Encontros raízes negras: identidade e representação quilombola na Comunidadedo Pacoval - Alenquer

Abstract

The present study deals with the growing strength of the black movement in the Lower Amazon, through the Encontros Raízes Negras, having as a time lapse the period from its first to the last edition, which took place in the years 1988 to 2018, so thirty years. During these Meetings, issues of combating racism, education, health, infrastructure and the environment are discussed. Such Meetings seek to insert claims in the Government's agenda setting in an attempt to achieve the implementation of public policies for the quilombola territories located in the western region of Pará, and are continuously reinforced by processes of collective identification and by struggles to enforce quilombola rights. acquired. The objective of this research is to discuss the so-called Encontros Raízes Negras do Baixo Amazonas and documents related to them entitled Open Letters in which adversities faced by quilombola communities in this portion of the Brazilian territory are deliberated. These documents were dispersed in the municipalities of Alenquer, Belém, Óbidos, Oriximiná and Santarém and there is a need to gather them in a single study so that they are not forgotten. The debate of these documents, in the present time, can serve as a paradigm to (re)demand matters to the Government in order to implement public policies for these quilombola territories, through new legal, political, economic, social, cultural and administrative tools. Therefore, we seek to respond to the problem regarding the efficiency of Open Letters in the search for public policies for the quilombola territories of western Pará. After analyzing these documents, it was found that they can partially meet the demands discussed in plenary sessions held at these events, with the main policies to be met the titling of quilombola lands, structural racism, health, education and the environment. The Encounters Raízes Negras are, so to speak, the most important tool used by the remaining population of quilombos in western Pará on the path that leads to the implementation of public policies for these communities, as they are events in which ancestry is reaffirmed. of its participants, a moment used to reinforce bonds of self-affirmation and collective identification as black people and strengthening as social actors who seek to enforce the specific national regulations that support them.