The great-granddaughter of an Indigenous woman "caught in the lasso", Maria Querobina is a historic babassu coconut breaker from southern Maranhão state. She is a militant in the struggle for land, the emancipation of rural women and social and trade union mobilization in the region.
Querobina, as she is popularly known, says she is a mix of Black, Indigenous and white people. Born in 1945 in the Olho D’Água Tolentino community, currently called Santo Antônio dos Lopes community, she couldn’t study back then, so she helped her mother and other female members of the family in housekeeping, in breaking babassu coconut and also in the income from hammocks, once they were cotton producers.
A "churchwoman and rezadeira [in Brazil, a woman who prays for healing sick people]", she became involved in social struggles starting in the Catholic Church, when priests went to poor communities and appointed people to lead them. Later, they gave rise to the so-called Basic Ecclesial Communities (CEBs, in Portuguese), which played an important role in social organization and mobilization in defense of rural territories.
At the age of 78, she remains fierce, speaking firmly and loudly, with the calm and experience of someone who has been facing big landowners for over 50 years. A woman who opened doors for other women when she became the first president of the Imperatriz Rural Workers' Union (STTR, in Portuguese) and, alongside her friend and comrade-in-arms Manoel da Conceição, one of the founders of the Workers' Party and the Central Unified Workers' Union (Central Única Trabalhadores, in Portuguese), actively participated in the first land occupation in Maranhão, today called Vila Conceição.
:: To celebrate March 8, women from the Landless Workers’ Movement will mobilize across Brazil ::
Who is Maria Querobina and when did she engage in social struggle?
I’m a solo mother from Maranhão state. I raised four daughters and three granddaughters. Currently, I’m also a great-grandmother. My family came from a small village near Cidelândia [in Maranhão] at the beginning of the 70s, with the arrival of the Centru [Rural Workers' Education and Culture Center], with Manoel da Conceição. Back then, we started talking about unions: what they were and what they were for.
I have been fighting in social movements for 50 years. I started in the church, and soon we advanced to the moment when the so-called grassroots communities emerged. With them, we discovered a lot of new things. It was also there that we understood that women didn’t vote and couldn’t receive votes. We had no IDs, but men did. Women could walk alone, we had always to be with someone else. I became curious about why this happened.
How was women’s participation in union movements back then?
About ten years after the creation of grassroot communities, we began to hear about union movements. At that time, there wasn’t the term "rural workers". We were all workers. Women depended on men and had a “dependent” document. We couldn’t subscribe [to a union].
With Manoel da Conceição and some of our comrades, we realized the need to bring women to join unions because they even worked double shifts, dealing with farms and housekeeping. So why couldn’t women retire? Why do women only get a pension when they are widowed, as a dependent? That pissed me off, and we started fighting to reinforce that women are workers and must be valued.
About thirty years after I arrived in Imperatriz, we progressed even more and also heard about non-governmental organizations, such as Cáritas, [with which] I took part in many conversations. The landscape was totally different from today. We grew crops, everything bore fruit on our land. We planted everything in peace.
We began women’s associations, engaged in discussions and the fight for land, raising ideas. We started talking to the communities. We even proposed a petition for the new Constitution, and elected a committee to find out where we were going to settle, and where we were going to make the first land occupation in the region. We found out about the farms Itacira I and II, which were dubbed “criminal”. When we arrived here, they were already called by this name. We fought to remove it from people's imaginations. Today, they are called Vila Conceição in honor of Manoel da Conceição.
Once the land was occupied, how were things?
Back then, we grew a lot of food. We had everything on the farms. There were cotton farmers and babassu coconut breakers. Some of the most important income sources were rice, manioc, flour and tapioca. We didn't have much money, but our tables always had a lot of food.
Today we can't produce anything even if we have a piece of land because pollution from monoculture projects, eucalyptus, soy, the great expansion of grass plantations and cattle grass are destroying our production. Even guava... No fruit ripens anymore. They get rotten before being ripped. With the help of technicians, we've discovered that it's because of pollution.
When eucalyptus arrived here in our region, it was planted by plane, a kind of chemical weeding. Today it is even planted by drones. Since the eucalyptus and soybean areas are very close to our houses, they kill everything in our yards. There are people with headaches who don't know what it is, almost all of them have cataracts and Imperatriz has become a hotbed for glasses sales and eye exams. It's chaos and it's because of the pollution, the poisons dumped on us.
Even 50 years later, you're still mobilizing people. What dream do you have today?
Today, the trade union movement has been castrated - that's a crazy word to use, but it's true. Union leaders have been co-opted for a long time. We struggled a lot together with family farmers. However, even politicians started taking everyone to offices, to positions elsewhere. Our struggle has come to an end.
Women don't even want to be union coordinators anymore. They prefer to look after their farms and be at home. We need to get our struggles back on track because we're broke and sick. I myself live in a community with more than a thousand residents and there isn't even a health technician.
Our dream, which is not just mine, is that we will once again be a class: no teachers, students, civil servants, rural workers with or without land - but a class that needs everything. Let's get together and give the best we can give, just like in the past.
Edited by: Matheus Alves de Almeida
