A Reforma Agrária no Brejo Paraibano: O Caso Do Assentamento União

Abstract

This final paper aims to understand the hired rural workers life’s transformations at the Santa Maria sugar mill, to the life in a land reform agrarian settlement named União, which is sited at the Brejo region in the state of Paraíba, at the city of Areia, from the social parts point of view, the settlers. Therefore, specifically points to know the region’s and county history where they are inserted, and to analyze how they interpret their daily work and housing in the past and present, when their lands were expropriated for agrarian reform purposes, creating ten rural settlements distributed between the municipalities of Areia, Pilões and Serraria.This study, of the Settlement União was built upon the use of formal and informal interview, data analysis, group field research, secondary data usage and bibliographic review. The results points that the land reform policy changed the subject workers into free farmers.The implementation of the União settlement represents the end of the relationship of subjecting the worker to the mill owner / plantation owner, the work of the farmer being less physically demanding and with the meaning of freedom over his body and use of his time. However, still persists plenty of barriers that limit the field settlers sustainability, as in the threat of maintaining, or not, the public policies nowadays.