Artwork by Candice Evers
In early 2023, I decided to move back to southern Brazil from Germany, where I had lived for five years. I then came back to my parents’ small farm in Paraná, in our town’s Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Terra in Portuguese, or simply MST) settlement.
By the end of my first year back home, two things were clear. The first was that my region’s climate had changed much more than I’d expected in just five years, with newly infuriating extremes of both heat and cold. To my growing frustration and concern, everyone I talked to seemed to downplay the change, as if thinking about the inconveniences would only make them worse, and as if nothing could be done—an attitude that, especially after growing up in the MST, I found hard to understand.
The second was that many of the memories I’d thought were out of sight after years of therapy and living abroad needed little encouragement to come back, at full force. Among these, complicated ones related to the MST were some of the most vivid, landing me in a state of ambivalence as I reevaluated my time in the movement.
I.
Telling someone from Brazil that I grew up in the MST almost always involves baggage on their side and mine. On their end are their political views and upbringing, as well as the Brazilian mass media’s portrayal of us as violent and chaotic, as vandals. On my end are the diverse reactions I’ve received over the years, ranging from the very combative and negative to gentle support or romanticized admiration.
Telling someone from Brazil that I grew up in the MST almost always involves baggage on their side and mine.
The social movement that created the MST started in the early 1970s in Paraná, as independent-but-connected cells fighting for land reform. These were supported by what would otherwise seem like strange bedfellows: the local land worker unions and the Catholic Church—at that point experiencing its most leftist and revolutionary incarnation in Latin America, through its liberation theology. MST’s main front of activism was the occupation of large estates, first in southern Brazil, then elsewhere in the country.
As Brazil transitioned out of its twenty-one-year-long military dictatorship (1964-1985), several large estates that were not being farmed were occupied by the MST. Around the same time, the new constitution of Brazil, written from scratch in the wake of the dictatorship, included a chapter dedicated to land reform that created legal procedures for these occupations.
The estate that became the settlement where my family and I live was occupied in August 1997. My father, then thirty-one and from a family of farmers, had already been politically active throughout his adolescence and early adulthood through the farmers union, the regional arm of the federal unified workers’ central, and the Brazilian communist party. My mother, then living with my father’s family at their farm and wanting to gain independence from her mother-in-law—who, despite her political awareness, did not appreciate my mother’s Blackness, poverty, or Northeastern roots—decided to join the MST with my father.
I was about to turn three at the time. The black tarp tent we moved into became the first home I can remember, and the first home in my parents’ marriage that they didn’t have to share with anyone but me.
Our tent at the camp was close to the road, near tall eucalyptus trees. Because of the makeshift nature of the occupation camp, living conditions were rough. We didn’t have electricity or running water, and the holes in our tents seemed to increase every time it rained.
Still, almost thirty years later, it’s not the daily inconveniences that I remember best, but the small details that made the camp my home. I remember that the election stickers my parents used to cover the holes in our tent looked, to me, like round stars against the black night of the tarp. I remember the old mattress on top of sturdy eucalyptus stumps that served as my bed, so far from the ground, like a tower in a fairy tale. The compact and shiny dirt floor underneath, that was a deeper shade of red than loose soil. The old woman who I thought looked like the Bored Witch from The Triplets, who was in charge of the healthcare group at our camp and sold sweets at her tent. Our neighbor who smelled the nicest out of anyone, and who once stole from our collective stash of money to sleep at a hotel and take a warm shower. When the money disappeared and he came back the next day looking well-rested, smelling even nicer than usual, everyone easily guessed what he’d done. Still, in the end, nothing happened to him.
My memories of when we had to deal with military police are also quite clear. I remember a time when I was five, when a fleet of MST buses was driving to Paraná’s capital to protest the creation of a military police squad dedicated to suppressing land reform activities in the state. We were stopped, and the military police started shooting rubber bullets at us. The men left the buses to confront them while the women and children stayed inside. The image of an officer’s shadow in our bus door, poised to throw a tear gas bomb inside, remains crystal clear in my mind. If I were to pinpoint the moment when I began to understand that the government and its institutions—especially the police—did not consider my life particularly important, that’d probably be it.
There were many more marches, protests, congresses, conferences, and meetings that I witnessed, though most weren’t as dramatic. With those, as with life at the camp, the details are what have become most prominent in my memory. Like the time when we attended a national congress in Brasília with thousands of other MST members, and I and the other kids spent the days in a makeshift kindergarten inside a yellow tarp tent that softly filtered the sunlight. I remember that there were toys there, and paper books, and fabric books that I liked to touch. We sang songs about birds and farming and land reform, some of which had been written for the kids in the movement. As a kid, I generally detested both school and having my picture taken, and could not smile for the camera even if bribed. So, I can’t help but find it telling that in every picture of me taken at that yellow-tinted kindergarten, I am smiling.
II.
