Land Tenure, Brazil

There are two principal types of land tenure in Brazil. The first dates back to the legal ownership of land by deed, officially granted by Sesmarias (crown grants) in the sixteenth century. The other form of land tenure, which paralleled that of legal claim, was related to title through occupation or squatting and through cultivation of the land. After Brazilian independence in 1822, the granting of sesmarias was discontinued. Until the Land Law of 1850, claim to land was recognized by its effective occupation and cultivation.

Land usage varied throughout Brazil. A chácara, or country establishment on the outskirts of a town or city, was typically a small or medium-sized farm where the proprietor owned both the land and its produce, often foodstuffs. Other small holdings for subsistence cultivation and some livestock breeding usually contained a small cabin or two and might also have included primitive processing facilities for manioc, beans, and corn. These units existed on unclaimed plots of land and also within fazendas (large rural properties). They were referred to variously as roças, sítios, and situações. Their occupants were squatters or leaseholders (posseiros), renters (arrendatários), tenants (foreiros), or sharecroppers (parceiros), many of whom paid an annual rent in cash and labor services to the landowner and owned small numbers of slaves. During the nineteenth century, small farms within the confines of large ones or within plantations could be freely exchanged or sold by their occupants without the prior knowledge of or consultation with the landowner. This arrangement began to change when landowners, faced with increasing production costs and diminishing prices for slave labor in the 1880s, began to control land use and labor through contracts and other formal agreements.

See alsoFazenda, Fazendeiro; Sesmaria.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nancy Priscilla Smith Naro, "Customary Rightholders and Legal Claimants to Land in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1850–1890," in The Americas (April 1992).

Additional Bibliography

Garfield, Seth. Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

Miller, Shawn William. "Stilt-Root Subsistence: Colonial Mangroves and Brazil's Landless Poor." The Hispanic American Historical Review. 83:2 (May 2003): 223-253.

                       Nancy Priscilla Smith Naro