26 ACUMEN • SPRING 2023 “I’m currently teaching a course that compares race and politics in Brazil, South Africa and the United States,” she says. “Brazil endured much of the same sort of history of the slave trade and slave labor, but the difference with Brazil—as opposed to the U.S. and South Africa—is that there hasn’t been an acknowledgement of racism.” Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre coined the term racial democracy in the early 1930s to refer to the notion that, because of the diversity and mixture of races in Brazil, the country had sidestepped the racism that plagued other nations. “That is a central problem,” says Jones. “If racism doesn’t exist, you can’t address it.” A pervasive contempt While racism plays a part in the overall dynamic that oppresses the migrant workers, Jones says much of the vitriol faced by the migrant workers she spoke with was cultural. “What shocked them was that they faced discrimination based on the types of food that they ate or the clothes that they wore because they’re from a different region,” she says. Whether and how the treatment and conditions the sugarcane workers endure are addressed may soon be moot. Mechanization of the sugarcane harvest is becoming more prevalent in Brazil, and these workers could soon be seeking other kinds of employment. “It’s not an occupation that people aspire to. These people do it out of necessity,” Jones says. “If we look at other kinds of dangerous labor historically, some occupations have been phased out, and people find other things to do.” With the Oct. 30 victory of former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over conservative Jair Bolsonaro in the election to lead Brazil, chances are better that workers’ situations generally will improve, but the political environment is unsettled. “I am not anticipating a 180-degree change in the lives of impoverished Brazilians, such as those who harvest sugarcane. Lula was president between 2003 and 2010, yet as you saw from the research that I initiated in 2007, poverty and inequality were such that people were willing to work as seasonal migrant sugarcane harvesters under dire conditions,” Jones says. “That said, I am optimistic about Lula’s victory because he seems to understand and support Brazil’s most marginal communities. There is ample evidence to suggest that Lula and the Workers’ Party in general are more interested in improving the lives of the poor than Bolsonaro.” ● nations disregarded their colonies. The result is what Jones calls internal colonialism. “The Brazilian north has in some ways been treated as a colony, and there is still enormous poverty,” Jones explains. The effect is that the population is treated as a foreign resource to be exploited, rather than as fellow citizens with equal rights. One of the reasons for the persistence of the difficulties sugarcane and other workers face is Brazil’s unaddressed history of racism, says Jones. LUMI ZÚNICA / GETTY IMAGES
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