The article aims to analyze the forms the category "landless" has been linked to the agenda of social movements between the 60's and 80's in Brazil. It explores two distinct contexts in the Southern state of Rio Grande do Sul: the Leonel Brizola's administration from 1959 to 1963 and the land occupations occurred from 1978 to 1980 that led the process of MST (the Landless Workers Movement) formation. The main goal is to demonstrate the relation between those collective actions and the attention the State regarded to it in each period. As a mayor hypothesis it sustains that without the analysis of State mobilization we can not understand the sociological meaning of the landless in Brazil.
Landless; MST; Rural social movements; State; Land occupations