“A coisa tá ficando preta”: o enegrecimento do repertório de movimentos de mães e familiares de vítimas de violência

Abstract

This study aims at examining the incorporation of a racialized interpretation of state violence by movements of mothers and relatives of its victims. It deploys ethnographies, literature reviews, and document analyses to present the path followed by three generations of social movements from Rio de Janeiro. The first of them came about in the 1990s, in the aftermath of the events widely known as slaughters (chacinas). The second was formed in the 2000s, when these movements developed various protest and complaint strategies. Finally in the late 2000s came a third generation, marked by the reflection about practices and grammars of state violence, in a process called the blackening (enegrecimento) of their repertoires of struggle. The transition between the second and the third generations consists of a context of increasing public debates on the racial issue in Brazil and of a tightening of bonds between movements of mothers and relatives and groups of back activism. The dissertation provides an analysis of the way such blackening, from a situational perspective, is part of a set of strategies created in their struggles for justice over the years. The blackened repertoire produced by these groups indicates an expansion of the ways they oppose and denounce state violence in Brazil.