I could go on about my memories within the MST, but the truth is that the happiest of them stop at some point. No movement is perfect, but at the beginning of the occupation our internal conflicts tended to be small, focused, and easy to solve. Until things changed.
In many aspects, our settlement was and still is one of the luckier ones in our state. For one thing, its estate was about to be foreclosed on by the central bank, so it took us only a few years to move from our camping grounds to our individual plots of land, created from the equal division of the estate’s farmable area. Many other settlements did not experience such a quick timeline. Additionally, our site mostly consists of flat land and rich soil. It is easy to farm corn, soy, and cassava with machinery, like most farms in the area, and it sits close to a small town so that we could easily get to school, or doctor’s appointments, or the supermarket—by foot, if necessary.
But there were many problems, too. Though many of the earlier members in our camp came from nothing, others who joined later had family who owned land or who could take in their wives and children so that they could skip the years of harsh living at the site. My family could not count on such assistance from my father’s land-owning family anymore since our relationship went from strained to wholly unsustainable after my mother decided to move out. My parents became totally committed to the MST cause. But some other people from similar land-owning backgrounds in our settlement did not engage with the movement as strongly; because they felt that the fight was as good as won in our case, and knew they had somewhere to go back to if it all came to nothing, they tended to see fewer reasons to keep working as a collective, and more reasons to think of themselves first. For many of these people, a quiet life on their own piece of land was the only goal, and they chose to live their lives independently from the collective as soon as they could.
Much more problematic, though, was that the prosperity of our settlement tended to attract grifters. One of those, a greedy man who seemed to grow addicted to whatever authority he could have, was put in charge of us.
Almost twenty years ago, after years of unilateral decision-making, corruption and misappropriated funds, our settlement’s leadership, headed by the aforementioned power-hungry leader, began to openly harass members who had fallen out of favor with them. Among these was my father, who had found proof of the leadership’s misdeeds and was idealistic, stubborn, and brave enough to publicly mention it.
What followed were years of persecution enacted on our family by our own settlement’s leaders and their followers, with constant and not-so-thinly veiled threats of eviction, or worse.
During those years, I’d say goodbye almost weekly to the few friends I’d made in school, because I was that sure that it would only be a matter of time before our house and barn were burned, or we were evicted, or my father was killed, or all of the above happened in just one night. I remember when a boy with a bowl haircut, whom I saw every day on the school bus, was suspiciously absent one morning. Later that day, I found out that his family had been evicted the previous night, and that ours was to be next.
After that, I started scanning the nights for sounds of trucks, men, steps, and guns, blessed as I was with annoyingly sharp hearing. It didn’t help me fall asleep, of course. Instead, it created a habit of hypervigilance and anxiety that, paradoxically, made me feel a little bit safer and in control.
With the help of distance and therapy, that habit of staying awake subsided during my time in Germany, and I started to believe it was gone for good. But to my frustration and surprise, it took only a few days after my return to Paraná for that habit to return. After that, I spent more than a year on hard internal work, applying all I’d learned in therapy, so that sleep has become progressively easier.
Like a scythe cutting through a thicket, that improvement has allowed feelings about my past with the MST—ones that had previously felt less urgent—to come to the fore. In this opening, fear is now less prominent, and I can more clearly see the anger and grief I feel about having the people we thought were on our side turn on us so quickly. I also see that the tragedy is still ongoing because the leadership’s actions caused estrangement among the families still living in the settlement today, and between them and the organization itself. I see, too, that one of those estranged families is my own.
III.
For many years, I avoided talking or thinking about my childhood in the MST. Both having to defend the movement, if talking to conservative people, or trying to explain its problems, if talking to those who romanticized it, felt like immense and painful tasks. Beyond that, I also kept my distance from any social movements and political parties, for fear of being betrayed once again, and because I had developed an overly critical outlook toward such organizations. My concerns with building a better world, justice and equality only grew over time, but I remained stagnant, unable to act on my beliefs.
Still, after returning to live in Paraná and experiencing heavy storms and cyclones more frequently, along with unseasonal cold spells and record high temperatures, the issue of climate change became more pressing in my mind. With that, the desire and urgency to be active grew stronger, to finally surpass the fear and paralysis that had taken hold of me.
Earlier this year, I met the first and only climate change activist I know of in the part of Paraná where I live. She invited me to a presentation she was giving at a café and asked me if I could stay longer afterwards. We talked for hours, until the café closed without our noticing. I’d felt so alone in my local climate concerns, but not anymore; I’d found someone who cared and wanted to do something with that feeling. As we talked, a long-neglected spark within me burned brighter than it had in years.
Some days before that, the spark had already doubled in size when I took part in an online micro-summit about zines and their role in climate justice activism, organized by the Glasgow Zine Library. At the end of the event, the moderator asked each of us to use one word to describe how we felt. Though we had talked about a topic as difficult as climate change, and had only had a few hours to come up with ideas, every single one of us used positive words: “excited,” “happy,” “inspired,” “thrilled,” “motivated,” and, more than once, “hopeful.”
