Terra Vista Settlement: 32 years of Struggle and Creation, Dreams and Practice, Eye to Eye and Hands in the Dirt
By Noa Cykman
“Defend Joy, Organize Rage” is the phrase I read on my wall every time I step into my shared home at Terra Vista. It reflects the place and the movement, which responds to centuries of racial injustice, land grabbing, and trauma with reclaimed land, organized communitarianism, and fruit trees. The people of Terra Vista inspire me with their courage and determination. This community does not subject itself to anyone – police, farmers, militia, politicians – or to the internal challenges typical of human coexistence. They hold monthly community councils and collective work, joint efforts and a shared daily life. The beauty of the place is impressive, a testament to the 24 years of agroecological transition.
If “the struggle for land is the mother of all struggles,” access to land allowed Terra Vista’s people and community to own their means of existence, their time, and their work. They organize their work according to their timing and preferences, strengthening values such as freedom and autonomy – understood not in their neoliberal sense, but as collective features. Meire, a community member, says that if the school doesn’t hire her again next year, there is no problem: she loves working in the field. She assures she will make a living on the land, and comments, “not working for anyone is too good.” The apparent contradiction between individual freedom and collective life proves untrue.
Terra Vista has innovated their land distribution system, creating a vanguard system within agrarian reform settlements. Every member is entitled to a piece of land to work. However, there are no fences between the lots, and the land is granted based on work. “As far as your arm can reach,” says the leader Joelson. The amount of land one is able to cultivate: that will be the size of their lot. “Everything we conquered, we conquered as a collective,” says Seu Loro, elder and leader who has lived on Terra Vista’s land since its first occupation.
The agrarian question in Brazil has been at the center of the social conflicts across the country’s history. In Brazil, it relates specifically to the historical problem of land concentration, an unaddressed colonial legacy. Land concentration and exclusion of traditional peoples from their means of existence has been the target of five centuries of rebellions and revolts. Resonating with international resistance groups, the organized peoples’ need for land and food sovereignty are systematically denied and distorted by the elite of white, large landowners who control the territory since invasion. Despite challenges like unequal resource distribution (nationally and globally), agroecology offers a transformative path forward. Movements like Brazil's landless peasants illustrate its potential; the current and next steps in building collective autonomy is a cross-territorial collaboration of traditional communities. Settlements, occupations, Indigenous reserves, quilombos, and other communal peoples gather as the “Web of Peoples” since 2012. Their goal is to promote sovereignty in their territories through the recovery of agrobiodiversity and the establishment of a network of trade and mutual aid.
“Autonomy can only be collective, and sovereignty exists only in a network of territories,” observes Neto, MST leader and founder of the Claudomiro Dias Lima settlement in the region. I had the pleasure to meet Neto and see him speak, sharing his experience, enthusiasm, commitment and wisdom, when he visited Terra Vista during the two-month course for "territory builders and defenders" (January-February, 2024). An autonomous territory allows the construction of another autonomous territory, and sovereignty is built in the relationships between territories – he explains. If one community loses all their corn, another one will give them corn. A network of seed keeping and trading is a central feature.
Land stewardship and agroecology propose a political spectrum that overcomes the contradictions of capitalism and the limits of socialism, Neto remarks. To break with Brazil’s old land structure produces profound changes in the power relationships that land generated. As the mother of all struggles, the struggle for land is a fundamental condition to restore and preserve living conditions on the planet.
Figure 8- Nadia Tupinambá speaking at the Web of People's Women Gathering, March, 2024
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