History of Quilombola Movements in Tocantins: migration as a form of resistance in the pre and post abolition periods of slavery

Abstract

This article discusses how the migratory processes, in the periods before and after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, were one of the main ways of resistance and formation of quilombola communities in the state of Tocantins, especially in the east and north of the state. Migrations that oc-curred either because of material loss factors, such as drought and hunger, or because of positive aspects and hope, such as the meeting of relatives or pilgrimages in search of Green Flags. This reinforces the non-applicabili-ty of the time frame on quilombola territories, as judged by the Supreme Court, in 2018, in the Direct Action of Unconstitutionality (ADI) 3239. For this, we sought to subvert the silences imposed by hegemonic historical productions, adopting an approach that took into account the understand-ing that the quilombola leaders interviewed presented about how far, in time and space, the political constructions of this segment. The information presented was obtained from qualitative research under a comparative per-spective between the pre- and post-abolition periods and between the pro-cesses of geographic occupation that gave rise to the communities studied here. Oral reports recorded in interviews conducted during field research or in publications produced by the Tocantins quilombola movements are used, as well as data from academic productions.