Day four of the Change Stories week in Belo Horizonte centred around the issue of food security and sovereignty again, but this time we learnt a bit more about the gaps left by the municipal government-run programmes and the groups who are stepping in to plug them.
While Belo Horizonte’s government-run food banks and ‘People’s Restaurants’ have helped to combat food insecurity across the city, activists explained that they haven’t done enough to overcome historic race, class, and gender inequality. Instead, these government measures have often been distributed unequally, with the communities that need the help the most continuing to miss out.
We visited CONCENTRA, a hub which takes produce from rural farming cooperatives throughout the state of Minas Gerais and distributes it throughout the city. Many of these rural cooperatives are linked to the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) or Landless Workers’ Movement, a grassroots social movement fighting for fair land distribution across Brazil. Having CONCENTRA as a distribution hub ensures that MST and other cooperative farmers get a good price for their produce, while also providing locally grown food to food banks and solidarity kitchens, as well as farmers markets and restaurants.
From there we had a short drive to the Maria Brás solidarity kitchen, one of the places that receives MST produce from CONCENTRA. The kitchen is located at an ASMARE centre (Association of Paper, Cardboard, and Reusable Materials Collectors), a pioneering workers cooperative made up of waste pickers across Belo Horizonte. In an incredible example of solidarity between grassroots organisations, at the Maria Brás kitchen MST volunteers provide free daily meals to waste pickers, people who are street homeless, and residents from the nearby favelas, all using produce from farming cooperatives throughout the state. The day we visited, the solidarity kitchen was celebrating its second birthday and it was amazing to see so many people gathered to celebrate this project, including the family of its namesake Maria Brás who dedicated 30 years of her life to developing ASMARE.
it was an important reminder to celebrate what we have already built, and to always be looking for new opportunities to build solidarity across our networks
In the weeks after racist pogroms engulfed Belfast in early June, we saw incredible shows of solidarity between people from different walks of life. Churches and community centres providing safe spaces for people scared to return home, local businesses donating food, people delivering groceries and driving families to appointments and exams, and even opening their spare rooms to people with nowhere else to go. As the emergency response was slowing down, and conversations were being had about how to maintain and nourish these networks of solidarity into something permanent, it was inspiring to visit a city where these networks were so solid and enduring. It wasn’t rocket science, and a lot of it was things our communities were already doing; food grown at Gairdín an Phobail providing healthy meals for families on the housing list in west Belfast, Kind Economy chefs cooking meals at the People’s Kitchen to be delivered to street homeless individuals in the city centre. But it was an important reminder to celebrate what we have already built, and to always be looking for new opportunities to build solidarity across our networks.
Later that afternoon, we visited Muquifu, the Museu dos Quilombos e Favelas Urbanos (Museum of Quilombos and Urban Favelas). We learnt about the history of Brazillian Quilombos, settlements that were founded by people who had escaped slavery, and how they have shaped Afro-Brazilian culture. In Muquifu we learnt about the preservation of Afro-Brazilian traditions which originate from the Quilombos, how they share overlapping roots in structural racism and housing inequality with urban favelas, and learnt the stories of some of the women who established the community where the museum now sits.
Our last day of the Change Stories trip explored similar themes, as some academics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) took us on a ‘Black Belo Horizonte’ walking tour.
On the tour, we learnt about the racist and colonial histories of Brazil, some of the movements and activists who were instrumental in standing up to these systems, as well as how racism still pervades in the city through issues like housing and poverty. They showed us the Ocupação Maria do Arraial, an MLB occupation of a vacant building in the city centre, named after a Black woman who resisted the eviction of her community to make way for the building of Belo Horizonte. We visited the city park and saw sculptures of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian writer and memoirist from a favela in São Paulo, and Lélia de Almeida Gonzalez, a pioneering Black Brazilian feminist theorist and activist. As part of the tour, we also had the opportunity to see some of Belo Horizonte’s famous street art portraying various aspects of Black Brazilian history and modern life.
This new occupation in the centre of Belo Horizonte will be used by MLB for political education, named after the Black Brazilian memoirist whose statue we visited in the city park earlier that day.
That evening held our closing symposium, where we came together to discuss what we had learnt that week and what we would be taking back to our home contexts. The symposium was held in one of MLB’s most recent occupations, Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus. This new occupation in the centre of Belo Horizonte will be used by MLB for political education, named after the Black Brazilian memoirist whose statue we visited in the city park earlier that day. Activists and researchers from Belfast, Brazil, Colombia, and the US talked about the incredible solidarity and grassroots organising we witnessed during this week in Belo Horizonte, and reflected on how this energy could be brought back to campaigns in our home context. From Belfast, Marissa and Conal considered how our housing campaigners could learn from organisations like MLB to push for housing equality and for vacant land and buildings to be used for homes. They reflected on how some of the networks of solidarity we saw in Belo Horizonte are being developed at home, but saw the importance of constantly naming and reflecting our shared goals and values.
We were returning to a city still reeling from racist violence, with so many people in our communities feeling scared, displaced, and unwelcome in Belfast. But we were also returning to a huge movement of people who had stepped up to support them. It was so important to reflect on what we had learnt from activists in Belo Horizonte who have consistently stood up to structural racism and inequality, building their own spaces of safety and solidarity around a city that often does not work for them, while campaigning for one that does.