Sitting in that digital room with kind, intelligent people from all over the world who cared deeply about doing something about climate change reminded me of a truth from my MST days that had been buried inside me, unable to shine for a long while: that when people work together towards something, they are much more than the sum of their parts.
Still, I must admit that I am not, and have never been, an optimistic person. I know that the future that results from any present-day activism won’t be perfect; in most cases I can think of, progress tends to be a slow process that comes with human costs. I also can’t be sure that I’ll soon see another movement as large or effective as the one I grew up in; or that I’ll get to be part of it; or that if I or we try hard enough, it’ll all work out. But these days, none of that sounds to me like reason enough to give up.
I think back to the camp where I grew up. I think back to the beginnings of the settlement, and to the other side of the story about my time there: how could I overlook that, for all its problems, our camp, like many others, worked well in many respects?
At their best, social movements like the MST are united communities that bring about tangible change in people’s lives. My parents have their small farm thanks to the movement, for one thing, as do thousands of other families.
I think about “smaller” moments of accomplishment too—like a specific one that also happens to be my first childhood memory. When I was 3 years old, my mother and I were going back home to our MST camp when our bus stopped suddenly on the highway. We walked to the front to see what was wrong and found out that others back at our camp had halted the movement of traffic. The military police had evicted another MST camp upstate that day—destroying the homes, humiliating the people, and violating their rights. Because they believed that many of the people camped there were Paraguayans, they had put them in buses and sent them towards the border to be illegally deported.
My father and others had been attending an MST meeting in a different city when they heard about the incident, and had raced home to tell the rest of our camp. The plan was to stop all movement on the highway that night for a simple reason: to prevent the buses carrying our fellow movement members from leaving them at the border with nothing. The evicted members were welcomed into our camp instead, where they stayed until they could find more permanent places to go. Our camp also used its collective funds to buy food and distribute it among them, to ensure they would not go hungry after they had left us.
That hundreds of movement members were organized and ready to act on such short notice may have changed the trajectory of those evicted people’s lives. That, to me, was and is the power of the MST, as well as the power of any strong movement or community. To protect another person is to be protected as well; it is to know you are not only an individual. It is to have a purpose in life that will go on with and without you; it is to share, truly. To be a part of such a community is to give your neighbor some water so they can also protect their children from tear gas, because even if your child comes first, theirs come right after. It is to forgive others for their flaws when they are forgivable—to be angry at the neighbor who stole money to sleep at a warm hotel while you were freezing in a tent, but forgive them, ultimately, because you understand that no one is perfect, and that some transgressions are benign. It is to try and move, together, toward an understanding of which transgressions aren’t.
That, to me, was and is the power of the MST, as well as the power of any strong movement or community. To protect another person is to be protected as well; it is to know you are not only an individual. It is to have a purpose in life that will go on with and without you; it is to share, truly.
Remembering all this makes it even harder to swallow the fact that there is still some ongoing estrangement between the people in our settlement and the overall MST movement, and that many of the families who live here don’t follow its tenets and don’t even feel connected to it. But it makes the whole picture of my time growing up in the movement feel sweeter too, and I missed the sweet.
Remembering also makes me wonder how many people in the world, especially its Western parts, have experienced that feeling of organized solidarity. I wonder whether people would be more willing to fight if they knew how powerful that solidarity could be, politically and materially. Would they be more willing to not only take to the streets, but to build a movement and dedicate themselves to it—even just for small windows in their spare time—if they knew how empowering and hopeful it would feel, and that it would be worth all the effort?
I understand why my family and I and so many others in our settlement felt hopeless, disillusioned, and burnt out. I understand why some still feel like that, and that sometimes people give a little because there is only little to give. But after many years of weighing up what went right and wrong, I can now again say that I am proud to have been a part of the MST’s imperfect struggle.
Before history is crystallized in textbooks, it is lived and made out of small steps. Some of those steps are bound to be in the wrong direction. Still, all of them matter.
I cannot reframe everything that happened to me in the MST so that it means something purely good, but I can see that through it, I was forced to learn very early on who I do not want to be. And that is the idealistic hope I have for every militant, movement, and community, including ours here: that we take the good with the bad and learn from both, rather than trying to either erase the bad, or use it to discredit the good.
I hope that we continue to fight, even if we are disillusioned; that we learn to find community and purpose and energy again, even after it is taken from us. The starry-eyed idealism I held as a child is impossible to carry now, of course; going through these memories since moving back home has meant reliving old wounds and pains. But it has also meant growing and changing in ways that allow me to appreciate the dullness or bright shine of each of my memories in the MST. And it has meant coming home to the most important tenet of belief that my parents and the MST imparted to me: that working together towards something better for us all has the potential to change things, regardless of what the powerful want us to believe. In a world of ongoing horrors that seem to have no end, I feel the truth of that more than ever. I have learned from my own experiences that this belief is not wishful thinking, but is, instead, deeply rooted in reality.