Each year men and women from Aracatu, a small city in northeast of Brazil, close their homes and move over thousand miles south to harvest coffee in Minas Gerais and São Paulo States. As soon as coffee harvest finishes four months later they go back home and resume work in their own gardens. The money earned in the coffee harvest provides assurance consumption throughout the year, allowing devote to their activities on the family farm. This paper seeks to show how the wage labor done by those families reflects into their productive and reproductive dynamics, including acting in strengthening peasant character, in the sense of a peasant subjectivity, as was proposed by Klaas Woortmann.
ethnographic; migration; peasant families; wage labor