The resistance of those who refuse to cease their struggle. Social action in the Rivera/Livramento border region

Abstract

This paper establishes the connections among three of the principal expressions of inequality and responses to them, emphasizing how inequality is related to discrimination in its modalities of class, race, and gender. Social responses to these three forms of inequality are exemplified and analyzed through a study of the formation of groups characterized by struggle and social action. Research was conducted along the dry Rivera/Livramento border between northern Uruguay and southern Brazil, understood as a regional geographic space. Tension and conflict were the epistemological and theoretical bases applied to establish the intersections between discrimination and resistance. The approach seeks to demonstrate inequality both quantitatively and qualitatively. The objective that underlies our analysis, and that guided much of the fieldwork carried out in recent years, is to demonstrate that although this border area is defined as ‘peaceful’, conflicts are an everyday occurrence. The article strives to demonstrate the existence of an unequal, discriminatory structure that underlies and generates resistant and resilient responses by social groups and subjects as strategies to escape injustice. This vision strips the Rivera/Livramento border area of its fantasy by laying bare the real conditions of inequality and confrontation.