REVIEWS : Defending Food Sovereignty, Quilombo Lives, Quilombo Dreams

...harvesting and hulling rice...

...One issue left largely alone in the film is that of race and racism...

...He accepts that the president’s economic program is uncertain, that identity politics continues to play an important role, and that after Morales’s election, “what will truly be irreversible is a self-confident indigenous presence in the management of broad parts of public life...

...She is a former NACLA staff assistant...

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS reviews New & Noteworthy GOLDEN AND BLUE LIKE My hEART: MASCULINITy, yOUTh AND POWER AMONG SOCCER FANS IN MExICO CITy by Roger Magazine, University of Arizona Press, 2007, 224 pp., $24.95 paperback for anthropologist roger magazine, there are as many kinds of sports fans as there are teams, at least in Mexico’s premier soccer league...

...But much of our culture has lost importance...

...As agribusiness has pursued cheap land, labor, and markets in the world’s poorest regions, wages and prices have fallen...

...What is the role of markets in such a scheme...

...In deciding whom to root for—and how—soccer fans are simultaneously declaring how they think “life should be lived...

...Their locations mark the historic movement of Africans across Brazil, QUILOMBO COUNTRy: AFRO-BRAzILIAN VILLAGES IN ThE 21ST CENTURy (dvd, 2006, 73 minutes), directed by Leonard abrams, Quilombo films (www.quilombo film.com) beginning in the northeastern state of Maranhão and moving west to the delta island of Marajo and finally to Trombetas, farther into the Amazon basin...

...Corporate approaches to agriculture are at or near maximum productive levels, but the world’s millions of small farms have only begun to exploit their productive potential, and can save jobs, community, whole cultures—as well JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008 reviews ing challenges to received thought on the left, especially regarding the scale and role of planning...

...She shows how agricultural processes rooted in family and community developed unevenly with capitalism, as subsidies The demand for food sovereignty is, in the end, incompatible with agribusiness models, in which “all resources necessary for sustenance are entrapped by the market,” as vandana Shiva has written...

...They point to the installation of electricity and running water as recent improvements, and we see power tools at work in the surrounding jungle...

...The food sovereignty framework, first proclaimed by the Via Campe of rural dwellers across the world, the Women’s Commission argued, fighting gender discrimination must occupy the heart of the organization’s demand for change...

...In exciting passages, Desmarais describes meetings of the organization’s international Women’s Commission, in which Latin American representatives took the lead...

...First it creates a higher demand for labor, including female labor...

...Nonetheless, Quilombo Country offers rich testimonial material and intimate footage...

...If we leave to work, we lose the land because farmers from outside will come in and take it...

...This is especially the case with formal education, which is what leads many young residents to move to urban centers, since most quilombos offer only primary education...

...Official quilombo land rights were first recognized under the 1988 post-dictatorship federal constitution...

...Focusing her analysis on developing countries, Caraway convincingly shows that this process, which also entails a cheapening of labor power, is not driven by labor markets alone, but also by changes and continuities in the realms of culture and politics...

...Abrams chooses breadth over depth, and while he has amassed a wealth of material, he fails to present it in a way that encourages critical consideration...

...In addition to these concerns, Abrams spends considerable time considering the religious practices of quilombos...

...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008 reviews Defending Food Sovereignty by Matt Kopka S ince 1995, the world trade Organization has vigorously facilitated the expansion of corporate control over global food production...

...Our situation is still very hard,” he says...

...Moreover, rural dwellers are the ones most likely to go hungry—even though about half of humankind lives in the rural sector, where most food is produced, rural people make up two thirds of those in extreme poverty...

...Matt Kopka recently finished doctoral coursework in interdisciplinary ecology at the University of Florida, and is researching the implementation of food sovereignty concepts by the Via Campesina’s Caribbean organizations...

...The realization that they had “voice, experience . . . expertise, and the ability to share,” helped end “a pervasive sense of isolation and powerlessness among participants...

...Employment growth in labor-intensive industries,” Caraway reports, is the primary stimulus for feminization...

...Meanwhile, a wave of farmer suicides has swept the planet...

...Abrams also shows footage of pageants performed throughout the region, in both rural and urban settings...

...As a result, Magazine argues, “most Pumas fans self-identify as youths and explain that they are attracted to the team because of the perspective on life and soccer that they share with the players...

...Quilombolas seem to spend considerable time engaged in the tasks of subsistence living, tied perhaps to NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS reviews the communities’ recent reclaiming of their land...

...These meetings increased the women’s “understanding of the root causes and validity” of the issues that peasant and farm women confront, often alone, every day...

...But despite evidence of this complexity, the film portrays the quilombos as cut off: Scenes of long boat rides through densely forested areas and machetes hacking through the underbrush give way to serene views of the quilombos, patches of cultivated land in the jungle...

