Environmental education and territorial identity at Mesquita quilombola comunity
environmental education, territorial identity, territory, culture, traditions.
This research is initially based on work experience as an school counselorat the Escola Municipal Aleixo Pereira Braga in the Quilombola Mesquita community, located in the municipality of Cidade Ocidental-GO, on the southern outskirts of the Distrito Federal-DF. During my work at the institution from 2018-2021, I was interested in finding out more about local history and culture. I tried to participate in the main festivities and talk to people in the community. In this work I seek to understand the relationship between quilombo identity and territory from Environmental Education. To this end, the research combines bibliographical, documentary and participatory research to recreate a brief historical account of the Mesquita Community, from the donation of land to the latest results of the 2022 IBGE Demographic Census, which for the first time a survey of the quilombola population Brazilian. From the experience in the current context of the community, I address the community's relationship with the environment, its cultural traditions, such as festivals, dances, food and religiosity and finally I talk about the symbol of the Mesquita community “O Marmelo” which has been cultivated for decades by families and commercialized. I close this work by reporting on the current crisis experienced by the community due to real estate interests in the territory, the difficulty in proving ownership of their land and the issue of deforestation in the locality to reflect on the role of environmental education in this context