Sowing sovereignties for peasant territorial autonomy: an interview with Maria de Jesus dos Santos Gomes – landless rural workers’ movement (MST)

In this interview, Maria de Jesus dos Santos Gomes – a militant of Brazil's Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) since 1989 and one of its historic organic intellectuals – reflects on more than three decades of struggle in the semiarid Northeastern state of Ceará. She traces how peasant women have broadened the concept of Food Sovereignty, first elaborated within La Vía Campesina, into a wider family of sovereignties – over water, seeds, energy, and territory – that converge on peasant territorial autonomy. The conversation moves across the pillars of the MST's Agrarian Program: popular agrarian reform, agroecology and creole seeds, Popular Peasant Feminism, and Educação do Campo, including the Ciranda Infantil she helped pioneer. Her testimony reveals a leader theorizing from praxis, knitting together the material and subjective foundations of the struggle to defend and transform the peasant way of life. The interview offers a grounded vantage point on how grassroots movements generate the analytical categories through which the agrarian and territorial question is reimagined through struggle.