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Abstract
Despite decades of academic critique, economic development remains a perpetual feature of everyday life and central to the organization of nation-states. However, economic development’s benefits and risks are often not equitably distributed. This ethnographic and historic-archival study investigates how Brazil’s recent national infrastructure development program—The Growth Acceleration Program (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento or PAC)—has contributed to widespread dispossession, environmental devastation, and depression in Afro-descendent coastal communities in Pernambuco, Brazil. State-designated “povos tradicionais,” or traditional communities, have lived off the land, mangroves, and oceans for generations. However, without formal land rights, these communities are regularly expropriated for development initiatives. In the early 2000s, PAC funds transformed a small public utility port between the traditional fishing communities of Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca into the sprawling Suape Port Industrial Complex (Complexo Industrial Portuário de Suape or CIPS) that today occupies over 13,500 hectares of territory. This research illuminates how the CIPS’s violent expulsion of over 26,000 Cabo and Ipojuans is linked to centuries of racial land tenure arrangements that systematically exclude Afro-descendant communities from land use and ownership. Furthermore, the study analyzes how Afro-descendent residents, especially women, disproportionately experience environmental degradation, including pollution, deforestation, and dredging of the ocean and rivers. Environmental change and dispossession from ancestral territories have contributed to the loss of livelihoods, ecological knowledge, and more-than-human kinship traditional communities depend on for financial and emotional well-being. Despite obstacles, many Cabo and Ipojucans maintain an extraordinary capacity for resilience and strength. Some devote themselves to community organizing, while others draw upon regional identity and cultural traditions to carve out personal moments of joy amidst overwhelming structural hardship. Syncretic Afro-Brazilian spiritual cosmologies emphasizing dance, music, and more-than-human sociality provide vital moments of autonomy and relationships of tenderness and care. Through personal and communal, affective, and joy-making practices, Afro-Brazilians in Cabo and Ipojuca strengthen themselves to confront the structural oppression and uncertainty of state-sponsored socio-political and environmental injustices. These findings indicate that to understand economic development’s profoundly uneven consequences, we must consider how development programs articulate with colonial histories, intersectional inequalities, and socio-ecological relations, especially in marginalized communities.