...In the quilombo of Santa Maria da the possibility of such a loss, citing the intimate relationship between culture and identity...

...We are strong and determined, and we are the majority of the world,” says the group’s 2000 Bangalore declaration...

...Such knowledge, the Via Campesina argues, is part of the human patrimony, not the property of fertilizer manufacturers or the makers of genetically modified seed...

...In what David Harvey has called “the greatest period of dispossession” in history, millions of poor workers have been driven from their traditional lands into the world’s exploding cities and “rurban” ghettos, while poor governments’ power to protect their citizens from hunger has been severely limited...

...ASSEMBLING WOMEN: ThE FEMINIzATION OF GLOBAL MANUFACTURING by Teri L. Caraway, Cornell University Press, 2007, 208 pp., $18.95 paperback while women are entering the labor force in growing numbers the world over—a process sometimes called the “feminization” of labor—we are not witnessing “a seamless integration of women into men’s jobs but rather a redrawing or reconfiguration of the gender divisions of labor that separate men’s work from women’s work...

...Feminization involves both the definition of new jobs as realms of women’s activity and the redefinition as women’s work of jobs previously held by men...

...Its members have marched against the WTO, dismantled a French McDonald’s, and occupied lands left idle by wealthy landowners, establishing cooperative farms, seed banks, and classrooms...

...If rural women are the very poorest have killed themselves, many drinking “one of the tools of agricultural modernization,” chemical pesticides...

...Farmers, increasingly separated from control over their production, lost their knowledge of the natural mechanisms underlying it as well...

...The film opens with the forceful voiceover of the narrator, hip-hop legend and former Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, who briefly explains the history of quilombos...

...Magazine probably draws too much political meaning from this emotion, but the book remains a compelling look at Mexican fandom...

...Second, it gives employers the opportunity to dismantle established gender divisions without firing male workers...

...Cristiane de Oliveira in Varre Vento, a young woman clearly dedicated to her teaching job at a primary school, says her choice to teach in the quilombo is partially determined by her qualifications: Having completed only a grade school education, she would be unable to work in a larger or less remote community...

...The answers will be found, Desmarais makes clear, in the crucible of struggle...

...Instead of simply demanding that people have enough to eat, as the conventional concept of “food security” would have it, proponents of food sovereignty insist that communities must produce food first to meet the needs of their own reproduction, according to their own cultural dictates rather than for export...

...In a larger ceremony, twirling believers collapse into the arms of their neighbors as spirits possess them...

...We dance till [the spirits] will come and we go into a trance,” says a priestess, explaining the body-wracking convulsions and fainting during the ceremonies...

...The future belongs to us...

...It “desperately needed time for farmers from around the world to meet,” establish policy positions, and devise protocols for engaging with NGOs, the FAO, and governments...

...Yet community activist Ivo Fonseca Silva, from the Association of Rural Quilombo Communities of Maranhão, denies expressions, religious beliefs—are compelling in themselves...

...These festivals and their narratives combine a plurality of religious and secular elements, yet their rich iconographies and histories go unexplored, leaving viewers to wonder at their beauty...

...Abrams’s filmmaking style appears open and honest: Community members welcome the camera into their homes and offer personal stories as well as historical and political commentary...

...Such notions of community and of a revitalized peasantry pose excit to first-world farmers underwrote national projects of industrialization and the rise of consumer culture...

...But his footage of ceremonies and festivals inspires awe...

...Dunkerley’s always engaging writing style is put to its best use in the volume’s lead essay on Evo Morales and the way Bolivia, as a “small country,” is seen, and frequently dismissed, by the outside world—and worse, the way it is seen, and taken seriously in (pre)scripted ways by a variety of Latin American “specialists...

...During a healing session, in which religious leaders call upon spirits to cure sick villagers and provide advice in a dark, smoky room, a woman consults a spiritual intermediary to learn why she and her husband have separated, and if he will return...

...So argues Teri Caraway in this interesting account of the role of gender in the global labor market and the workplace of the early 21st century...

...Food is “a source as nature—as they feed millions now going hungry...

...Their agriculture is remarkably low-tech, as is the construction of their homes: The residents, or quilombolas, erect houses with wood frames, clay walls, and roofs made of palm leaves...

...The Catholic priest of Obidos applauds efforts to revitalize an African culture lost through years of wage labor and oppression, while ex–quilombo resident Seu Mimi Viana comments on the erosion of community values in the urban setting...

...In March 2006, a group of Via LA VIA CAMPESINA: GLOBALIzATION AND ThE POWER OF PEASANTS by annette aurélie desmarais, fernwood publishing and pluto press (distributed by the university of michigan press), 2007, $24.95 paperback Campesina women destroyed millions of bioengineered eucalyptus seedlings on a Brazilian plantation run by the Aracruz cellulose company, demanding an end to such facilities, which exhaust precious water while failing to address the food needs of the poor...

