On struggles and memories: the militants of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) and the struggle for land in the Baixada Fluminense (1950-1964)

Abstract

At the end of the 1940s, the region known as Baixada Fluminense witnessed a peasant mobilization by a group of farmers who were claiming ownership of land that were the target of speculation. In this context, some social actors of different ideological backgrounds went to the locality in order to dispute the political representation of this group of farmers who were fighting for their permanence on the land. One of these agents was the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB), more specifically, some communist militants who began to act in this territory in order to mediate the struggles for the land that were being fought. The objective of this paper is to analyze the identity relationship built between the communist militants and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) in the memories of Joseph Purity da Silva, Lyndolpho Silva and Braulio Rodrigues da Silva when acting as mediators of these land conflicts in the Baixada region Fluminense in the late 1940s to the early 1960s as we seek to understand how they thought and how they acted together farmers, look at how they built the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB) by its base. It is important here, for an institutional history of the PCB seen from below, seen by its active militants and not by the party leadership; by the concrete mediation of the conflicts (practice) in spite of the party orientations (theory).