The Land and the People

Abstract

The village of Santa Lucia is a typical agreste settlement—one made up of semi-itinerant traders, occasional migrant-workers, small-holding farmers, and their share-cropping kin and neighbors. To reach it involves a four-hour drive inland from the lower altitudes of the littoral up into the higher plateaus of the semiarid agreste (see figure 1.1). Leaving the favelas (shanty towns) on the outskirts of Recife, one drives for an hour or so past undulating seas of vivid green: miles and miles of sugarcane rolling up to and away from the horizon. Small sugar plantation towns appear and disappear periodically: brightly painted houses nestling on slopes thick with vegetation. Not far from these one often notices a pair of grandiose gates, leading to the residence of the local family landowners.