Abstract
This article intends to contribute to the discussions on the forms of land occupation and property rights in Pará in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will look at a case study of land litigation involving small squatters, their legitimation strategies, conceptions and property practices woven into their neighborhood networks. We will discuss actions that unearth notions of law that face the challenges in which the defense of access to the land is mobilizing both the empirical repertoire of customary practices of possession and the recourse to the legal formalization that is being (re)built in the initial period of the Republic. Our approach is part of the social history of property, where, contrary to a statist view that naturalizes the notion of ownership from its institutional formalization and its consecration as law, understands that property should be thought in its history, as a practice, from the social relations that the working subjects have. In order to do that, we will deal with a case of land litigation between two families of squatters that took place between 1893 and 1905 in the northeastern region of Pará, in the locality of Apehú, an area that belongs to the municipality of Belém. Our approach will have as main axis the analysis of a Plundering Old Force Action process that crosses the early years of the Republic.
Keywords:
property; squatters; Republican Pará