In the past decade in Brazil, we have witnessed the rise of a new subaltern space, which has prompted a new theoretical category, incorporated in the contemporary epistemologies of Subaltern Urbanism: Urban Occupations. These new terrains of livelihood and self-organization have prompted a series of new resistance strategies, everyday practices and narratives that must be understood and decodified. The Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte—third largest in the country—accounts for over 25 housing occupations in its territory, more than half of which settled in the last five years. Occupation Rosa Leão, established in 2013, is one of them. As it happens in many other occupations, most of its dwellers are black women. They constitute majority in the coordination groups and are often more closely involved in the collective necessities of the community. The present article draws upon the experiences of these women as subjects of their own history to showcase urban occupation as a powerful place for understanding and dismantling the always existing but often overlooked intersection between coloniality and gender. It relies on the activist and academic engagement of both authors in these territories, and specifically in the experience with a women-only self-construction workshop organized in October 2017. Through this workshop, we sought to understand how “usually male” construction knowledge was employed (or not) by women, how it could be used as a tool for domination/emancipation and how gender relations intertwined with such issues in the process.
O presente artigo tem como objetivo discutir o protagonismo das mulheres negras nas disputas de lugar ocorridas, em três tempos históricos distintos, na região da Izidora, onde atualmente se localizam as ocupações Vitória, Esperança e Rosa Leão, situada no vetor norte da cidade de Belo Horizonte, capital de Minas Gerais. O que se busca mostrar é a convergência entre as lutas em torno da permanência das comunidades na dimensão físico-territorial e das lutas por nomeação do lugar. As perspectivas feministas negras são tomadas, enquanto epistemologia, para construir um quadro conceitual que, ao problematizar análises unidimensionais da produção do espaço, dá visibilidade às múltiplas dinâmicas que se entrecruzam no espaço e no tempo, informadas por gênero, raça e classe.
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