...Desmarais grounds her analysis in the landscape of 20th- and early21st-century agriculture and the worldwide peasantry’s stubborn refusal to be disappeared from it...

...Yes, we have value...

...While these scenes are powerful, they also impart a feeling of JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008 reviews voyeurism, as though the camera should not intrude into such intense, sacred moments...

...and extracting oil from the seeds of babassu palms...

...The film is a sweeping ethnography, touching upon a range of issues, from food cultivation and preparation to religious practices to land rights and racism...

...These questions are matters of urgent debate in the Via Campesina...

...The religious syncretism practiced by many Brazilians has long been the subject of scholarly discussion, to which Abrams contributes little depth...

...Irineiu da Souza of the Association of Remaining Quilombos of the Municipality of Oriximina discusses nascent efforts to form agricultural cooperatives to leverage higher prices for cash crops like brazil nuts...

...Corinna Zeltsman is a writer and printer living in New York...

...Through such encounters, Desmarais writes, “farm leaders came to understand each other’s realities” and to “define the nature of solidarity...

...All of the issues toucheduponin Quilombo Country—land rights, conceptions of community, racism, cultural relates the tale of a slave who, to satisfy his pregnant wife’s craving for bull’s tongue, kills the master’s bull and must flee a band of hunters, only to be saved when a healer brings the dead animal back to life...

...Such policies, now denied to third-world governments in the name of free trade, shielded wealthy nations’ farmers from the market’s ravages...

...BOLIVIA: REVOLUTION AND ThE POWER OF hISTORy IN ThE PRESENT by James Dunkerley, Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007, 224 pp., $30 paperback this collection of essays by longtime Bolivia observer James Dunkerley, written over the past three decades, covers some 200 years of the country’s history, from the independence struggles of the early 19th century to the contentious politics of sovereignty and neoliberalism of our own day...

...This book prepares us to join the debate at the highest level, and to join the work as well...

...We can’t leave,” explains Patricia Da Sousa, “because if we do, we could lose our land...

...Its logic helps us understand that food produced for profit alone spreads misery, and indeed threatens our existence: Corporate livestock create more greenhouse gases than automobiles, monocrop farming produces deserts...

...Advocates demand the resources—seed, water, and above all genuine land reform—to effect such changes...

...Quilombo Country: Afrobrazilian Villages in the 21st Century, a documentary by Leonard Abrams, presents a panorama of daily life in three of these contemporary quilombos...

...Prior to this, residents recount, sharecropping and wage labor were common, as was conflict with outsiders over land...

...Throughout the film, collective land ownership resurfaces as a fundamental issue for the quilombo...

...The film also documents saints’ days and public celebrations...

...We haven’t found other people Pretos, we witness the feast of Santa Filomena, in which residents cut an enormous mast from a tree and carry it from the forest, entering homes and receiving gifts of food, money, and alcohol in exchange for a blessing...

...Although this approach makes for a largely unfocused film, Abrams captures compelling images and testimonies that convey some sense of the tensions within quilombos...

...Pumas, by fielding a team on which no player is allowed to approach early middle age, has built itself (and billed itself) as the team of “youth...

...sina at the 1996 Rome Forum on Food Security, constitutes both a politics of resistance and an emerging mode of development...

...Since 1997, Desmarais reports, 25,000 farmers in India alone of nutrition, only secondarily an item of trade...

...One particular narrative dance The apparent balance that quilombos have achieved between subsistence living and integration into a cash-crop economy speaks to their complex relationship with and within brazilian society...

...The words peasant and campesino, employed in such contexts, do not imply a folkloric preservation of culture or feudal relations, but the ineradicable relationship between the soil, its local particularities, and those who work it...

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS reviews Initiatives born of these meetings expanded membership of the Via Campesina’s coordinating committee to balance its gender representation...

...The authoritative voiceover is almost incompatible with the documentary’s style, which gives precedence to thoughtful testimonial accounts and respects the opinions of numerous quilombo residents...

...This footage is juxtaposed with interviews of former quilombo residents now living in cities and towns, constructing a clear dichotomy...

...Most of the large formal settlements were destroyed within two years of their founding (with the exception of Palmares, which endured for almost a century as an independent kingdom), but descendants of their inhabitantscontinuetocarveoutaliving in villages scattered throughout the northern Amazon region...

...The mast is then raised in the town amid drinking and singing...

...The view is global, but much of the book’s emphasis lies in Latin America, the “epicentre of change,” as the group’s Web site proclaims, “where a new kind of internationalism is being born, not one of capital, but of people” (www.viacampesina.org...

...The organization’s beginnings may be traced to a series of exchanges in the 1970s between South and Central American small farmers, and between those farmers and some of their first-world counterparts...

...Both an organization and a movement, the umbrella group represents millions of peasants, small farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, and landless workers...

