Mulheres assentadas e cooperadas (re)construindo caminhos: trajetórias de vida e experiências de empoderamento

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to analyze the participation of the women at Guanabara and Sebastião Rosa da Paz settlements, located in the city of Amambai/MS, privately and, especially publicly tending to find out, to register and to clarify their intentions about those places. We focus this research on a group of six women, who are involved today in several representative instances of COOPERFAMILIAR (Cooperative of familiar agriculture of the settlements) whose its range comes from the presidency, substitution, and the participation as associated. This way, we work on the perspective of gender and “empowerment”, with analyses and reflections about many roles played by the women into the settlements, which produce old and new social relations of gender in these spaces. We point out the process of fights, participations and collective organizations of the women, as: The flouring and the cooperative women group, tending to comprehend the importance and the meaning of these actions for themselves, for the family and for the community whose they belong. By the Oral History methodologies (interviews) and by using the trajectories of life, we aimed to know parts of the life story of the six cooperated women that happened before their settlements, as their youth, their migratory process, their beginning in the fight for land until their new experiences in the process after their settlements: the participation in collective groups, mainly in the Cooperative. We could also admire the construction of the process of empowerment of the cooperated women.