"The pencil is heavier than the hoe": agrarian reform in Chile and peasant pedagogies for economic transformation (1955-1973)

• Grant number: 16/13432-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: January 01, 2017
• End date: October 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: Jorge Luís da Silva Grespan
• Grantee: Joana Salem Vasconcelos
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 17/06753-1 - Agrarian Reform in Chile: socialist dilemmas, peasant struggles and military spoliation (1967-1978), BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This research investigates the history of agrarian reform in Chile, focusing on peasant education projects run by different public and private institutions, which struggle to form a new rural subjectivity consistent with their horizons of economic transformation. The concentration of Chile's agrarian property in the 1950s and 1960s was also formed by "cultural latifundios". Rural illiteracy reached between 35 and 45% of the adult population. In the arc of agrarian transformation, imperialist modernization, social-Christian reform and the Chilean road to socialism came into the front stage successively, as well as the struggles, agencies and experiences of the peasantry, which interact with urban educational programs designed for the rural world. The agrarian reform approved in 1967 by the Christian Democratic government and radicalized by the Popular Unity (1970-1973), changed the agrarian structure together with the cultural structure, both mainstay of class domination. The pedagogies for agrarian reform reveal a battle of values, which highlights the subjectivity of the new relations of property, labor and production of the political programs and popular experiences under tension. We argue that pedagogies for agrarian reform were an important (though not the only) strategy in disputes over the models of society and the moral economies of rural transformation in Chile. Each chapter of the thesis has its own corpus, based on teaching materials, reports from educators, transcriptions of culture circles with peasant voices, the press, parliamentary sessions, interviews, among others.

Academic Publications

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

VASCONCELOS, Joana Salem. \The pencil is heavier than the hoe\: agrarian reform in Chile and peasant pedagogies for economic transformation (1955-1973). 2020. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.