“We’ve left behind the ‘I’ in order to work for ‘us’ and the ‘my’ to work for ‘ours’. What is mine? The house, the clothes. And what is ours? The land.”

Proven FreeProven SustainableQuilombolas - PSQuilombolas

Feb 20

Benedito Alves da Silva (ben-eh-dee-toe ahl-vays dah-seel-vah)

President Association Ivaporundura

IMAGE SOURCE: Karime Xavier. “Lack of license stops traditional fields in quilombolas areas of SP.” Folha de Sao Paulo. 21c Oct. 2018. | TEXT SOURCE: Carlos Fioravanti. “Feet Planted in History.” Pesquisa. June 2015.

QUOTE CONTEXT: “He divides his time between taking care of his banana plants and vegetable garden and talking about his people and answering questions from the groups of schoolchildren who visit almost every day.”

QUOTE QUESTION: What is yours and what is ours?

IMAGE CONTEXT: ”It is a quilombo here. It is more than 400 years old. In the past nobody used a (planting) license. The practice of our ancestors taught the way we work.”

IMAGE QUESTION: Where do you sit to contemplate power?

MEDIA LITERACY CONTEXT: The quote is from a science & technology website. The photo is from a media conglomerate newspaper story.

MEDIA LITERACY QUESTION: What are the potential benefits and challenges of working with mainstream media channels to get your message out?

“We’ve left behind the ‘I’ in order to work for ‘us’ and the ‘my’ to work for ‘ours’. What is mine? The house, the clothes. And what is ours? The land.”

Benedito Alves da Silva (ben-eh-dee-toe ahl-vays dah-seel-vah)

“It is important to stress: the fight is not just ours. Preserving the environment and our history is in everyone's interest.”

“We only worked collectively, doing collective projects, puxirum (poo-she-room) as we called it, and the work was always divided with the plots right next to each other.”