This is a part of the article series Decolonial Praxis: Going Beyond Empty Words, edited by Fernando David Márquez Duarte, Dulce Alarcón Payán and Javier Daniel Alarcón Mares. Editorial and Translation Assistant: Lorenia Gutiérrez Moreto Cruz.

An unusual scene caused a great impact in the peripheral regions of some cities in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, during the Covid-19 pandemic: people lining up and smiling, receiving donations of diverse and healthy organic food directly from the hands of the farmers. There were nearly 330 tons of food, destined for approximately 45,000 people, between May 2020 and February 2022. This scenario of solidarity was the result of the Emergency Plan launched by farmers from rural black communities – the so-called quilombos – of the Ribeira Valley region, which, in collaboration, distributed their abundant products to vulnerable families during the health crisis. The objective was to simultaneously allow income generation and food security, minimizing the impacts of the pandemic. Before the health crisis, the Quilombolas Farmers Cooperative of Vale do Ribeira (Cooperquivale) sold most of its products for school feeding through the National School Feeding Program (PNAE) of the Brazilian Ministry of Education. However, when schools closed due to the pandemic, the municipal governments of São Paulo, Santos, Santo André and Cajati suspended their contracts with the cooperative. In response to the crisis, Cooperquivale and  its partners created the Emergency Plan to raise funds to organize production and distribute food in the poorest areas of urban centers, known in Brazil as favelas, or by the emic term with great political-identity meaning, quebrada.

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Through a "consortium of donations", Cooperquivale, in association with the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA) and other institutions, managed to commercialize food production in areas of great socioeconomic vulnerability. According to Marcucci and Machado (2023, 38),"From this initiative, links between quilombo and favela were highlighted, which not only make the opening of future markets possible, but also reinforce common affections and alliances". The initiative, which linked the quilombo with the urban black movement through food sovereignty and ancestral exchange, has prospered. Since July 2022, the Quilombo&Quebrada fair has been held monthly, in which products from the crops of the quilombola communities on the outskirts of the capital of São Paulo are sold. Between fruits, tubers and vegetables, the products reach consumers at subsidized prices thanks to a partnership between Mulheres de Orì and Kitanda das Minas, which are food culture ventures run by black women, and Cooperquivale.

The Ribeira Valley is located between the south of the State of São Paulo and the east of the State of Paraná, and is home to the largest continuous area of ​​the Atlantic Forest biome of Brazil, in addition to other important biomes, such as sandbanks and mangroves. The region has a dense hydrographic network, which includes the Ribeira de Iguape river basin and the Iguape-Cananéia-Paranaguá estuarine lagoon complex, and great biodiversity. It is also home to several territories occupied by Indigenous and traditional peoples and communities, such as quilombolas, caiçaras, caboclas and ribeirinhas, who are dedicated to fishing and family farming.

The strong presence of the black population in the Vale do Ribeira is linked to the colonial period, when a huge contingent of enslaved black men and women were brought to the region, mainly from the 17th century, in the context of gold exploitation (Santos and Tattoo 2008). This occurred due to the extensive knowledge that these populations had about the technical and technological processes to find and extract the mineral, introducing various tools and utensils such as the bateia, the canoe (leather utensil) and others (Silva 2020).

The so-called quilombos are black communities with differentiated identity characteristics, which maintained their logic of existence despite the end of the Brazilian slave system in 1888, as spaces of resistance to a society built on exclusion. They were fundamental in the process of liberation of the black population from the slave system, in addition to perpetuating a technological legacy of knowledge and techniques used in agriculture, mining, metallurgy and architecture, among other sectors (Gomes 2015).

The word quilombo disappeared from Brazilian legislation in 1888, only to reappear 100 years after the abolition of slavery, in 1988. The Federal Constitution promulgated that year gave the inhabitants of these communities the right to the lands they had occupied for centuries. It is important to highlight, according to O 'Dwyer (2007), that despite being a "historical identity" recognized in the law, being a quilombo – that is, resident in a quilombo – in the constitutional text deals with subjects existing in the present and, therefore, subjects of rights today.

Currently, in Brazil, these territories remain in dispute, and its people persist in demanding their constitutionally guaranteed rights, resisting external threats, often linked to the interests of big capital. An example of this is the production of electrical energy through dams in the region: for 30 years, the quilombos, along with other traditional peoples, helped in the fight for the non-construction of theTijuco Alto Hydroelectric Power Plant (Pinto 2014), which gave rise to the Movement of Peoples Threatened by Dams (MOAB).

