane prices dropped throughout the 1990s, and by 1999 the MST was a prominent political organizer in the northeastern plantation region. Yet fewer than four years later, most of the region's workers had dropped out of the movement. By delving into the northeastern workers' motivations for joining and then leaving the MST, Wolford adds nuance and depth to accounts of a celebrated grassroots social movement, and she highlights the contingent nature of social movements and political identities more broadly.

Looks at Brazil's largest grassroots social movement, Movement of Rural Landless Workers, or MST, to show how mobilization is shaped by cultural understandings of material and spatial environments.

About the Author

Wendy Wolford is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University.

Reviews
"Wolford's narrative style accommodates her heterogeneous sources, but she is rooted in ethnography, and the density of her description is a significant
virtue. She allows space for extended material directly from interviews with MST settlers and leaders, which ground her analysis. In her conclusion, she offers a careful, balanced, and subtle evaluation of President Lula's record on agrarian reform that avoids the polemics associated with this subject." - Thomas D. Rogers, Hispanic American Historical Review
"This Land Is Ours Now is destined to become a classic in social movement literature and among those who study property relations, land tenure, and development policy. Offering a fresh, honest, and insightful take on a compelling but previously oversimplified story, it has broad implications for the political strategies of social movements, autonomous communities, and development alternatives in Latin America and throughout the world."-Dianne Rocheleau, Professor of Geography and Global Environmental Studies, Clark University
"Precious few ethnographic subjects have ever been accorded the respect, critical eye, and deep attention Wendy Wolford pays on every page to ordinary Brazilians. Her study of the MST is exemplary in every way. The voices and texture are palpable and are woven into an analytically powerful and conceptually original argument. A signal contribution to the study of land reform, of social movements, and of Brazilian politics. I'm frankly a little jealous of what she has achieved here."-James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University
"Wolford's narrative style accommodates her heterogeneous sources, but she is rooted in ethnography, and the density of her description is a significant virtue. She allows space for extended material directly from interviews with MST settlers and leaders, which ground her analysis. In her conclusion, she offers a careful, balanced, and subtle evaluation of President Lula's record on agrarian reform that avoids the polemics associated with this subject." -- Thomas D. Rogers * Hispanic American Historical Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822345398
Author Wendy Wolford
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 413g