Table Of ContentSPRINGER BRIEFS IN SOCIOLOGY
Markus Lundström
The Making of
Resistance
Brazil’s Landless
Movement
and Narrative
Enactment
123
SpringerBriefs in Sociology
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ö
Markus Lundstr m
The Making of Resistance
’
Brazil s Landless Movement and Narrative
Enactment
123
Markus Lundström
Department ofEconomic History
Stockholm University
Stockholm
Sweden
ISSN 2212-6368 ISSN 2212-6376 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs inSociology
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TheMakingofResistance:Brazil’sLandlessMovementandNarrativeEnactment
“How can popular movements endure and adapt to varying political opportunities
and economic constraints? Students of poor people’s movements have long vexed
over this problem. Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) offers a
telling case for this inquiry. Here is a peasant group that originated in the early
1980s,becameoneofworld’slargestandmostsophisticatedgrassrootsmovements
bythe1990s,andhasremained activeandcontentiousinthe2010s,despitemajor
obstacles to agrarian reform. Markus Lundström probes this question through an
intriguing lens. Successful movements like the MST, he argues, are adept story
tellers. They develop a clever narrative of their place in history. Identify their foes
in an incisive manner, and nurture their sense of purpose and self-image in strong
yet flexible ways. The ethos of resistance is sustained through a dialogical process
that involves movement participants, allies and close observers, notably in the
academiccommunity.Theinteractionwithscholars,asLundströmaptlyshows,has
helped reinforce key elements of the MST narrative. These and other valuable
insights teased throughout this book contribute much to our understanding of how
popular movements can foster resilience.”
Miguel Carter, PhD
Founding Director
DEMOS–Centro para la Democracia, la Creatividad y la Inclusión Social
Author and editor of For Land, Love & Justice: The Origins of Brazil’s Landless
Social Movement (forthcoming with Duke University Press), and Challenging
SocialInequality:TheLandlessRuralWorkersMovementandAgrarianReformin
Brazil (2015, Duke University Press).
“This delightful book offers an original standpoint that ventures beyond familiar
accounts of contemporary analysis of resistance, and of Brazil’s Landless Rural
Workers’ Movement. By focusing on the importance of storytelling and on the
powerofnarrative,Lundströmopensabreathingspacetoexploretheoreticallyand
empirically how movements’ narratives – in this case the MST’s – are constantly
revisited and re-enacted, and rewriting their own history.”
Dr. Ana C Dinerstein
Political sociologist, University of Bath
AuthorofThePoliticsofAutonomyinLatinAmerica.TheArtofOrganisingHope
(2015, Palgrave Macmillan)
“The Making of Resistance is a carefully crafted ethnographic study of Brazil’s
Landless Movement (MST), that since its founding in the early 1980s has become
the largest social movement in Latin America. Dr. Lundström’s focus on the
group’s skillful use of their own constructed narrative, to motivate and shape their
actionsandguidetheirmovementandsuccessfulmobilizations,bringsanewlevel
ofunderstandingtohow this important socialmovementoperates.Thisisrequired
reading for anyone who wants to understand the MST or how narrative can
influence a social (or political) movement.”
Harry E. Vanden
Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies
University of South Florida
Author of Politics of Latin America: The Power Game (2015, Oxford University
Press), and co-editor of Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical
Action From Below (2014, Rowman & Littlefield)
“InTheMakingofResistance,MarkusLundströmtellsthestorybehindthemaking
of Latin America’s largest and most enduring social movement, Brazil’s Landless
Movement. Skillfully weaving together social history with rich ethnography,
Lundström explains the movement’s precursors in historical struggles over land,
traces the origins of the modern movement in the land occupations of the late
1970s, and chronicles the evolution of the movement as a political subject in a
context of profound socioeconomic and political change. Through interviews and
focusgroups,Lundström’snarrativeallowsBrazil’slandlessworkerstoexplainand
interpret their own struggles to gain access to land and construct a new political
subject. This book is a major contribution to the field, as few works in the social
sciences provide such penetrating insights into the making of social movements
from the vantage point of their protagonists.”
Kenneth Roberts
Richard J. Schwartz, Professor of Government, Cornell University
AuthorofChangingCourseinLatinAmerica:PartySystemsintheNeoliberalEra
(2014, Cambridge University Press)
“This is a unique and theoretically provocative book on Brazil’s iconic landless
ruralworkers’movement.Lundströmoffersanewperspectiveontheirstrugglefor
land and their search for autonomy, which highlights the ways the MST has nav-
igated and narrated the ups and downs of over 30 years of struggle against the
dominant agrarian elite of the country. The Making of Resistance invites us to
revisit the role of discourse in the process of political subject formation of peasant
movements.”
Leandro Vergara-Camus
Senior Lecturer
Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London
AuthorofLandandFreedom.TheMST,theZapatistasandPeasantAlternativesto
Neoliberalism (2014, Zed Books)
To the living memory of Elton Brum
Preface
Manyacademicsstudyexperimentsthatcounterthecapitalistsystem.Butstudiesgenerally
reach only the university world, while people that take part in these experiences—the
research objects—do not see much of those studies. We have had various persons here,
interviewing, researching, and observing. And we always say, not just to you but to all
people that come here, that it is important to study these experiments from the workers’
pointofview.Idon’tthinkitisonlyourcommunity,orourmovement,thathavepositive
experiences.Ibelievethatacademicsthathavethisoutlook,thatidentifywiththeworking
class,arelikewiseoperatingagainstthehegemonyunderwhichwealllive.Itistherefore
important that you, who study our experiments, find ways to disclose the results to our
community.Thatwouldhelpusadvanceourstruggle.
