The María Umania Project

María Umania was a migrant from El Salvador who dedicated her life to solidarity with her extended family and others who suffered from poverty.  Se was also the "Nana" for David and Sal Litvak, whose parents were themselves migrants from Chile and Hungary to New York.

As a tribute to María, David Litvak is financing a project to document the life of another poor family that has dedicated itself to making the world a better place.  We have chosen the Machado family of the Morro do Fortunato, a quilombo (runaway slave colony) in the south of Brazil.  The Machado family not only founded the quilombo as a refuge for afro-brazilians trying to make a life after slavery, but also turned it into a model of cooperation and prosperity.

The María Umania project will end with a documentary on the history of this family, showing how they have overcome discrimination and poverty and helped everyone in their community.

Working in the quilombo

Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, but long before the Princess Isabel signed the paper to manumit the slaves, black men and women had taken their freedom into their own hands. Millions fled into the jungles and deserts of Brazil's backlands to create small communities and even several independent countries, like Palmares. With the end of slavery, these "quilombos" were often forgotten, but in Brazil's progressive 1988 Constitution, the framers made a nod to the injustice in the country's past by recognizing the land rights of the decedents of runaway slaves who still live in the quilombos. In the south of Brazil, this right to ancestral land has brought the quilombos into conflict with many of the traditional powers of the region. Communities close to large cities have given up their claims in exchange for a pittance from real estate speculators, while more remote quilombos face threats from ranchers, lumber interests, and developers of tourism. Until the government formally recognizes the extent of their land, the promises of the Constitution are a dead letter. In 2014, Shine a Light will begin a long-term series of projects with children from these black communities, first teaching kids how to make films and other digital media, and then (with the help of history professors from the local university) to develop oral histories of the quilombos. In this way, children, parents, and grandparents will all participate in the judicial process that confirms their tenure on the land, not through legal briefs but through documentaries, historical comic books, and historical re-inactions where children represent the roles played by their great-great grandparents in resisting slavery. We expect two important results from this work: First, we will make an important contribution to the quilombos' struggle to gain legal title to their land. The second consequence may be even more important: though Brazil has become increasingly egalitarian over the last decade, social mobility into the elite is still restricted by who can pass the rigorous exams into the Federal University system. Few children from quilombos even try to pass the test: in one study we did of five public schools in the south of the island of Santa Catarina -- schools where many students are the descendants of slaves -- not a single graduate went on to the Federal University. By bringing children from quilombos into contact with university professors, and with the world of formal learning, we will break down the high wall that has long excluded blacks from Brazil's elite.

Digging up History

We came to the Morro do Fortunato Quilombo, in southern Brazil with plans to help the community document its history as a refuge for freed and runaway slaves; this sort of oral history is a required part of the application for a quilombo (runaway slave colony) to win land rights from the Brazilian government. Perhaps the greatest surprise for me has been how little work it has taken: the community takes pride in its history in a way I have seldom seen, and the names of the founders of the village are constantly on everyone's lips, even though they died more than 100 years ago. On Saturday, we sat with three of the quilombo elders to talk about the founding of the Morro do Fortunato. Vitor Cardoso, who has been running the project for Shine a Light, had been doing a lot of archival research on the community -- birth and baptismal certificates, wedding records, etc -- and he wanted to see how the documentary evidence stacked up against their well-remembered oral history. Many quilombos were founded by runaway slaves: they fled the brutal fields of sugarcane and manioc and made a life for themselves wherever they could. Some of the largest quilombos, like Palmares in Brazil's northeast, became more populous than the Portuguese colonies on the coast. Morro do Fortunato is different: the people there remember that the land came as a gift to the freed slave Fortunato. "He got it as a gift from his father," Maurício Machado explained. "Ignácio was his father's name, at least that's what my grandfather told me, and in that generation, they still kept 'Inácio' as a surname." "It isn't on his birth certificate," Vitor replied. "We really want to know who that man was, and how he had the land to give such a huge area to Fortunato." Everyone chatted for a while, trying to remember the names of landholders on both sides of the quilombo, until Vitor, the historian, remembered something. "The slaveholder who owned Fortunato's mother was named Ignácio Pereira da Silva," he interjected. "It's not that uncommon a name, but it is more than a coincidence." "The stories tell us that Fortunato was a light skinned man, short and very, very strong," explained another of the elders in the community. Was Fortunato the son of the landholder with his slave? Vitor had discovered that she was a recent arrival from Africa, and had been bought in a market in Ribeirão, in the south of what is now Florianópolis. As the conversation continued, an even more interesting hypothesis emerged. Though the quilombo has few documents of sale or deed, people there remember clearly the names and surnames of all of the landholders around them for generations. "We don't have the deed of gift when Ignácio gave this land to Fortunato," Vitor said, "but maybe the family is still around here. Any Pereiras or da Silvas who still own land here?" "The still down the hill, where there is the sign that they vend cachaça [moonshine]: the owner is a Pereira," Maurílio responded, and quickly they had traced the bootlegger's family back three or four generations. His family had owned the land as long as the quilombo had been there; the clearing in the valley could well have been the center of a large plantation. Ignácio Pereira da Silva could well have given the forest on the mountain to his illegitimate black son. Children have been the lead researchers on the project, asking questions and making small films about different elements of their quilombo. As they listened to the conversation, I wondered if they understood the big deal that was happening in front of them, the intellectual adventure of digging up history: not the tales of kings and generals, but their own community. The excitement was palpable among the adults, and I hope that the kids, as they grow up, continue to take as much pride in their history as their parents and grandparents do. As we do more research in the archives and in the quilombo, I'll keep you up to date on these mysteries!

Poetry in the quilombo!

This weekend, the Quilombos do Sul project turned its attention to what the community has been like for women and girls over the last decade. Vitor Cardoso, our staff historian, interviewed Dona Chica, who has seen a lot in her almost 90 years in the Morro do Fortunato Quilombo. We don't want to spoil the movie and comic book that will eventually emerge from this project for you, so we won't tell to many details of the interview, but I did want to include one thing: It's relatively common in Brazil for men to compete in poetry contests. About 70 years ago, it appears that the girls and young women in the quilombo did the same thing: and young men (prospective boyfriends!) were the prize.