Movement, Media, Memory: Brazil’s Landless Movement at a Temporal Interface

A growing body of scholarship has shown how continuous and communicable social mobilization depends extensively on collective memories organized into movement narratives. This article sets out to study this formative activity in a changing media landscape; it asks how activists navigate the temporal nexus of mediated collective memory construction. The empirical focus is on the case of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), a long-standing actor engaged in both collective memory construction and digital media communication. Through a corpus analysis of two types of media sources – the internal newspaper Journal Sem Terra (1984-2014) and MST’s Facebook page (2014-2019) – the article demonstrates how collective memories of rural violence has served various functions in these media. The study verifies the formative implication of rural violence for Brazil’s Landless Movement, but also unveils notable differences between the newspaper and Facebook in this regard. Whereas Jornal Sem Terra employed a horizontal collective memory construction, activated through contemporary documentation of ongoing and upcoming events, the Facebook-posts were primarily engaged in a vertical extraction of already established memories. Printed media hence produced a narrative around collective memories of rural violence, memories then re-produced through digital media platforms. Drawing on these findings, the article discusses how the temporal nexus of mediated collective memory construction conveys for social movements both peril and potential.