Black invisibility on a Brazilian ‘frontier’: land and identity in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article centers attention on race, place, and space as co-produced concepts that reveal much about both how racial ideology operates and is constituted in contemporary Brazil. In Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the ethno-racial order constructs the region as devoid of colonized people and consummately available for capital-intensive agribusiness production. Land protests in Mato Grosso do Sul by black and indigenous activists undermine popular fantasies of racial harmony embedded in Brazilian-ness. The regional variation of the latter denies the historical and contemporary presence of black Brazilians in narratives of the state’s founding and contemporary status as a ‘frontier’. This article argues that we may consider ‘coming out’ moments by blacks in the state as defiant counters, revealing identification processes that undermine the denial of full recognition of blacks as citizens.