De saberes e de territórios: análise das práticas de resistência das comunidades caiçaras de Iguape/SP (1990-2024)

Abstract

Overlapping a traditional caiçara territory in the municipality of Iguape, on the southern coast of São Paulo, lies the Jureia-Itatins Ecological Station, created in 1986 through authoritarian environmental policies of the state government without consultation, listening, or community participation. Since then, clashes and struggles have been waged between the caiçara communities, environmental organizations, and the state government, which expropriated residents and forced the displacement of most of the communities, who then began to live on the margins of the Ecological Station, joined with other caiçara communities and on the outskirts of surrounding cities. From this forced migration emerges a new daily life, full of dynamics and popular articulations, established through tactics and strategies, which have come to structure resistance practices of the remaining communities. Thus, through a qualitative approach, participatory methodology, and militant research, this work describes, analyzes, and interprets the resistance practices of the caiçara communities of Iguape/SP. Based on a cartographic analysis, the identified practices were grouped into two dimensions: the first is the political-institutional dimension (political, economic, and environmental practices), which structures institutes, cooperatives, associations, and community consultation and research protocols. The second dimension is the ethical-aesthetic dimension (pedagogical, ancestral, and artistic practices), which structures territorial pedagogical innovations, safeguarding ancestral knowledge, and community artistic interventions. Using a set of data collection techniques and instruments, such as discussion groups, semi-structured thematic interviews, participant observation, field diary, and image records, an analytical corpus was constructed based on the territory, considered as a fundamental geo-historical category in the composition of the practices produced by the communities. The results pointed to practices as structuring the nonconformist articulations that weave a network of antidiscipline and project a critical ordering of space. In doing só, they establish a set of caiçara social technologies, creating a community model of territorialized management, consisting of systems of actions and objects that shape a type of spatiality that turns the lived territory into a lived space, giving rise to networks of horizontal reciprocity. This strategically elaborated structure is what allows the self-managed support of practical operations, and of the markings of symbolic boundaries, promoting a process of caiçara resistance on the southern coast of São Paulo.