Memory as policy dispute: the case of California-Quixadá settlement

Abstract

California was one of the most prosperous farms of Central Sertão Cearense during the second half of the century XIX and first half of the 20th century. It belongs to one of the most traditional families of the region, Queiroz, where the writer Rachel de Queiroz would come. There is an Official History of the Treasury - backed by "historians" and memorialists like José Bonifácio de Sousa, Eusébio Queiroz and Raimundo Girão - based on the memories of two members of the family: Esperidião Queiroz de Lima (in the book Antigas Familias do Sertão) and Rachel de Queiroz (published in several articles of newspapers and magazines of Ceará and the south of the country, and in the book Tantos Anos). This official version, however, is questioned in the memory of the peasants settled by INCRA in 1986, after a conflict that caused two deaths. Their testimonies bear reminiscences of the time of slavery, originating from an oral tradition not known by historians. What is perceived in this divergence of accounts is the confrontation of two views on the same past, which brought to the political arena of the present, seek to affirm the failure of the post-expropriation agrarian model and, in an opposite case, the reaffirmation of fairness and success of Agrarian Reform.