Hinterland: Stories from the Caatinga
Brazil's Sertão is always on the brink: of rain, return and survival.
Unforgiving heat, slash-and-burn farming and water scarcity characterize the Sertão, Brazil's northwest semi-arid region. It has the largest rural poverty in Latin America, with 35% living in extreme poverty. Home to nearly 20 million people, it lies between the Amazon and the northeastern coast, covering nine states. It is always on the brink of rain, yet it rarely ever falls.
During an oppressively hot November morning, so hot that even donkeys walk slowly, Marinalda, mother of five, leads her goats to a drying pond. "If it wasn't for [family welfare] Bolsa Familia, I wouldn't know what would happen to people out here." Her persistence is not uncommon in the hinterland, historically a place of refuge during colonial Brazil for escaped slaves, oppressed indigenous communities, gun-toting bandits and white cattle ranchers pushed out by the sugarcane industry. "If I could choose I wouldn't live here. We are here because we are stubborn."
The Sertão's history, steeped in systemic discrimination, inequality, and poverty, reveals a steadfast and resilient people whose rural way of life is often forgotten in Brazil. It is a window into the country's gaping disparity between the poor in the north and the rich in the south, exacerbated by lingering prejudices from the past.
It is also a place where thousands have abandoned as generations migrated to prosperous cities like Rio de Janeiro. The Sertão is largely under-reported because, in the Brazilian imagination, its story is about those leave "“ not one about those who stay.
Last year I began my project, Hinterland: Stories from the Caatinga, documenting subsistence farmers coexisting with drought in the Sertão. My intention of the project is to bridge cultural understanding and contribute to the conversation about survival amid poverty and systemic discrimination in Brazil.
To understand the Sertão is to understand the local sertanejo's relationship to the land. One must examine the hardy hands of the farmer, his limitless patience for rain, the intense belief in folk rituals because it is only the sertanejo who can stubbornly withstand the harsh environment of the Sertão. It is here that extreme hardship is often balanced with the refuge of extreme faith.
Farmers who grow enough to feed their families have long lived with erratic rainfall. Livestock and crops die.
I met a 70-year-old farmer chopping palma cactus to feed his drought-tolerant goats. Joaquim worried as he watches his land turn to desert. Today the rain is not enough to grow plants. "A seca é a pior." This drought is the worst "“ in fifty years. Joaquim told me his family lost the seeds because everything they grew died. "You only see land. You see animals eating trees." The plants used to be taller, fuller. Now they risk extinction. "It's drying. The clouds don't even come here."
The 2016 FotoVisura Grant will help me continue the next half of the project exploring the rural lives of the farming families in this photo essay and importantly, delve deeper into understanding their relationship between water and faith through folk rituals and pilgrimages, and migratory farmers. In the Sertão, life happens in the field. Moved by the sertanejo's insistence on survival, I want to portray the spirit and the struggle of those who stayed behind, always on the brink.
Lianne Milton | Photographer | www.liannemiltonphotography.com | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
