Messing with the roça: work and movement in Sertão Mineiro

Abstract

This article focus on how the notion of roça organizes some practices and its meanings for inhabitants of two rural communities, Ribanceira and Gerais Velho, situated in São Francisco Valley, north of Minas Gerais state. At those places, the idea of roça appears as tangled with the work experience, connecting the forest, the urban, other labor activities, and worker’s moral. Moreover, the times and places of roça relates to short and long distances movements that weave the threads that sustain their living world, as these movements draw the link between persons and things, as well as sets the meanings of the experience in the roça.