Guarani in urban context

Abstract

The paper offers a fundamental contribution to an understanding of the presence of guarani families in urban periferies in Mato grosso do Sul (MS) and their living-strategies. It discusses the genesis of this process presenting the atrocities of the State against the guarani, like the expropriation of their traditionally occupied territories as well as the disrespect of their own forms of organization. The data have been collected by monitoring the transformations in the region witnessing the broad deforestation, the introduction of agro-industrial farming and cattle-breading and their consequences leading to the expulsion of communities from their last places of refuge. Adding dense information deduced from the author's proper life-experience and dedication, the paper discusses how the Brasilian State promoted the reduction of communities into reservations, where they became subject to a rigid control applied by imposed authorities.The research reveals different impacts of the State's reservation policy and the new guarani-ways ("new teko") in response to it. Besides analizing the context of life in the reservations as well as in urban indigenous quarters, the study  also stresses on (re-) arrangements of gender-roles caused by the new alternatives of socio-spacial mobility. Since the decade of the 1980ies, the reservations turned into an overpopulated environment of great violence and repression. In order to escape from those living-conditions, families have searched for other places. An exit was either the search of the recovery of their former living-spaces/tekoha, or the migration towards urban areas. It becomes evident that the origin of this mobilization is exactly where everything started: in the reservation.