ThereisundoubtedlyacriticaledgetoLuisa’sstatement.Livinginoneofthemost
well-organized and prosperous communities of Movimento dos Trabalhadores
Rurais Sem Terra (MST), Luisa has become accustomed to curious outsiders. She
recurrentlytellsherstorytovisitingstudents,researchers,journalists,andactivists.
Twentyyearsago,Luisatypicallybegins,sheoccupiedalargelandestatetogether
with other landless rural workers in Southern Brazil. For years, she and the other
occupantsstruggledforlegalizedlandaccess.Theywantedtobefarmers,notfarm
workers. Eventually, in the early 1990s, the occupied land was officially expro-
priated, transformed into a state-sanctioned rural settlement. The settlers started to
cultivate rice and soon advanced into manufacturing. Today, Luisa concludes, the
MST settlement produces high-quality food for the rural poor, their organic rice
distributed to public schools all across interior Brazil.
Luisa tells her story with pride and dignity. She finds it important to voice one
ofthecollective“experimentsthatcounterthecapitalistsystem.”YetLuisaistired
of being a “research object.” And she declares this to me, another question-asking
visitor,foreignertotheircommunity,totheircollectiveexperience.Luisatherefore
requests of me to disclose a report that “would help us advance our struggle.” But
thatIcannotdo.WhatIcando,however,istooutlinehowsuchanadvancementis
fosteredbystorytellingitself.TheMSTstoryisrepeatedlynarratedbyinterviewed
MST participants, like Luisa, as well as academic scholars, like me. The story is
told in dialogue with the past, recalling protagonists from a narrative prequel to
ix
x Preface
situateBrazil’sLandlessMovementinhistoricalcontext.Yetthisstoryisnotsome
narrative monolith. It is flexible, constantly modified, and revised. And it is con-
tinuously revived, put into action through narrative enactment. It is therefore, I
believe, the dynamic usage of the movement narrative that best answers Luisa’s
request.
This book explores the story of Brazil’s Landless Movement: its historio-
graphical prequel, its narrative components, its modifications, and its enactment.
The scientific purpose with this exploration stems from a non-essentialist under-
standing of social movements and other agents of resistance. This means that
groupsofpeoplethatsomehowconfront,defy,orescapetherepressiveworkingsof
powerdonotnecessarilyrepresentsomepreexistingidentity,norshareaprescribed
social essence. From the non-essentialist theoretical perspective, resistance agents
derivenotfrom class, ethnicity,gender, oranyother form ofsocialcategorization.
Agents of resistance instead become distinguishable through their activities and
advocacies.Fromthisnon-essentialistperspective,resistanceagentsareunderstood
as diverse, or divergent, political subjects. Resistance then becomes a contingent
activity;individualsareunified, inaspecifictime andplace, throughtheirstruggle
for sociopolitical advocacies. This notion of resistance contingency motivates,
I believe, a thorough exploration of the MST story.
Brazil’s Landless Movement is commonly narrated as one of the world’s most
long-standing andsuccessfulsocialmovements.Thestorybeginsinthelate1970s
with rural mobilizations, materialized as land occupations. These resistance activ-
ities become increasingly interconnected, and the Landless Movement soon grows
nationwide. Through successful land occupations, numerous families, hundreds of
thousands, now gain legalized access to farm land. In this storytelling, MST con-
tinuously navigates Brazil’s uneven politico-economic topography.
Here,weencounterwhatsocialscientiststypicallycallaresearchproblem.Ifwe
acceptthenotionofsocialmovementsascontingentpoliticalsubjects,howcanwe
possibly understand their continuity over time? The answer to this question,
I believe, is partway found in the dynamic activity of history writing.
With empirical focus on Brazil’s Landless Movement, this book explores the
enablingpowerembeddedinthemovementnarrative.ThebookbeginswithMST’s
historiography, encompassing what I refer to as a prequel to the MST story. My
empiricalanalysisofethnographicandwrittenMSTsourcessuggeststhatthescene
of this prequel, just like the MST story, takes place at the social margins of the
Brazilian nation-state project. The historiographical characters, recalled in the
narrative prequel, include runaway slaves, indigenous peoples, religious groups,
andrurallaborunions.Together,theseinsubordinateresistanceagents,protagonists
oftheMSTprequel,portraythehistoricalcontext—fivecenturiesofresistance—in
which the story of Brazil’s Landless Movement is then situated.
Local translations of the MST story, like Luisa’s storytelling, imply the narra-
tive’s importance for political subject formation. Collective memories create a
mutual space of experience, specific understandings of past events that assign
meaningtocontemporaryresistanceactivities.Thespaceofexperienceistherefore
avitalresourceforpoliticalimagination,formulatingahorizonofexpectation.The
