"the River Is Our Street.” Rural Protest Alliances Against Export Infrastructure in Brazil's Amazon Sacrifice Zone

Fragmentation and isolation from political participation impede collective organizing in rural “sacrifice zones” of large-scale development projects. The Tocantins-Araguaia industrial waterway project seeks to expand the export corridor for soy directly through Brazil’s Amazon Forest, threatening to destroy ecosystems and local traditional communities’ socioeconomic base. This study contributes to the critical eco-feminist investigation into the role and potential of intersectional organizing for climate action, given that it can reveal similar forms of oppression among diverse groups. It draws on fieldwork accompanying a boat caravan of labor leaders from various movements representing fisher, peasant, family farmer, indigenous, afro-descendent Quilombola, women, youth, and church groups in their protest in defense of the river. It argues that the campaign’s intersectional practices—recognizing autonomous cultural identities, building solidarity around crosscutting threats to production and social reproduction, and formulating unifying inclusive alternatives and demands— address the collective action problem in global peripheries. Moreover, the campaign reflects rural worker organizations’ integration of regional, agrarian, and environmental justice in an attempt to broaden the understanding of and make visible the real world of labor.