Cheia de axé (full of axé): Spirituality, resistance, and repair in Pernambuco's Afro‐Brazilian traditional communities

Abstract This article explores how Afro‐Brazilian communities in Pernambuco respond to state‐led industrial development through culturally rooted practices of resistance and repair. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in the coastal municipalities of Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, this study traces the effects of Brazil's large‐scale economic development program, known as the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC, in Portuguese), which enabled the expansion of the Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS). Built on former plantation lands, CIPS has displaced over 26,000 residents and disrupted traditional livelihoods tied to mangroves, subsistence farming, and small‐scale fishing. Yet rather than portraying Afro‐Brazilian communities as passive victims of racial capitalism's extractive logics, the article foregrounds their strategies for sustaining life: syncretic spiritual practices, ancestral reverence, ecological care, and popular music. These embodied and relational practices are not only sources of individual resilience but also tools for collective healing and political engagement. By analyzing how residents cultivate joy, autonomy, and connection in the midst of systemic violence, the article contributes to broader anthropological debates on repair, development, and plantation afterlives. It calls for expanding coloniality frameworks to account for how racialized communities generate alternative futures through cultural creativity, environmental intimacy, and everyday acts of refusal.