De nativos e de caboclos: reconfiguração do poder de representação de comunidades que lutam pelo lugar

Abstract

I analyze the movement of traditional peoples and communities living in the north of Minas and in the southern Espinhaço Range of Diamantina region that, in the struggle for recognition and territorial law, constituted, in their strategies of resistance and repositioning, a social movement called Articulation Rosalino Gomes of Traditional Peoples. I approach its emergence from antecedents that I sought by electing characters and contexts of recent regional history set in the last hundred years. I denominate these characters who opposed resistance to mandonism and territorial expropriation, each in its own time, as native insurgents. Through them I sought to understand the emergence of the Rosalino Articulation in a context of hegemony of the local and regional elites associated with the modernization of the region. From an “ethnographic pact” established between me and the “antennas” of the Rosalino Articulation, in a collaborative research, I went in search of understanding how the identity question posed by the Rosalino Articulation enters the debate about the right to difference with the activation of other epistemes as a reaction to the condition of coloniality that remains in Brazilian society and, in particular, in Northern Mineira. I use “situational analysis to comprehend a complex series of events carried out by Articulação Rosalino in the exercise of “practice of law”. I realize that the processes of identity production and affirmation in their differences and traditionalities are complex and contradictory, encompass different ways of seeing and doing in the world, triggering their own values, knowledge, languages and understandings. I note that the struggle for rights and recognition promoted by the communities, which reaffirm themselves as “tradicionals”, and then as “nation”, impact not only on the reconfiguration of their powers of representation, rebelling and activating different strategies for the recovery or protection of their territories against the subsequent attempts at confinement, territorial confinement. They go further, promoting insurgencies that enter the ontological dispute for another living. They activate different strategies to keep their lives in place, without giving up intervening in wider spaces, as active participants in civilizational dialogues.