Another key issue is the persistent presence of mining in the territories (ISA 2013), such as lead mining. This, which in the last century left great liabilities in the physical and biotic environment, interfered with the environmental quality of the territory until more recent years (Silva et al. 2018). Furthermore, the absence of the State in the application of the rights of the quilombola peoples, such as the titling of their lands, is notable, while traditional activities are criminalized through the application of restrictive environmental laws. These laws ignore the environmental protection exercised by the communities themselves and harm the quality of life of residents. As Normann (2021) states, the strong inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and values ​​is a prerequisite for a responsible environmental agenda. Using the concept of green colonialism, the author discusses the dissonance between what is projected from public power about strategies to defend the environment and address problems such as climate change and what really happens in practice; a practice that necessarily has to include decolonial epistemologies.

This research is based on the concepts of coloniality (Quijano 2005; Mignolo 2005) and decolonial turn (Grosfoguel 2008; Maldonado-Torres 2006; Restrepo and Rojas 2010) to analyze the processes of perpetuation of inequalities and strategies for coping with vulnerabilities, derived from them through mutual aid. Our analysis points to another civilizational paradigm that highlights the success of community self-management and solidarity networks in a context of crisis. Non-hegemonic knowledge and forms of action distance themselves from the modern-colonial model of individualism and competitiveness, highlighting the role and effectiveness of solidarity and collective action in the defense of life.

This discussion is part of the project "ENDURE: Inequalities, Community Resilience and New Governance Modalities in a Post-Pandemic World", developed through a transatlantic platform of 15 institutions from 12 countries and funded in Brazil by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do State of São Paulo (Fapesp). The project examines the short and long-term consequences of Covid-19, proposing a holistic vision for the study of the crisis based on new forms of mobilization/demobilization of societies and political systems.

According to Nel-lo et al. (2022), various authors have pointed out that the relationship between the impact of the epidemic and vulnerability is reciprocal. Thus, already at the very beginning of the crisis, it was warned that inequality could have a significant impact on the spread of the virus. In turn, the pandemic may have caused a persistent increase of global poverty, such that its impact could represent a setback of approximately a decade in global progress in poverty reduction. On the other hand, the authors affirm that in the context of the pandemic, very diverse people organized themselves to provide help and alleviate, to the extent possible, the effects of the situation. These practices have spread to various fields:

From the production of health materials to the provision of food, from care for the elderly to culture, from the prevention of gender violence to education and housing. The diversity of the thematic fields, the speed of their creation and dissemination, as well as the fact of relying on intensive and innovative use of ICT have been some of the characteristics of the solidarity movement on an international scale. (Nel-lo et al. 2022, 13).

From the production of health materials to the provision of food, from care for the elderly to culture, from the prevention of gender violence to education and housing. The diversity of the thematic fields, the speed of their creation and dissemination, as well as the fact of relying on intensive and innovative use of ICT have been some of the characteristics of the solidarity movement on an international scale. (Nel-lo et al. 2022, 13).

The experience of the Ribeira Valley fits into this type of solidarity movement. Among the variety of initiatives that proliferated in the urban peripheries and traditional communities of Brazil, it was an example of success that even generated several developments. Relying on decolonial theory as the backdrop that crosses this discussion, we contextualize the pandemic in Brazil, pointing out how it victimized the most vulnerable populations in a scenario of great inequality. Next, we will focus on the experience of facing the health crisis in the Ribeira Valley, to finally reflect on the role of solidarity in extreme moments.

Pandemic and Decolonial Thinking

The continuity between the colonial system and the present has been defined by Aníbal Quijano (2005) as coloniality, a concept that operates at each of the levels of subjective and social existence. The coloniality of power refers to the relations of domination established and perpetrated through European expansion. Walter Mignolo (2005) describes the first exchange of glances between Indigenous people and Europeans as their point zero. The hierarchization of knowledge according to these criteria of hegemonic validation is called coloniality of knowledge. At the level of subjectivities, the naturalization of the supposed scale of superiority and inferiority between subjects is called coloniality of being.

The context generated by colonization is permanently updated in various forms, becoming the modus operandi and constitutive component of modernity (Maldonado-Torres 2006). The institutionalized colonial system obscures the continuities between the past and current hierarchies of the world-system. For this reason, Maldonado-Torres proposes the concept of the decolonial turn as an invitation to subvert this historically imposed order.

Thinking about the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil means analyzing an exclusive structure based on the criteria of gender, age, race, class and disability. The generic notion of "humanity", developed by the Western universalist imagination, has as its counterpart the dehumanization of the subaltern “other”. As Fanon (1975) warned, it is not possible to subject subjects to servitude without inferiorizing them. The "other", being "inferior", becomes invisible and disposable.

In crisis contexts, exclusionary structures become more evident. Not by chance, a study that evaluated the performance of 98 countries in combating the pandemic revealed that Brazil was the second in the world with the highest number of deaths and the third in number of cases (Rossi et al. 2022). The virus killed nearly 700,000 people in the country and its confrontation was marked by disagreements, denialism, misinformation and disarticulation between different levels of power. It is important to keep in mind that in Brazil the official figures did not report hundreds of thousands of cases, the real number being much higher.

As described by Rossi and his colleagues........

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