#Articulation of Black Quilombola Rural Communities

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Media Coalition Representing Brazil’s Peripheral, Favela, Quilombola, and Indigenous Communities Use Ancestral Technology to Democratize Communication Rights

The Peripheral, Favela, Quilombola, and Indigenous Media Coalition brings together a network of journalism initiatives as ancestral technology to end the silences in the media market and change the future of journalism in Brazil with Black, favela, indigenous, peripheral, and quilombola voices, chanting “from within to within,” highlighting location, race, ethnicity, gender, and class.

“We are the Peripheral, Favela, Quilombola, and Indigenous Media Coalition. A set of journalistic and ancestral technological solutions to produce and share information of public interest in social contexts in which Internet access is precarious or non-existent… We work towards a media that is anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-LGBTQIA+phobia, and anti-ageist.” — Coalition launch manifesto, May 2023

The initiative is concerned with knowledge-producing technologies in service of the collective work of peoples, territories, and ancestral wisdom in favelas, urban peripheries, villages, and quilombos. The Coalition has been developed by 11 organizations: Periphery in Movement (SP), Desenrola e Não Me Enrola (SP), Third Street Margin (SP), Maré Mobilization Front (RJ), Fala Roça (RJ), Turmoil Network (PE), Mojubá Media and Connections (BA), TV Comunidades (MA), Quilombo TV (MA), Tapajônico Youth Collective (PA), and the Media Collective for the National Coordination for the Articulation of Rural Black Quilombo Communities (CONAQ). Officially launched during the Digital Journalism Association’s (Ajor) 3i Journalism Festival, the Coalition wants to reinvent journalism in Brazil, starting from the grassroots, rooted in what is happening on the ground.

Continue reading.

[bumblebeeappletree]

#ad Brazil has a long and violent history of producing racial inequalities. As the last country to abolish slavery in the Americas, this relatively recent colonial history of slavery still impacts Brazil’s Black, Indigenous, and Quilombola communities. The SETA Project aims to advance racial equity by transforming Brazil’s education system to be anti-racist. SETA in Portuguese means “arrow,” which represents a symbol of justice that this program aims to take back, with the hopes of spearheading change and agility.

ActionAid Brazil works with Ação Educativa, the National Campaign for the Right to Education in Brazil, the National Coordination for the Articulation of Black Quilombola Rural Communities (CONAQ), Geledés – Black Woman Institute, and UNEfro Brasil to achieve this.

Listen as SETA Program Director Ana Paula Brandão shares how they are harnessing youth, education, and Black movements to trigger this national healing process and transform Brazil’s public schools by 2030.

Learn more: wkkf.org/RE2030

#News #NowThis

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

In Pictures: COVID-19 hits Brazil's quilombos hard    

Founded by runaway slaves, these poor communities are reeling under the coronavirus pandemic.

In a small room filled with donated bananas, lettuce, toilet paper and more, Rejane Oliveira quickly prepares boxes for more than 100 families who are trying to weather the coronavirus outbreak.

Her community, Maria Joaquina in coastal Rio de Janeiro state, is one of Brazil's quilombos, settlements founded by runaway slaves in centuries past and still largely inhabited by their descendants. Often disconnected from urban life, even within city limits, quilombos have relatively high poverty rates.

Quilombolas tend to avoid going into the city, but in spite of their relative isolation, they have begun to succumb to the coronavirus all the same.

Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, after which the Quilombola campaigned for more than a century to gain recognition of their right to the lands they occupied. Lands where their descendants live and try to keep their ancestors' traditions alive.

To facilitate government aid, Brazil's national statistics agency in April released its estimate of how many quilombos exist nationwide - almost 6,000 - as well as their locations.

The number of people living in them remains uncertain. The agency planned to count them for the first time in the 2020 census, but the pandemic forced its postponement until next year.

While the population of the quilombos remains untallied, the National Coordination of Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (CONAQ) is tracking the pandemic's impact on them in conjunction with the Socio-environmental Institute, an environmental and Indigenous advocacy group. Their data shows 3,465 infections and 136 deaths.

Continue reading.