The Settler Turned into Juice: Land, Labour, State and Capital in the modernization of S. Paulos citrus production

• Grant number: 09/14561-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2010
• End date: January 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Heinz Dieter Heidemann
• Grantee: Cassio Arruda Boechat
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims at researching the transformations of a region. Therefore, it represents the unfolding of our former mastering research, which sought for an understanding upon the formation of the colonato region within Brazilian Sao Paulo State coffee production; as well as it characterized the social relations of production that constituted it as a region; and also verified the local colonato particularities in the area of the city of Olimpia. To do so, we intend to analyze the final process of disintegration of such working system which culminates in new social relations marked by the presence of a mobile worker (called "bóia-fria") and by a transformation of the farms themselves and the constant capital concentrated on them. Thus, the crop mechanization, parallel to the citrus insertion within the farms (replacing coffee crops), shall be focused connected with the general industrialization debate and particularly that on Sao Paulo countryside. We will think the concentrated orange juice industry as a result of a new global capital reproduction moment, emphasizing the fictitious capital autonomization constituting the so called "agribusiness" or the "citrus agri-industrial complex" within the same local reality we have been studying. Also, as far as the colonos mobilization is concern, gradually being excluded from living in the farms and going to work partially in the orange harvest and partially going to live and work in cities commerce, we shall think such mobilization as attached to a work crisis of the context from the 1960s onwards.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

BOECHAT, Cassio Arruda. . The settler who turned into juice: land, work, state and capital in the modernization of São Paulo citrus production. 2014. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.