Quilombo Sobara Araruama, Coastal Lowlands Region
Remembering is a way to act on the present. The young Quilombo Sobara, located in a rural area of the municipality of Araruama, Willian, Rosiana and Daniele have used the knowledge of the past as a means of seeking improvements to the community. The lack of expectation regarding the conditions of survival through agriculture has led several youth Quilombos toleave their lands in search of work.
In Sobara in the center of this issue, is the disruption of family farming. In the past, the cultivation of cassava, manioc for the production of flour, corn, beans, potato, banana, orange, of cane sugar and annatto, and the creation of small animals size, were the primary means of livelihood among residents. The surplus production were sold nearby. Indeed, for these young people, talk about cooking and gastronomy practiced throughout childhood is an assemblage on the present moment.
To size a little history of the group in the mid-nineteenth century, after the formalization of the expropriation of the lands of the indigenous village of São Pedro, medium and large farms emerged in Aruarama. Among these, there are the Holy Spirit and Sobara farms, whose historical accounts indicate that households currently in Sobara community descended, in part, of flocks of these nineteenth-century slave farms.
Moving to a more recent period between the 1960s and 1970s, the region suffered some transformations that affected the lives of the residents of Sobara. Initially, there was replacement by livestock farming in Farm Sobara. Then there was the acquisition of several farms in the region for two customer groups: one generically called "Portuguese" by residents of Sobara and another consisting of the Agroindustrial company Agrisa São João The first dedicated to the planting of large-scale orange; while the latter acquired, among other lands, the Sobara farm introduced the monoculture of sugar cane. These changes have caused many residents Sobara pass to work in the plantations of orange and sugar cane as hired labor or sporadic.
Already in the 1990s, replacing the orange crops favored by cattle that many Sobara residents become even more dependent of Agrisa once lived in the property of that company and worked almost exclusively for it. This process, noted William, president of the newly inaugurated Association of Remnant Community Quilombo Sobara, caused considerable damage to the crop survival of the group: "As you can see, here is narrow on the sites and we stay in the middle. So I believe, I do not have access [...] in the very beginning when pulling in history is that we were almost kicked out ... the best parts of the best places on the land and getting the part more ... that today we do not plant more [...]. My father stopped planting for it.”
