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This paper investigates the changing relationship between land, citizenship, and power in Brazil, where land-related policies have historically served to situate political and economic rights in the hands of an elite land-owning minority. In response, contemporary grassroots movements in Brazil, including the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) advocate the substantive transformation of what I develop here as a new form of “agrarian citizenship”, in which political participation, local food production, and environmental stewardship redefine the ongoing constitution of the relationship between land, state, and rural society. Based on extensive interviews, participant observation and document analysis from 2004-2006, this ethnographic study examines the contours of how changing notions of agrarian citizenship are negotiated among members of a growing body of social groups demanding land redistribution and reasserting agrarian culture in Brazil. By developing and enacting new forms of political participation that involve the transformation of personal and collective values and practices, rural activists such as the MST envision the redistribution of land as a material right, but also view the transformation of the land-society relation as an equally public responsibility.
