The ‘Peasant Breach’ and my Own Research

Research update, late August 2009

The ‘peasant breach’ is the historical process by which Brazilian slaves managed to spend part of their time working as peasants, cultivating their own provision grounds. They permanently bargained for more time and more rights to decide what, when, and where to cultivate their plots within the limits of the plantations, thus creating a ‘breach’ in the slave system.

According to Ciro Cardoso, however, this does not mean that the process weakened significantly the power of the slave system. He argues that the metaphor of the split in the wall shattering the whole building is invalid to express the relation between the ‘peasant breach’ and the broader slave system. While he concurs with Nigel Bolland in this sense, other authors such as Reid Andrews state that the struggles for the right to work at the provisions grounds anticipated post-colonial disputes over land.

In any case, during the next two months I am going to show how the ‘peasant breach’ took much relevance in Pará, where several crews of slaves took control of the land in old sugar engenhos once the master fled to richer areas or simply died. This control, however, hardly received legal sanction, being instead a ‘de facto’ situation. In the decades after the end of slavery, several landowners would try to break this balance between autonomy and legal right to landownership, thus generating responses by the descendants of the slaves.

Afro-Brazilian Woman Selling Different Crops