...Any one of them could have served as a single critical lens through which to examine contemporary quilombos, but the film, lacking a meaningful guiding question, attempts to cover them all...

...The continued closure of many lines of work to women is intimately related to gendered discourses of work—ideas that managers hold about the qualities of male and female labor...

...If this seems like an anthropological stretch, it is, but the book is great fun to read...

...The apparent balance that quilombos have achieved between subsistence living and integration into a cash-crop economy speaks to their complex relationship with and within Brazilian society...

...Annette Aurélie Desmarais, a geographer and former farmer from Saskatchewan, has long worked with the organization and provides a critical introduction to the Via Campesina and its demand for “food sovereignty,” subjects about which too little information has been available...

...Imagery and memories of slavery permeate the documentary, yet apart from several brief moments, race in the present is seldom addressed explicitly...

...Clearly, the meanings and expressions of quilombo culture are a source of debate...

...Quilombola Libanio Pires offers his assessment...

...Despite the long history of outsiders threatening quilombos—in modern times, they have survived the military regime’s eviction plans, the threat of major business interests, and encroachment by wealthy landowners—many quilombo residents say they want to benefit from key aspects of modern Brazilian society...

...In Magazine’s study of the porras (the organized fan base) of the Mexico City–based Pumas, one of the country’s best professional teams, we learn that many of the top-ranking teams in Mexico have deliberately created social identities for themselves, which are then adopted by their most fervent followers...

...Thus Pumas fans “are closer to something inherently and basically human: emotion...

...Foodsovereignty’sradicalinsistence on community, on the development of a “defensible life space” against neoliberalism’s enclosure of the commons, is particularly suggestive, and dovetails with our growing understanding of the ecology of food production and the amount of energy wasted as food is processed, transported, packaged, and stored...

...If the film is sweeping and overambitious, the opinions, explanations, and concerns expressed by residents focus our attention on the plurality of forces that shape today’s quilombos...

...The older ones die but the children grow up knowing...

...Simultaneously, many saw how world developments, including WTO negotiations and free trade agreements, would have “a profound effect on the everyday lives of the world’s population,” threatening the existence of peasant communities...

...We gather up the children to learn the drums, and so some leave and others enter...

...Under this food regime, hunger has grown rather than diminished: Between 2001 and 2002 alone, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the number of undernourished people worldwide increased by 10 million...

...So we have to stay in our place...

...Distinguishing solidarity from paternalistic charity, especially as implied in relationships with first-world governments and NGOs, has been a crucial challenge for the organization...

...Quilombo Lives, Quilombo Dreams by Corinna Zeltsman A lthough brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery (1888), resistance to the institution over the years continued unabated, with fugitive slaves joining one another to form settlements throughout the country...

...Poor people’s ability to create such spaces, Desmarais suggests, may be the true measure of social progress in our time...

...What are the appropriate levels and modes of governance if community is the basis for production yet (presumably national) governments are required to redistribute resources and protect the peoples’ gains from hostile forces, both inside and outside of national borders...

...The filmmaker launches into an overview of the quilombos’ basic characteristics through a visit to Santa Joana and Santa Maria, where residents demonstrate how they cultivate, harvest, and prepare their food— digging up manioc roots and grinding them into flour...

...The 15-yearold organization has become a powerful presence in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and more recently Africa...

...that value us...

...This omission may owe to the filmmaker’s failure to consider the quilombo within the larger context of contemporary Brazilian society...

...These communities, known in Brazil as quilombos, united recently arrived Africans with Afro-Brazilians in complex, dynamic societies...

...Together these are asserted as human rights...

...But after World War II, food production began to yield to specialization, profit pressures, and the pursuit of global markets...

...Residents participate in religious life with energy and passion, and their zeal is evident in varied public and private manifestations...

...The global environmental crisis is, in fact, the crisis of capitalism...

...And given the racial history of the region, how, Dunkerley wonders throughout this volume, could it be otherwise...

...Concern over the perceived loss of this vibrant culture in the face of modernity is addressed at various points in the film...

...Would they mean an inevitable reassertion of exploitative relations down the road...

...While establishing a presence on the world stage at events like the 1999 mass demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle, the Via Campesina still faced colossal challenges in creating a worldwide organizational infrastructure...

...The demand for food sovereignty is, in the end, incompatible with agribusiness models, in which “all resources necessary for sustenance are entrapped by the market,” as Vandana Shiva has written...

...La Via Campesina, this book’s remarkable protagonist, has risen in response to the growing food calamity facing rural dwellers...

...While some critics protest that a politics focused on ethnic identity undercuts a more “rational” and powerful confrontation with oppression, ethnic politics are powerfully at play in Bolivia...

...Dunkerley gives the critics their due, but effectively denies the possibility of a scripted response to Morales’s revolutionary movement...